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Just started watching the series, first two movies and on ep 3. So far I've found Yang to be incredibly boring while Reinhard is awesome. Knife-fighting space combat offends my sensibilities but you can't expect much from science fiction.
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Feb 17, 2012 07:10
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DamnGlitch posted:"Knife-fighting space combat offends my sensibilities but you can't expect much from science fiction." No, I meant extreme "we just rubbed hulls with the enemy" close range space combat. Up to 15 now. The series has also so far been very one sided on when a character is supposed to be a "good" guy or "bad" guy, but that's unavoidable in fiction I guess? But yeah, the Yang sections get better once he actually starts doing poo poo instead of focusing on his personal drama. Reinhard's is entertaining, Yang's is just bleh. ED: I can't stop laughing at how easily both sides are surprised by ships coming in from blind spots. It's like they can't see enemy ships unless they're straight ahead of them. Nephilm fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Feb 17, 2012 |
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Feb 17, 2012 20:39
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Dunno, I'd really like to watch fiction with "realistic" space combat. In particular for this kind of story, where it's about grand strategy and large fleet tactics where individual ships pew pewing don't matter; if the space combat were realistic, the tactics employed by the opposites Yang and Reinhard would be more cerebral than greek phalanx maneuvering.
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Feb 17, 2012 21:56
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Rationalizing it over a context that really make no sense. I'll take Crest of the Stars any day.
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Feb 18, 2012 02:28
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It's camp value.
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Feb 18, 2012 03:20
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Rakugoon posted:Wow, Star Trek and Star Wars must be like, unwatchable to you. Very much. Also, I just got to the boarding troops fighting with axes and crossbows. This poo poo is hilarious. What's the rationale for this?
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Feb 18, 2012 03:36
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Extremely tough armor that axes and crossbows go right throw? ...okay. I guess if that was the epitome of body armor then I can understand why they never saw the need to develop needlers.
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Feb 18, 2012 03:51
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Hey, suspension of disbelief is fine and all, but you're loving retarded if you actively try and defend crazy bullshit logic in words of fiction, as people are doing here. I can see the merits in the series and am just laughing along.
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Feb 18, 2012 03:57
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Nate RFB posted:I guess I don't really see how something like Crest of the Stars is any less "ridiculous". Ships flying through pseudo-2D hyperspace in bubbles of realspace that merge into each other at close range. Works for me. The fact that they still have manned fighter-craft is kind of silly but at least they make a point of only genetically engineered posthumans being able to withstand the Gs.
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Feb 18, 2012 05:13
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Rakugoon posted:It's built to reflect concentrated light off, not crossbow bolts. Also some plate mail was perfectly capable of stopping bullets and archers still wiped them out. Well, first of all that refers to early firearms, which were quite lovely and their advantage over traditional long bows relied on easy of use and mass manufacture. Now, modern anti-ballistic fibers aren't meant to stop arrows or bladed weapons since you prefer mobility, but since the troops in the show are already wearing this bulky (I assume ablative) armor, would it really have been so hard to add plated layers underneath? Or to field flechette weapons that aren't those goddamned unwieldy medieval monstrosities? Also, no double standard; not only am I not arguing here over the Empire being a monarchic system with nobles and poo poo, which would be the closest simile to your strawman, your jab at elves doesn't even follow because their ears are an stylistic choice more than anything and really have no relevance on what the Abh are or how they behave. And on the LoGH fleet movement poo poo, the argument then boils to their comms being limited to short range radio broadcasts, their computers being 70s era toasters, optics and thermal sensors being a guy eyeballing it out a viewport, ships being hilariously slow... or I guess they move at plot speed? Tracking on turrets is also terrible but that links into lovely computers as previously mentioned and... ugh list goes on and on. Coordination is really the least of the problems they face. poo poo, I mean in the movie they showcase Wang coordinating the fleet by relaying to them all to follow pre-programmed formations he had written a few hours beforehand. Nephilm fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Feb 18, 2012 |
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Feb 18, 2012 05:42
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Beautiful, long lived and smart people is just post/transhumanism - pointy ears is solely what you'd associate with elves. Well that and I'd associate the fact that they follow inhuman values, but recent fiction has really pussified elves so it doesn't apply as much, and could be jotted down just as well under transhumanism. And you know? Considering how meddlesome they are, being the entire root of the conflict and all, in hindsight they don't follow very traditional tokienesque values so... But I digress, I just got to the part where they use self-propelled asteroids against the orbital defense installations. Because relativistic projectiles against fixed-orbit targets is such a clever, unforseeable tactic. This poo poo is great.
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Feb 18, 2012 06:14
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Nah, Kircheis does it first with the plotonium gas, which I thought was neat. Yang then uses rocks, which was surprising only in so far as discovering that they actually did have the ability to do that kind of stuff - at which point one wonders why space fortresses are even a thing. Oh hey new OP. I like these vocals better.
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Feb 18, 2012 07:22
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What I find hilarious is people getting butthurt over said lack of realism being pointed as such. Well, the lack of realism can also be funny in its own way, because as I mentioned, camp.
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Feb 19, 2012 01:24
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The title belongs to Poplan, but Schenkopp has better taste in women.
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Feb 19, 2012 02:44
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KlavoHunter posted:Chorusing out "SPACE DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY!" with my friend when LoGH uses questionable physics was one of the best parts of watching this series Yes, something is missing when you don't watch that kind of poo poo with other people. Up to 42 now Empire invasion through both Iserlohn and Phezzan about to begin.
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Feb 19, 2012 05:22
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Ep 45. "We should just tell him [Yang] that the General Staff Office will take every responsibility and he should just do as he thinks best." *finishes his sandwhich* I like this guy.
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Feb 19, 2012 07:04
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Oh god battle near a black hole.KlavoHunter posted:"SPACE DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY!"
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Feb 19, 2012 16:05
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Takes No Damage posted:And I think we can all agree that while not perfect, the SPACE PHYSICS are presented more realistically than in most other shows of this type. No, I'm not really seeing the "more realism" part. Space is treated as goofy as I've seen in anything that's not Planetes, and even loving Gundam does it better whenever it doesn't involve the humanoid robots or magical particles. Also, the series gets a lot better after ep 40 something when all the incompetent people die or go offscreen, and I agree that the space combat at this point becomes just sort of something you have to sit through to get at the meat. But wow that's a grind to get there, I wouldn't recommend this series to other people.
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Feb 21, 2012 01:04
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Reinhard with a bouquet larger than his torso... this is... this is too much. That blush. I'm dying.
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Feb 23, 2012 06:13
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TK-31 posted:The best part was how after the deed was done she looked physically distraught. He's that bad. I think that had more to do with having to do the walk of shame in front of the Kaiser's guards and attendants, then her own family's.
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Feb 23, 2012 16:13
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I wonder what the japanese fascination is with when a nameless mook (or otherwise feeble character) wounds/kills/seemingly kills a notable character they immediately go into an anxiety attack that usually involves dropping their weapons and laughing maniacally.
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Mar 1, 2012 18:48
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DamnGlitch posted:other examples? Within the same series you have the guy who fatally wounds Schenkopp, and on a related note the firing squad that kills whatshisname leader of the Alliance after Yang escapes but as for other examples I can't point them out off the top of my head since I haven't watched media in which the relevant situations come up with in ages aside from LoGH, but I do recall encountering it a fair bit in anime/manga I've gone through. Maybe it tries to convey a sense of the character in question not being truly bested, or otherwise granting them some sort of moral upper ground by portraying the party who did the deed as pathetic as possible. Or it being an ignoble situation, I don't know. What I do know is that I've NEVER seen a situation come up in which a larger-than-life character/plot element is brought down and a nod is made towards the previously unknown person who did the deed being just a regular dude, with nothing particularly special to them besides trying hard or getting lucky. No, if they show them at all they have to show them as frightful little human beings humbled to the point of submission or insanity by what they just did.
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Mar 1, 2012 20:23
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Rakugoon posted:Well in real life Napoleon was once facing down an entire army as a firing squad and the guy closest to him just plain fainted, the idea of being forever known as the guy that killed a historic figure isn't pleasant if your last name isn't Oswald. And that's actually kinda replicated in LoGH, but doesn't apply to the specific cases I mentioned nor to the broader trope. Facing down who you had previously sworn loyalty to in a stand-off is very different from finding a target you were already forming part of a concerted effort to eliminate, nevermind cases where the significant individual isn't even famous or shouldn't be immediately recognizable.
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Mar 1, 2012 23:25
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Why are you trying to justify it? My point is not whether it's justifiable or not for a given circumstance, but that the culture seems to be enamored with it.
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Mar 2, 2012 02:08
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Minrad posted:At some point after visiting Earth, Boris Konev drops an In a religion there's nothing cheaper than the lives of its faithful?
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Mar 8, 2012 23:18
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on how the Earth Cult uses its followers. Does anyone know what I'm talking about and have a screenshot of that quote? I've been trying to find it for like a day on Google and would search through the series myself but I never backed it up when I watched it.
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Go watch Monster or something.
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Mar 22, 2012 07:45
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poo poo like Lucky Star and K-ON doesn't target kids bro, it targets 30+yo manchildren. The industry realized that they don't need to appeal to a wide audience when they can appeal to a small hardcore audience that has way more purchasing power.
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Mar 22, 2012 14:53
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Chas McGill posted:Wow. So I'm guessing it's a kind of escapist fantasy complex or something? Doesn't that account for like 90% of all fiction? In the specific case of the anime industry you can point out how an audience grew up watching, for instance robot shows and... well, never stopped liking them, which is a completely legitimate position. And however you may look at them, some of these shows that look childish are specifically aimed at these same grown-up audiences (compare to adult cartoons like The Simpsons and Ren&Stimpy; something like MLP *is* aimed at children) and those are the ones that hit, because anime for little kids are their own category. The trait of manchildren would be mostly attributed to the fact that in many cases they're spending a significant percentage of their livelihood on overpriced merchandise, not to mention a blatant embrace of the most extreme excesses of said materialism and/or associated manias/fetishes. Nephilm fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Mar 23, 2012 |
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Mar 23, 2012 01:28
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Truly treading down the path to decadence.
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Mar 23, 2012 03:53
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Madoka is an awesome deconstruction of a genre.
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Mar 23, 2012 07:35
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Because being dark in hindsight is an intended staple of the magical girl genre, but sure, whatever.
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Mar 23, 2012 11:58
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Uznare posted:After starting this journey in december, I have finally finished it about five minutes ago. This show is not only probably the best anime I have ever watched, but also pretty much the best show I have ever seen. I would not hesitate a single moment to call it the best show ever made either. You haven't watched many, series have you? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 6, 2012 16:32
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DamnGlitch posted:Just because you nitpicked it to hell doesn't mean everyone else didn't enjoy it. There's a difference between enjoying and calling it "the best ever made". Hyperbole much? Chas McGill posted:Even if I didn't like it (I really did) I'd have to concede that there's nothing quite the same was LotGH out there. I tried watching Crest of the Stars but the art style is so hideous compared to LotGH that I never made it past the first episode. Wow really? I guess you hate any depiction of humans that doesn't follow perfectly realistic proportions?
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Apr 6, 2012 17:37
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Mercrom posted:How much "attention span" are we talking about here? I've watched 6 episodes and My Conquest is the Sea of Stars and the only reason I'm contemplating watching more are these comments and the ridiculous amount of praise the show gets. What makes this show good? The characters? The plot? The realism? The message? The space fantasy aspect? So far I found all those things lacking or missing and the latter outright distracting. The beginning is pretty dull because it focuses on Yang doing trite poo poo before he surrounds himself with the interesting characters on his side of the story, but eventually it gets rolling by focusing more on Rienhard and then the good characters on Yang's side getting introduced. If it wasn't clear already by what I just said, the characters are the series' strong point, and truly the only particularly noteworthy thing about it beside the usage of musical pieces, but then I'm also a persona non-grata in this thread because I don't consider it the missed second coming of anime-Christ, along with saying it's not really being a series I'd recommend to other people because, as I just said and you yourself noticed, it takes so long to get moving and then by the latter 3rd/4th it just drags on and you're just kind of keeping at it because you've already invested so much time. Kinda like LOST... but at least this one has a logical conclusion so there's that.
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Apr 22, 2012 00:42
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Mercrom posted:If it just started out slow like HBO shows I wouldn't mind. It's just that what I've seen hasn't been impressive. The two main characters start out stuck in dysfunctional organizations on opposite sides, having to deal with incompetent or indifferent superiors and politics. That's pretty similar to how The Wire starts, except the incompetent characters in The Wire aren't pants on head retarded in order to make the main characters look like geniuses, and the indifference is completely understandable because of how hosed the system is. Yeah, it appears to be an anime trope that incompetence has to be very hamfisted. It eventually disappears as all organization heads are replaced due to the social restructuring that goes on through the series, and instead of everyone with any sort of authority being pants-on-head retarded it's mostly competent people making bad or impossible decisions... but it still takes quite a while to get there and the main named characters never stop being godly übermenschs compared to unnamed chumps. There are certain aspects of the series where you can't go looking for realism in, as it simply isn't there - the justifications for creating the initial conditions (and for playing out many of the setpieces the author wanted to see when it involves sci-fi) are usually pretty weak.
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Apr 22, 2012 05:33
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Zorak posted:Legitimate science fiction is fiction that uses science of technological concepts to discuss realities of the human condition, or possibilities of the human condition in the future. That is to say, it's not just "things happen, here's my theory on how intelligent robots work in the framework of my setting", it's "things happen, and that's important." However, the fulcrum of such analysis rests on the POV of clearly superhuman individuals (with a few exceptions, and in those it's mostly due to the author's failure to portray competence than actual intent) and even throwing aside all the techy sci-fi, you're looking at events and situations that simply don't stand up to common sense. There are battles where they're habitually throwing away millions of lives, yet their own population sizes on a civilization scale are not large enough to make such numbers non-trivial, making you wonder how their societies can even function the way they do (particularly the Alliance) without crippling war weariness given that the war has been going on for over a hundred years. Even worse, you have characters portrayed as heroic and noble, lamenting the bloodshed and choosing to sacrifice themselves... along with the hundreds of thousands of people under them that are just completely ignored. It's total disconnect of the scales involved, and it's not and analysis on numbers and the meaningless of human life if you're no important in history... no, it just comes off as sheer incompetence and selective values dissonance. And this is actually something that'd have been great if brought to fore, you know? How society would have evolved given that humanity has almost wiped itself out twice already and space war has evolved into having to throw millions into the meat grinder by necessity (again, just skirting around the issue of the author's own attempts at explaining the mechanics of it being awful)? But no, because this is your little faux USA and faux 19th century Germany, and you most definitely don't want to alienate the audience by having your characters introducing values/moral mindsets that they can't relate with, you just try your hardest to not look at it and hope nobody notices the elephant in the room. That is fantasy.
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Apr 23, 2012 20:33
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Zorak posted:Did... you fall asleep for half the story? That was largely the point of the whole thing on the FPA side. There basically are no young men left in the Alliance. War weariness is super high, but those in political power are twisting public sentiment via information control. It's a massive amount of people dying, yes, but the population is equally massive. It's like you're arguing the internal point here. I'm saying that it wasn't heavy enough. quote:Yes, and that's one of the major failures of Reinhard (internally) and one of the major criticisms of him and strong points of Yang; Reinhard is a dictator, one who acts ultimately on self-interest. Even if he's ultimately "doing it for the good of his people" or out of some moral obligation, he's still ultimately wielding lives out of petty concern. It's one of the things that Oberstein even criticized about him, what drove Annerose away from him ultimately even. Annerose is kind of emotionally hosed up since she's basically been the causa-bella for the death of hundreds of millions of people. I wasn't even talking about Reinhard, guy's clearly bloodthirsty as gently caress, and Yang knew where he stood, but consider every other leader in the series. And I'm aware of the phrase, but now acknowledge it from the context of a guy on the ground - with battles with attrition rates of over 20%, you're talking that on average one person out of every 5 that Joe Soldier personally knows within his immediate peers just died. This is simply huge from an organization level, specially since all these men are trained, professional soldiers, not conscripted, ignorant peasants with nothing to live for told to charge machinegun nests in WWI trench warfare. quote:No, fantasy would be in essence to do what you are saying. Ultimately what this is is commentary on all modern democracies/republics, all modern dictatorships and tyrannies. For good and for the bad, and how ultimately these cycles of government are inescapable, as all societies fall. Even the united empire of Reinhard will one day fall. This is the explicit commentary being made. It's a fantasy setting, it's what I'm saying. In order to be able to deliver its message it distances itself so much from reality (be it through intent or incompetence) to create this impossible setting that it's hard to gauge it otherwise. It's on the same vein to why Star Wars can't be considered science fiction just because it has spaceships and lasers.
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Apr 23, 2012 21:32
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Rakugoon posted:Holy poo poo and a massive diss on the regular men and women that died in WWI out of nowhere. You are aware that most of the poor fucks that died in the trenches are just as intelligent as you or me, right? They had dreams and aspirations too. And yes massive casualties take a toll on the system, that's what industrial warfare is! Stalingrad wasn't a walk in the park either, and the Soviet army didn't fall apart. This idea that the scale of the deaths in LoGH makes it less reaslistic somehow is really bizarre, especially since previous deaths are a huge driving factor of the story. I literally give no fucks about their dreams, aspirations or how intelligent they were, I care about where they came from. You want to make a deal out of industrial warfare? Yes, it was loving brutal. Yes, LoGH does a fair representation of it. And yes, it's unrealistic as gently caress, because the context is entirely different. This isn't the start of the industrial revolution, pressing uneducated masses out of plowing the fields into lubricating the grinding gears of war with their blood, these are modern societies. I mean, you can kind of make a case for the GE as they actually show colonies filled with peasants, but not for the alliance. Can you seriously imagine a modern country engaging in that sort of war? When soldiers are a much heavier investment of resources than giving them an uniform and a gun and letting God sort them out? It's utterly unsustainable. And don't give me "oh but the Alliance was on the brink of collapse", no, this is the kind of poo poo where you need an Orwellian population control not to have a complete system collapse after the first lost battle... and the series is trying to compare that to loving babbys first media blackout.
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Apr 23, 2012 22:08
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Rakugoon posted:Soldiers in World War II did all sorts of training. Wars have always been unsustainable and inefficient-- senseless bloodbaths that cost huge amounts of time and money are just exactly what they are. And guess what? The last hundred years of history have more people dying in wars than the rest of history combined so YES I CAN TOTALLY SEE IT HAPPENING. IT HAPPENS. IT'S AWFUL. And it's not just the two world wars either, poo poo has happened all the time in the 20th and 21st century and it's been getting progressively worse, not better. You name dropped Stalingrad. You're comparing American, British and German forces (and losses) of the era to the Red Army - the Red Army that immediately conscripted 6 times as many people as it had at the start when poo poo hit the fan, in order to win by attrition. The one nation that was representative on WWII of the actual conditions of WWI by being the one behind on starting its industrial revolution. And that was the last time we had bloodshed on that scale from conventional combat, because after that armies evolved into what they are now. Society finished changing into what it is now. All soldiers became, to a degree, professionals - because modern nations no longer posses the bulk of, excuse the term, uneducated pissants necessary to wage wars of attrition (compounded with the fact that human wave tactics were actually rendered obsolete by technology). Modern wars are pretty tame in comparison from a battlefield perspective - the bulk of casualties has shifted to non-combatants, and the armies that take huge attrition are not from modern societies, but those of 3rd world nations where combatants are still peasants with guns. Now, don't misrepresent. War is a terrible thing, sure, they're a huge expenditure of lives and resources, right, PEOPLE DIE, OKAY... My point is, a modern (democratic/faux-democratic) society CANNOT engage in the type of warfare depicted in LoGH without some very fundamental shifts in mindset/values and structure - shifts that aren't at all apparent or even implied in the series.
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Apr 23, 2012 22:56
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Point to me where I ever said peaceful. This isn't about the enlightenment of modern civilization, it's about people not wanting to loving die. In a modern society, as it has traditionally done throughout most of history, the military works as a path of upwards social mobility for those of lower socioeconomic status - but few would join a modern army if there was a 20% chance of dying anytime you got front-line duty. For most people upwards social mobility isn't worth those odds, not when even the poor can stay fed and sheltered. Just look at those odds. Even if you built up a national fervor against a clear external enemy, in the proud tradition of police states like Israel, with those kinds of casualties you'd be looking at draft resistance and desertion numbers through the roof... specially since this is an ideology war. The GE isn't looking to genocide the FPA, they haven't even lost any core worlds; for the bulk of the population it'd be a distant war if not for the fact that everyone who goes to it stands a huge chance of dying.
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Apr 23, 2012 23:46
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