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Gosh I sure love Spice and Wolf!

 

 

haha why is the preview image on the video holo on a headcrab with a half-life 3 logo...

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So I just watched an episode of gintama where the main villains are militant gender essentialists that punish non cis people with a pink gender swap beam. It was pretty awesome but I'm definitely getting the feeling that this isnt exactly the gintama from like 2006.

The show's definitely weirder now, probably because of how long it's been running and how much it feels like it has to one-up itself. Not quite sure if that's a bad thing overall, but it does make a lot of the bokke-tsukkomi routines kind of forced and gimmicky. Like it's Mulder and Sculley still doing the imagination vs skepticism schtick after 7 seasons of alien bullshit. A lot of the old gintama humor kind of relied on the viewer having some ground of normalcy to stand on for the non sequitur stuff to really kick, but now it's just kind of non-stop, forced weirdness.

Still going to watch it though, cause it's such a long running train wreck that it's impossible to not be endeared by the desperate schlock.

Edit: oh yeah another thing I miss is humor playing with anachronism, like the image of an edo era samurai reading shonen jump. The setting was really great for those kinds of jokes. I guess they ran out of material because recently the setting is more like a free pass to eliminate any accountability to place and time, opening more doors for weird non sequitur. Again, whatever though.

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N1njaSquirrel and I had discussed how excellently the third season (well, strictly speaking, the third half-cour) of Working!! is doing. Man, everything that I resented about the show, especially its insistence on a reset-to-zero at the end of every episode, is being wiped away by this final season, which is totally committed to wrapping up every little plot, even those put out as gags, nearly simultaneously. It's pushing the previous seasons of the show into "must buy" territory...

 

oh yeah another thing I miss is humor playing with anachronism, like the image of an edo era samurai reading shonen jump. The setting was really great for those kinds of jokes. I guess they ran out of material because recently the setting is more like a free pass to eliminate any accountability to place and time, opening more doors for weird non sequitur. Again, whatever though.

 

Oh! Edo Rocket has a similar setting, but a greater emphasis on historical-anachronism-as-humor than Gintama, as I understand it.

 

That's the one that got me started on the whole OST.  Every time I hear that track, I feel like I have forgotten/lost something significant and not sure if I should be happy about it or sad about it.  It also makes me feel that something has definitively ended.

 

Then the track after that one just makes me sad.

 

Then the track 7 omg... it traumatized my tween mind that had such a dork waifu crush on Asuka.  It wasn't til I watched FLCL that I fully recovered what that accompanying scene did to my mind.  Then FLCL did something else so : /

Evangelion inhabits this weird space in my life. I was in a really bad place when I first watched it, but it was the thing I escaped into. I have basically an encyclopedic knowledge of it, so a lot of the series means things to me that it doesn't mean to other people. This has led to many weird conversations about the series.

When I used to feel bummed (by used to, I mean still sometimes), I would listen to either the End of Eva soundtrack or the S6 soundtrack for the series. The music means a lot to me, and a song like that one brings a lot of weird emotions out in me.

 

When I'm listening to the soundtrack, it's certainly hard for me to decide whether I'm experiencing fond memories of Evangelion as one of my favorite anime, a psychic echo of my mental state when I first watched the show while sick in bed during Easter my senior year of college as I admitted to myself that I wouldn't be going to grad school the next year, or simply the handiwork of Sagisu Shirou as a talented and prolific composer. I've always thought that it's a lot of the first and a little of the second, but my recent obsession the past few months with the Kare Kano soundtrack, which I watched under perfectly normal circumstances, has pushed up the prominence of the third a lot. "Treasure Every Meeting" and "We Meet Only to Part" are staples for driving home from work or a date nowadays.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPQ28v-_cLY

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Wait, I love that track! It was in one of the Eva Rebuild films really briefly and I always wanted a longer version.  :o

 

I watched the first few eps of Kare Kano forever ago and never followed through. Might have to give it another shot now...

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I'm "re-watching" The Melancholy of Haruhi and I'm seeing a lot of parallels with the Nagato spinoff, but I my brain seems to have blocked the show from my memory because I could remember a thing about it.

 

And I think I know why... the "Endless Eight", who on Earth makes a time loop eight episodes long and one third of the whole series? I'm sorry, but this is painful to watch. I'm at the fifth of eight episodes and it seems literally the episodes except for some minor details at the beginning and end.... and I still have three episodes to go? 

 

How on Earth did this show get this popular? I don't care that if in the original series they weren't aired in this order, EIGHT time loop episodes is UNACCEPTABLE! Instead of having Kyon make some realizations at the beginning and end of each episode, they could just fast forward the repeating parts and not make us watch the same thing eight times.  :tdown:  :tdown:  :tdown:

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And I think I know why... the "Endless Eight", who on Earth makes a time loop eight episodes long and one third of the whole series? I'm sorry, but this is painful to watch. I'm at the fifth of eight episodes and it seems literally the episodes except for some minor details at the beginning and end.... and I still have three episodes to go? 

 

I try not telling my friends about the EE and seeing how far they bother to get on their own. I know one person who somehow sat through all 8.

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I sat through all eight!

 

It's awful but it's also hilarious so I let it go.

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I'm pretty sure my memory erased the fact that I got through the Endless Eight along with the whole series BECAUSE I watched all EE episodes back in the day.

 

And I just sat through all of them again today, although at least I have my Vita to make it more bearable. There is on episode in the middle where Kyon starts thinking about toy planes, but that gets brought up again.

 

Just watch the first and last episodes of the Endless Eight saga, the rest are almost literally the same even dialogue-wise. I really hope my brain won't make me forget this again if I even dare watch this show again.

 

Or just watch the Nagato spin off instead, there is less Mikuru abuse for starters and it has it's own version of the Endless Eight but with no time looping.

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I watched all the endless eight episodes as they aired, didn't really enjoy anything about them, and yet somehow my overall memory of Haruhi is positive. How the subjective human brain can work this way is a wonder.

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I feel like watching them as they aired would've been infinitely more tolerable for me, just because that means I wouldn't have been in the habit of binge-watching the entire show. So every week I would've forgotten some things and then slowly it would've all just permanently embedded itself in my mind, and I would've started noticing those tiny differences, and then bam it would've been over.

 

I mean I don't think I would've enjoyed it or anything. But it would've been a better experience.

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I feel like watching them as they aired would've been infinitely more tolerable for me, just because that means I wouldn't have been in the habit of binge-watching the entire show. So every week I would've forgotten some things and then slowly it would've all just permanently embedded itself in my mind, and I would've started noticing those tiny differences, and then bam it would've been over.

 

I mean I don't think I would've enjoyed it or anything. But it would've been a better experience.

 

I definitely think that the artistic goals of the "Endless Eight" arc have mostly been spoiled by the cultural phenomenon of binge-watching, yes.

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I remember admiring endless eight for its audacity even as it was actively frustrating me. But the admiration is almost entirely for the concept and the bravery behind it; I don't remember any of the actual content they put on the screen with any fondness and I don't intend to ever revisit it.

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What did everyone think about that Disappearance movie? Is it still the last thing adapted from the actual light novel series? I'm also super bummed that I don't get to live in that beautiful KyoAni-realized world anymore.

 

edit: shit, I have the urge to rewatch haruhi.

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I've been watching Gatchaman Crowds, I'm not sure if I like insight as much as I liked the first season but we will see where it goes (though the ending of the first season was rushed and ocnfusing).

 

Speaking of Haruhi, i really need to try watching it again. I saw like, 6 eps, and it was good, but confusing (though I believe that was intentional)

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Guys, I really want to talk to someone about the first episode of School-Live. It's really powerful and really good, but the pay-off is literally in the last scene.

 

I really don't want to say why it's so good, because like the Stanley parable, saying anything about it ruins it completely. 

 

so please, someone, watch this for me. Endure it, because it's worth it. 

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I actually find the Endless Eight to be my favourite part of the show, even though I did watch it after it aired.. I like shows that make you feel comfortable with the characters to the point where you sorta know what they're gonna do, and EE was the most literal example of that. Plus, the little changes kept me paying attention. I dunno. I really like re-watching shows/movies over and over to pick out everything, so that's probably a factor. 

 

I actually went back recently to watch the show and then realized all I wanted to see was the Endless Eight, so I just watched those episodes by themselves. I guess that's weird. 

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Rewatching haruhi like I said i would, and I realize I've never seen the show chronologically. Some of these episodes make a lot more sense now!

 

Kinda wish more long-form series would do the mini-arc thing in the way that Haruhi does for its 6-episode adaption of the first light-novel. Feels like a movie in how well-paced the story feels. 

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I just saw Wolf Children and it's interesting to see how each child chose a different path, but next I watched Millenium Actress and it was pretty amazing, was the mixing of her movies and real life supposed to symbolize she'd lost touch with reality? Some moments did get a bit confusing.

 

She was in "real life" when the train was under attack by nationalists and it switches to a movie, but it never tells how she escaped that situation, was it even real?

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Ok. I just saw it.

 

!!!!!!

 

 

Yes! I hope you liked it. ;3

 

did you see it coming? Sadly it was ruined for me before I watched the episode! I've yet to watch the second episode yet, but it'll be interesting to know where it'll go. I have it on good authority that it really goes to crazy places.

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Yes! I hope you liked it. ;3

 

did you see it coming? Sadly it was ruined for me before I watched the episode! I've yet to watch the second episode yet, but it'll be interesting to know where it'll go. I have it on good authority that it really goes to crazy places.

 

I'm definitely gonna see where it goes, feels Madoka-esque in a way.

 

Honestly that first episode felt like a one-shot, like it could have just been like a one episode OVA.

 

Also I love how they fully committed 100% to the slice-of-life OP.

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I finished the second half of Jormungand, after dragging my feet for almost three weeks. What a piece of junk! So much effort was put into the firearms and the combat, but the show keeps pushing that aside to spotlight its overstuffed cast of mercenaries. There were several scenes in the last two episodes where literal minutes were spent going through the protagonist's ten-man bodyguard and hearing every character's identical opinion on her Bond villain-esque plan for world peace, and then in the epilogue there's another extended scene of all ten saying "Welcome back" to another character that similarly lacks any differentiation. I don't think I've seen a more total failure than adapting what was apparently a character-driven action manga into an episodic and setpiece-driven anime...

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