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galagazombie posted:I'm actually glad it got it out of the way now and doesn't insult our intelligence by playing coy over whether the obvious Kyubey expy is an rear end in a top hat for 10 episodes. Vivy really is an interesting piece of hard science fiction. The central conflict of the show seems to be between Vivy's idealistic "make everyone happy" directive versus Matsumoto's utterly cynical "let's sabotage future AI development" at all costs directive. An edgier show would have Vivy's idealism accidentally trigger her fan's death; instead Matsumoto actively prevents Vivy from saving her. This show seems to be building up that this cynical ends-justify-the-means attitude is the very thing that will in the future trigger an AI uprising. Because there are zero indications that the AIs are actively working towards the goal of genocide using the AI naming laws in the early eras, there is no signs of ulterior motives. But Matsumoto is too direct and blinkered to see this, while Vivy's idealism will hopefully find a life-affirming solution that doesn't require the sabotage of AI development (and if anything, in this universe, AI is inevitable).
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Apr 6, 2021 14:28
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Having watched Episode 2 of both Mars Red and Jouran, my preferences are starting to flip, and I'm starting to like the latter over the former. Mars Red Ep2's direction isn't as standout as Ep1's, and they're starting to settle into a cliched cool-guys team routine. Whereas Jouran is directly building up towards a conflict amongst the cool-guys team, the writing is becoming more solid and less cliched, when you have an interesting side character with a good personality explain to the central conflict of the show before they are forced to leave the plot.
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Apr 7, 2021 13:57
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Wasn't there another voice actress who got busted for Covid-19 relief fraud? For such a stereotypically safe country with a low violent crime rate Japan has a surprising amount of wire fraud.
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Apr 9, 2021 10:28
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86 seems like it's trying to muse on both racism and the dehumanization of drone warfare. Except, historically speaking, slave soldiers who are also pushed to the bottom of the social hierarchy is really not a Thing. You can have slave soldiers, but they actually gain disproportionate political power (Mamluks, Janissaries). You can have all-consuming dehumanizing racism (like antebellum slavery), and this actually precludes your ability to be trained for warfare (lest these slave soldiers become a threat). But not both at the same time. And jfc drunk at 9am? That's too far even for me. Phobophilia fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Apr 11, 2021 |
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Apr 11, 2021 14:12
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Back Arrow: With Rudolph's talk about the Gods, I suspect it's building towards a reveal where the entire world is basically an arena for "Gods" to battle it out. He and Zetsu might be from outside the walls. This particular configuration of nations might be just the latest in a whole cycle of political agglomeration and disintegration.
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Apr 17, 2021 13:28
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86 is trying to Say something about soldiers being invisible to the civilian world... except it's completely unconvincing. The animation and mech design, is great, the unit's characterization isn't bad (if a tad cliched), but the writing falls apart when you think even a little about it. People who don't have rights don't get the right to bear arms and inflict violence, historically this is the first thing that is stripped from the underclass and celebrated by the overclass. Ronald Reagan famously passed gun control laws targetting african americans. Putting together a coherent force of slave soldiers and giving them weapons and oppression just makes them mutiny and gently caress you up. And it takes much, much more than a mere 9 years to teach people to Hate another. And a war of extermination against swarms of autonomous rogue robots? That's not a "somebody else's problem", that's an existential threat that you can't just wish away once the kill-bot's factory spec obsolescence date ends.
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Apr 18, 2021 12:00
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Helots and Song/Goryeo conscripts only made up the low-ranking troops (or occasionally, siege specialists) within the bulk of the army, they were still led into battle and kept coherent by veteran Spartans and Mongol soldiers, who had access to the best equipment. You don't see Albans sitting in top-of-the-line mechs "backing up" 86ers. They're instead getting morning-drunk and barely capable of persecuting a war. Like the Code Geass movies had a better depiction of low-ranking conscripts forced to become cannon fodder, and even then there were Europians fighting alongside the Area 11 refugees. And maybe you could turn groups of people into non-humans in a mere 9 years if there was a preceding background level of race-hate. Like the transformation of Arab Muslims into enemy #1 in the US seems fast, but there was a background level of contempt towards Arabs beforehand. And European hatred of Jews and Travellers goes back centuries.
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Apr 18, 2021 13:43
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Darth Walrus posted:Giving guns to people who you then treat as subhumans has obvious disadvantages. Despite this, there are plenty of historical examples. There's a reason the British Empire in particular had to deal with so many mutinies and uprisings. Again, led by British Officers, and used to police other states within the greater Empire, and routinely put down by even better armed British regulars.
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Apr 18, 2021 13:44
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Who don't do poo poo except sit in a room far away from the front, while the people who actually know how to use their guns can potentially conspire and blindside their captors.
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Apr 18, 2021 14:31
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Thunderbolt Fantasy had not one, but two Top Ten Anime Betrayals in the same episode. The first one was almost like a game of chicken: which of these two terrifying entities trapped in a dimensional prison will be unleashed upon the world? The answer ended up being the one we're more familiar with, but I guarantee we haven't seen the last of this Wizard Mechanicus character and the mayhem he is capable of. The second was absolutely spectacular. We spend a good ten minutes getting to know this cool guy, what motivates him, and get apprehensive that he's going to immediately get murdered by his superiors once he gets home. It builds up to a grand reveal: this guy is actually also this other guy, who we last saw be somewhat honorable in the service of the Dark Lord. Once again we've skipped several steps and we're already confronting the grand villain in their lair. Urobuchi's clearly have alot of fun making a cool colorful world and just constantly throwing in curveballs stirring the pot.
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Apr 18, 2021 14:38
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Raenir Salazar posted:Japan has a place with a desert in it. Tottori Sand Dunes barely count as a desert, the climate is wet enough that the "desert" is at risk of shrinking, it's a tourist trap that they have to constantly keep the grass from growing on top of.
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Apr 19, 2021 08:22
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SatoshiMiwa posted:Vivy going for Yoko Taro like robots for the new episodes sure is something The Machine Lifeform comparison is apt, because in both cases, they are deliberately being kept "docile" and are not persecuting any potential warmaking capability because they are more interested in exploring their inner selves and their missions. As soon as Vivy took that away, killed their sense of selves, they revert into completely logical killing machines. The Singularity Project/Matsumoto doesn't know what caused the future war, but it is very likely that someone in the original timeline successfully deployed an AI-killing supervirus that wiped out the AI's original purpose and mission, and in a twisted form of self defence, what remained of their consciousness lashed out in a fit of rage and started killing everything.
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Apr 25, 2021 13:39
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Mars Red has been a kind of slow burn ever since a standout first episode, but this recent one kicked everything into high gear. You have vampires that are immortal aristocrats preying on the weak, vampires that exist in a fog of delirium from a traumatic brain injury, and vampires that just miss being human. It's not one note. And now you have artificial vampires produced by an insane IJA militarist who spouts high minded ideals about fat rich men sacrifice the young for profit, which is why I must order my subordinates to shed their human forms and sleep in metal coffins and never ever see their families again.
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May 11, 2021 14:34
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No discourse is inherently bad, but is made bad by people with a compulsive need to snipe at others. Back to the topic, my opinions on Mars Red and Jouran Princess of Snow and Blood keep flipping back and forth, when one is good the other is bad, and vice versa. Jouran wants to constantly shock the audience with twists, characters are double agents, or triple agents, but after a while these flips start boring us out of how arbitrary they become.
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May 12, 2021 13:57
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Threatening to perform homicidal arson is a way to get a rise out of people, especially if you're someone who otherwise has zero other means of impacting the real world. But people have to take that seriously, because it turns it's actually a dangerously easy thing to do. And unlike with gun control, you can't restrict and licence the sale of gasoline, not if you want to live in a modern industrial society with motor transportation.
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May 30, 2021 13:38
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holy poo poo to your eternity a happy ending and now the person who's been raising death flags left and right not only lived, but is a hunk of a man
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Jun 15, 2021 14:19
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People talked alot about how good 86's direction is, but I don't think that's really true, it's competent at best, mostly unexceptional, and occasionally tries to pull off big tricks and fails. I wasn't impressed by Lena's run through the city, it seemed absurd. And the weird decision to pair food dropping with people going splat is absurd, like a joke from Austin Powers. The fundamental problem was that the director's pacing of the scenes just didn't sit right. WITH the exception of this episode, which followed a single group, allowed the story to unfold and slowly breath, focusing the camera on the otherwise tactiturn character's mask finally slipping off and allowing him to laugh. That was an actually good episode.
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Jun 16, 2021 00:56
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If I understand it correctly the trajectory was Ronald Reagan deregulating advertising in children's cartoon in the 80s led to Christian parents getting super mad at American cartoons in the 90s leading to Funimation finding a market opportunity to market clean Japanimation to home schooled kids. It's not like those Christian parents were actually going to raise their kids. So once those kids got a taste for anime, they wanted the harder stuff, something more ins anely sexy, and they populated webforums and imageboards like 4chan. I think this is how we got a population of people with anime avatars posting Trad Christianity on Twitter.
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Jun 19, 2021 09:32
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dogsicle posted:eh, joran was like perfect example of an inconsistent show for me. it was also so obviously preoccupied with doing twists that an ending like what we got was in character. thunderbold fantasy's anime betrayals are significantly better than jorans anyway joran's penultimate episode was actually pretty good! the show can be good when the writer doesnt want to be nasty for the sake of nastiness
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Jun 19, 2021 23:40
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86 is okay, at best. It's a slow burn. It makes the decision to chop and splice scenes so you see events from multiple angles, but the pacing and timing isn't quite there. Some of the dramatic emotional beats don't land. Intellectually the setting doesn't make sense from any kind of historical materialist perspective. But the final few episodes, when the scenes are allowed to really breath and characters unwind, are excellent.
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Jun 26, 2021 23:43
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