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I like introducing friends Cat Soup because even though it's bizarre, cruel, and makes no lick of sense, everyone always has a good time.

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The audience you watch something with can be hugely influential to your experience of it.

The first time I ever watched Perfect Blue was with one of my 1st serious girlfriends post uni. I had no idea what to expect, people just seemed to think it was a critically important artsy foreign animation and at the time i very much wanted to play up the who arts graduate thing.

Boy that was one awkward watch....

I don't think I watched it again for nearly 5 years out of residule awkwardness

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I'm now done with episode 16 of Mushishi.

So far each episode has been awesome. I don't have any overarching thoughts about the last four, so I'll break my thoughts up by episode.

Episode 13 was brain shatteringly sad. A lot of Mushishi so far have dealt with moving on when you experience loss, and committing to the life you can live. And so far most of them have had hopeful endings; the boy who moves past the death of his mother in episode 4, the girl who learns to live with her own strength and independently decide that she should in the swamp episode, even the episode where the dude's old girlfriend turns into goo ends with his living with a new life. Whether or not these people were happy doesn't change that they went on existing and coexisting with this cruel, chaotic, god bug world. But this episode shows someone not only clinging to his past but also never knowing if it really is in the past, and when he realizes that his fiance was dead the whole time he can't keep on existing. It's a much bleaker outlook, and basically says that once something's in the past, if you don't fully commit to living a new life you'll be dragged into a personal hell where you might as well be dead.

I thought that this caps up this part of Ginko's development really well, cause it provides a strong argument against clinging to a past loss to the point where you're neither moving forward nor totally backwards.

Episode 14 is mad weird. I feel like I'm missing a lot of cultural context because it looks like it references the kaguyahime folktale, which I know nothing about other than like the synopsis. It seems to be focused on how familial relationships could just be self serving, parasitic traps that you depend on due to necessity, which I guess is a really unique theme to impart in an anime. I have no idea how to parse this one. Ginko never actually does anything the whole episode, which I guess somewhat highlights the difficult question he faces, which is "should you value freedom over love". My idea of Ginko's character is that he would choose love unquestionably, but he also has this duty to protect the interests of his clients, and it seems like the family both want to be free of the bamboo tree.

I don't have much to say about episode 15, other than that when I watched it I experienced enormous pity for Ginko cause it highlights the nature of his loneliness and wandering around once again. Though I guess it represents this natural compromise, where he found a place where he can be with other people, feel wanted, give to others, and maintain his lifeline and balance with mushi, but he can only indulge once or twice every year.

Episode 16 was fuckin baller. I like how the mushi is functionally identical to a real disease (Alzheimer's syndrome) but the explanation for why it's occurring is totally fantastical. Also liked that it has a positive attitude toward accepting and making the best out of mental illness and losing memory and self, and seems to send the message that happiness comes first.

I wish all anime was Mushishi.

Edit: I think a big part of my I'm still watching (beyond alchemist detective awesomeness) is because I really want to see how Ginko develops as a character or if he develops at all. He's this perpetual, ghostlike presence in every episode that seems opaque before you start digging into how his actions reflect his inner landscape. This is another reason why I'm not too fond of episode 12, but I guess I never would've gave Ginko's character a second thought if it weren't for that.

Edit edit: wait am I reading into everything too little or too much?

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I wish all anime was Mushishi.

Called it!

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I'm now done with episode 16 of Mushishi.

So far each episode has been awesome. I don't have any overarching thoughts about the last four, so I'll break my thoughts up by episode.Episode 13 was brain shatteringly sad. A lot of Mushishi so far have dealt with moving on when you experience loss, and committing to the life you can live. And so far most of them have had hopeful endings; the boy who moves past the death of his mother in episode 4, the girl who learns to live with her own strength and independently decide that she should in the swamp episode, even the episode where the dude's old girlfriend turns into goo ends with his living with a new life. Whether or not these people were happy doesn't change that they went on existing and coexisting with this cruel, chaotic, god bug world. But this episode shows someone not only clinging to his past but also never knowing if it really is in the past, and when he realizes that his fiance was dead the whole time he can't keep on existing. It's a much bleaker outlook, and basically says that once something's in the past, if you don't fully commit to living a new life you'll be dragged into a personal hell where you might as well be dead.I thought that this caps up this part of Ginko's development really well, cause it provides a strong argument against clinging to a past loss to the point where you're neither moving forward nor totally backwards.Episode 14 is mad weird. I feel like I'm missing a lot of cultural context because it looks like it references the kaguyahime folktale, which I know nothing about other than like the synopsis. It seems to be focused on how familial relationships could just be self serving, parasitic traps that you depend on due to necessity, which I guess is a really unique theme to impart in an anime. I have no idea how to parse this one. Ginko never actually does anything the whole episode, which I guess somewhat highlights the difficult question he faces, which is "should you value freedom over love". My idea of Ginko's character is that he would choose love unquestionably, but he also has this duty to protect the interests of his clients, and it seems like the family both want to be free of the bamboo tree.I don't have much to say about episode 15, other than that when I watched it I experienced enormous pity for Ginko cause it highlights the nature of his loneliness and wandering around once again. Though I guess it represents this natural compromise, where he found a place where he can be with other people, feel wanted, give to others, and maintain his lifeline and balance with mushi, but he can only indulge once or twice every year.Episode 16 was fuckin baller. I like how the mushi is functionally identical to a real disease (Alzheimer's syndrome) but the explanation for why it's occurring is totally fantastical. Also liked that it has a positive attitude toward accepting and making the best out of mental illness and losing memory and self, and seems to send the message that happiness comes first.I wish all anime was Mushishi.

Edit: I think a big part of my I'm still watching (beyond alchemist detective awesomeness) is because I really want to see how Ginko develops as a character or if he develops at all. He's this perpetual, ghostlike presence in every episode that seems opaque before you start digging into how his actions reflect his inner landscape. This is another reason why I'm not too fond of episode 12, but I guess I never would've gave Ginko's character a second thought if it weren't for that.Edit edit: wait am I reading into everything too little or too much?

Really hard to respond to a lot of your thoughts without spoilers for future episodes, but they are intresting ones anyway so keep em comming!

The best I can say is that my personal take on ep 12 is that it's needed to put emphasis on how knowledge doesn't make things less painful sometimes it can even make pain worse

.

The loss of his true mother seems too much for such a young child to process and he recovered relatively fast, it's a death by a landslide a 'act of God' if you will a force utterly incomprehensible to him.

But the loss of his second 'mother' comes with his fill understanding of what's happening, not only his knowledge of Mushishi but because he's evidently become more empathic with her than perhaps he was even with his real mother, so the grief and desperate attempts he makes to not loose her reflect that .

To survive the consequences of his grief of he if forced to looses the memories of the very human connection that drove him to act rashly, not only that all the worldly and otherworld knowledge he has built up is taken and he is returned to a blank state

'The Ginko' eats darkness and produces light which slowly in turn produces more darkness it portrayed as a blameless force just trying to survive in its own way, the newly self named Ginko's journey for knowledge and the pain the knowledge he gains sometimes inflicts regardless of his intent could be seen as a mirror of that. He's rebuilding himself, sometimes at a cost to himself sometime inadvertently at a cost to other in ways he's not quite able to understand.

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The first time I ever watched Perfect Blue was with one of my 1st serious girlfriends post uni. I had no idea what to expect, people just seemed to think it was a critically important artsy foreign animation and at the time i very much wanted to play up the who arts graduate thing.

Boy that was one awkward watch....

I don't think I watched it again for nearly 5 years out of residule awkwardness

I keep meaning to rewatch that one. I saw it in one of my classes at Art Institute and boy was that inappropriate.

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I wasn't enthused about Battle of Gods, comedy beats notwithstanding, because it felt like an unimportant thing. Now with the second new film featuring Freeza however... Let's just say I'm holding out for more beautiful Vegeta neck muscles.

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It felt like they were trying to set up a potential future for the DBZ franchise with the whole gods thing, so it didn't feel unimportant to me! Although whether or not they eventually go there remains up in the air. Plus Bills/Beerus (which is it?!) was just the best.

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All this new DBZ... in my own fanfiction universe DBZ ended with death of Freeza and Goku becoming super saiyan.  Up to that point it was the best!  That saga just wrapped up everything so nicely and IMO it just holds up so well even in far more broader scope... like it's legit good science fiction.

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Haha I don't know if I would call any of DBZ good science fiction... It's barely even science fiction at all. I mean it's about a bunch of dudes punching each other and shooting magic laser beams at each other while flying around with the power of kid (magic). The only science fiction elements are the capsules and the space travel, and the capsules are basically magic anyway. U:

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Haha I don't know if I would call any of DBZ good science fiction... It's barely even science fiction at all. I mean it's about a bunch of dudes punching each other and shooting magic laser beams at each other while flying around. The only science fiction elements are the capsules and the space travel, and the capsules are basically magic anyway. U:

 

Well it's science fiction as much as Star Wars is :P

 

So more like fantay-sci-fi I guess (which is what most sci-fi boils down to I suppose since most of them are super soft on actual science part that it devolves into magic).

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It's actually way less science fiction than Star Wars... In SW you have actual literal space ship fights and you have actual world-threatening Death Star and all kinds of literal science fiction shit.

 

In Dragon Ball Z (up to the end of the Frieza saga), the only world-threatening thing is Frieza being inhumanly capable of summoning a giant death ball and throwing it at planets because... magic.

 

If you move a step beyond Frieza, you have the androids/Cell, which is the most science fiction the series ever gets. And then a step beyond that, you have Buu, who turns people into chocolate and eats them to power up.

 

Not to mention the existence of an afterlife from the very beginning of Z when Piccolo kills Goku. And the whole King Kai being a sort of godly being (though less godly than other Kais introduced later).

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idk, when star wars first came out, the force was just a different word for 'magic' before the fandom blew up and people demanded explanations.

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It's actually way less science fiction than Star Wars... In SW you have actual literal space ship fights and you have actual world-threatening Death Star and all kinds of literal science fiction shit.

 

In Dragon Ball Z (up to the end of the Frieza saga), the only world-threatening thing is Frieza being inhumanly capable of summoning a giant death ball and throwing it at planets because... magic.

 

If you move a step beyond Frieza, you have the androids/Cell, which is the most science fiction the series ever gets. And then a step beyond that, you have Buu, who turns people into chocolate and eats them to power up.

 

There is no science behind how any of those 'ships' or 'lasers' work in Star Wars though.  Their root in science is as deep as how they look and that's it.  The Force/Mitochlorian is pretty much DBZ's power level and that's pretty much the driving force of the universe for respective work of fiction.

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There doesn't have to be an explanation. It's science fiction because they are science fiction tropes. They work through science because spaceships work through science.

 

idk, when star wars first came out, the force was just a different word for 'magic' before the fandom blew up and people demanded explanations.

Well, of course. Star Wars is terrible science fiction. (It's also terrible in general oh shit.) But it's definitely still infinitely more sci-fi than anything DBZ has to offer.

 

shrugggggggggggggggg

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I guess there's just huge difference between what we each perceive as functional science to even call something science :P

 

There is an evil space warlord.  He once commanded a warrior race who did his bidding. But fearing their growing power, the warlord betrayed that subordinate race and wiped them out in treacherous backstabbing surprise attack.

 

But few of the warrior race survived.  One of the survivor, the main protagonist, joins the fight against the warlord in aid of another alien race that is currently under attack.  During this fight, he would ultimately awaken his race's final (fuck all that level 2 bullshit) form and defeat this evil warlord, avenging his race and freeing the galaxy from the warlord's evil doings

 

That's how I remember DBZ and to me that's as science fiction as most modern sci fi (aliens, space travel, future "tech" (magic in tool form really) thrown in here and there) :D

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Agreed, they are both terrible sci-fi, but don't forget DB did have flying cars, houses that come from pills and spaceships.

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Agreed, they are both terrible sci-fi, but don't forget DB did have flying cars, houses that come from pills and spaceships.

 

Oh they both had terrible science, but since that seems to be norm for sci-fi, I think one of them (cough DBZ's Freeza saga cough) actually kicked much asses and hence me saying it's a good sci-fi since having good science doesn't seem to matter.

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Also you're ignoring the key difference here, which is that science fiction is the core basis for everything Star Wars does, while Dragon Ball couldn't give less of a shit about its science fiction elements. And that's all on top of the fact that Star Wars actually had believable science fiction (space ships and laser guns, among other things) (also note that believable science fiction is different from believable science) beneath the added-because-it's-cool space wizard layer on top of it all.

Star Wars is about a galactic war.

Dragon Ball is about dudes punching each other dead.

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But also who would Erin in a fight?!

Goku or Luke Skywalker?!

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dang i thought i fixed that typo

 

Skywalker couldn't touch any of the Gokus. Young, old, or whatever!

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Also you're ignoring the key difference here, which is that science fiction is the core basis for everything Star Wars does, while Dragon Ball couldn't give less of a shit about its science fiction elements. And that's all on top of the fact that Star Wars actually had believable science fiction (space ships and laser guns, among other things) (also note that believable science fiction is different from believable science) beneath the added-because-it's-cool space wizard layer on top of it all.

Star Wars is about a galactic war.

Dragon Ball is about dudes punching each other dead.

 

Star Wars is about the balance in "The Force".  Every canonical wars in that universe has been started because of "The Force", not politics or science. 

 

 

Which series's Goku?

 

Even kid Goku took high powered rifle shot to the face and survived.  Goku wins all day.

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In other news I've been rewatching Bakemonogatari. I like this anime!

 

I don't know why Crunchyroll only has it in fucking 480p, though. \:

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