All posts by draggle

No. 6 10 — Don’t Change, Shion!

No. 6,

“Ok, I’ll get on it after I kill these small fry.”

They aren’t People!

I really liked the opening scene. Dogkeeper, standing amidst the rubble of the destroyed town, scoffs at Shion’s idea that the people from No. 6 are human too.

Then one of her dogs comes up to her, who found something. The dog found a piece of gold. Dogkeeper tells it to go look for more.

So here Dogkeeper is in a ruined town, surrounded by the dead and the dying, searching for gold in the rubble. Who isn’t human again?

No. 6 is the BIG BAD

After last episode, the creators still hadn’t established the fact that No. 6 was EVIL. So they started the episode by having Shion and Nezumi climb a pile of corpses. How subtle.

When the villains level towns, kill babies, execute old ladies, and pile up mountains of corpses in the basement for no apparent reason, it’s kind of hard to take them seriously.

Bipolar Disorder

What is going on with Shion in this episode? He’s been a pansy for the entire show. This episode, he starts out cowering in the back of the truck, and gets grossed out by corpses.

Then he hears Safu’s voice. Courage reignites in his heart, and a smile lights up his face! He knows the positions of the security cameras and how to avoid them in a building he’s never entered. He even knows the secret passages! He fools doctors with his smooth talk, and outfights soldiers with his cloak. He shoots a soldier from across the room, and then comes in close for the kill, finishing him off from point blank range while the man cries and begs for mercy.

Finally his eyes glaze over, and Shion joins Nezumi in crying. What has he done?!

I appreciate the idea that people can change, but this is just silly. To go from a wuss to a special agent with skills exceeding Nezumi’s in the span of five minutes, and then back again? When the most “reasonable” explanation I can think of is that Elyurias is influencing his mental state, something’s off.

Random Thoughts

  • The baby decides that Dogkeeper is her mother, and then starts suckling from a dog teat? What strong familial bonds.
  • What has this whole pseudo-mystical angle with Elyurias added to the show? I will go ahead and propose nothing at all, except to give me more fodder to laugh at.
  • I thought it was impossible to get inside the correctional facility? And then they go ahead and do it… because spoiled rich people become paralyzed by stinkiness.
  • The fight scenes had a quite noticeable drop in animation quality. I suppose it is the first time anybody’s moved since the second episode.
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Usagi Drop 10 — Rin at the Gates of Hades

Usagi Drop,

Rin caught a cold, and it’s the end of the world. Daikichi needs to stay by Rin’s bedside every second for two days straight, and doesn’t even have time to go and shave. Kouki and his mom come over to join the nursing squad. Daikichi monitors every minute change in her temperature. Rin’s face is flushed. (Is it just me, or is the art a bit off in this shot? Rin looks like an adult bishoujo, not a little girl.)

Health Paranoia

When I was a little kid, my favorite play spots were mud puddles and forests. I spent most of my time digging rocks out of the ground, collecting bugs, building traps and secret bases, and riding around on my bike. I ate food off the ground and bushes (I don’t do that anymore… of course…) and bathed and washed my hands as little as I could get away with. My idea of hygiene was covering my droppings with leaves and wiping with Indian toilet paper (if you’ve never had the opportunity to try it, it’s actually more comfortable than some of the most expensive brands). Raw eggs? Yum yum! I don’t think I’m that atypical, at least among boys. Even Daikichi seems to have had a similar experience.

So I will never understand this level of paranoia over a cold. When I was a kid a cold was just an excuse to skip school. It didn’t mean I would stay in bed all day! (Although my parents certainly tried.) Daikichi’s acting like Rin is going to die. I guess we could chalk up some of the blame to the fact that Daikichi is a new parent, and this is the first time Rin’s ever been sick. But still, hasn’t he ever had a cold before? Or, more to the point, haven’t the creators of Usagi Drop?

Daikichi goes so far as to take the martyr’s path: if only I had died in her place! Curse you, God!

I should mention that this portrayal of a cold isn’t specific to Usagi Drop at all. Every cold I can think of in anime goes the same way. The sick person can’t even get out of bed. But the next day they’re perfectly fine. The reaction to colds is partially a cultural thing: people from Asia do wear these surgical masks, even at school. But I find it hard to believe they take it this far.

Yukari provides some good advice to Daikichi: calm down. But her rationale is slightly odd: it isn’t that he shouldn’t worry, it’s that he shouldn’t let Rin worry by acting worried. Yukari is clearly worried as well, considering how often she comes over during the course of Rin’s illness. Of course, she could be more worried about Daikichi than Rin.

The most reasonable reaction to Rin’s cold comes from Kouki, after Daikichi forbids him from entering her room:

Kouki gets it.

Fathers of the World Unite!

It wasn’t really connected to the rest of the episode, but I did like the part where Daikichi befriended some of the other fathers. Parenting in Usagi Drop seems to be a world dominated by single mothers, so it’s nice to see he isn’t the only father out there.

Conclusion

Usagi Drop appears to have no conclusion in sight, but for once, I’m fine with that. Life goes on, kids grow up. A story like this shouldn’t end.

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Onii-chan no Koto… 13 — *Yawn*

Onii-chan no Koto, ,

The biggest question surrounding this show is why I decided to blog it in the first place. Looking on the bright side, it makes my more recent choices *cough cough* Dog Days *cough cough* seem downright inspired by comparison. But, I’m a completionist, and I’ve got to finish what I’ve started. So let’s talk about the extra episode.

This special episode continued in the tradition of the TV series, and showed a bunch of skits showing how perverted Shuusuke is. I’d say it was a bit better than most of the original episodes, since at least there was more variety and they didn’t linger on anything for long.

But the problem continues to be that they keep replaying different variations on the same jokes over and over again, which stopped being funny after the first episode. We get that Shuusuke is perverted and pathetic. We get that Nao likes it that way. Can’t we get something new?

The only part that even made me chuckle was Shuusuke getting on his knees and begging his mother for a third time, but this time for a more detailed atlas instead of porno books (to look up perverted sounding places, of course). The fanservice in this episode was more explicit than the original series, and equally uninspired. We have Shuusuke looking up Nao’s skirt and looking at Kondo’s stockings for the zillionth time.

Well, now I can knock this show off my checklist once and for all. This and Dog Days have proven once and for all that I cannot blog comedies. There’s nothing more boring than talking about what’s funny.

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Steins; Gate 23 — Open the Steins Gate!

Steins; Gate,

I’m split about this episode. One one hand, I enjoyed it: the repeat of Christina’s death was pretty exciting, and Okabe returned to being Hououin Kyouma. But on the other hand, it just felt cheap. Okabe spent so much effort saving Mayuri, but now his future self just tells him what to do?

Christina’s Death: Take Two

I did like this scene (even if I have issues as to how we got here). Once it was revealed that the guy giving the talk was Christina’s father, everything clicked into place. Those kinds of *snap* moments are rare and hard to come by. From this, it became clear right away why Christina was attending the nutjob convention in the first place and who would kill her. Plus the events of the first episode made a lot more sense.

The creators did a nice job at including Okabe into what should have been a touching father-daughter reunion. I liked especially how Christina’s father decided that Christina and Okabe were conspiring to ruin him. It’s a reasonable conclusion, even if it’s wrong.

No Free Lunch

Okabe just finished reliving Mayushii’s death over and over again. But now, he gets a time travelling girl and a message from himself in the future telling him exactly what to do. It just feels like a cheap ending tacked onto the end of the VN as an afterthought to make everybody happy.

In the uncountable set of multiverses, there is exactly one timeline which will break free of local attractors and make everyone happy. We know this because… of science! From the future! And it just so happens that we’re one step away from reaching this perfect universe right now! It shouldn’t take much math to convince anyone that the probability of this happening is zero.

Inconsistencies and Changing the Rules

I probably shouldn’t think about time travel in Steins; Gate too much, because it’ll just make my head hurt. The show seemed to have a well-defined set of rules governing time travel, but this episode felt like the creators punched in the cheat code so we can get the ending where everyone lives happily ever after. One thing that changed is minor: Suzuha’s time machine can go forward now. That can easily be explained from improvements in Okabe and Daru’s research.

But the change that bothered me the most is Okabe receiving a message from himself in the future. What? How? Every other time Okabe has sent a message to the past, he doesn’t remember receiving it. If his future self can send messages without Okabe himself experiencing sending them, why didn’t that happen in the Mayushii timeline as well? Why did Okabe have to live up to the point he sent the message every other time, but not this time? It seems inconsistent.

In the same vein, why did the Okabe in the universe where he killed Christina have to send the message in the first place? Couldn’t the Okabe that sent Suzuha have done the same thing? He already knew that Okabe would need to receive the message. If he knew that Okabe needed to receive the message, couldn’t he have just sent the message himself?

Another thing: Christina saw the Okabe from the future originally, in the first episode (go watch it again if you don’t believe me). Now, to prevent her death, he can’t change what the other Okabe experiences. But he already did. Christina met the future Okabe before. Hopefully the remaining episodes will clear things up, but it all feels like a giant pretzel of contradictions to me. Does anyone have some better ideas for how to resolve the seeming contradictions? (no VN spoilers please)

Pet Peeves

It annoys me when science fiction shows make the entire universe anthropocentric. In this episode, the multiverse will explode in a set of contradictions if Okabe happens to see himself in the past. Right. Future Okabe has already affected past Okabe, and the light cone has become a light donut regardless of whether Okabe’s mind recognizes that fact. The universe is non-causal (or dissipates in a puff of contradictions, if Steins; Gate is to be believed). On the other hand, perhaps the universe is anthropocentric, and the universe disintegrates not because of non-causality but because Okabe’s mind recognized a contradiction in the structure of the universe. Then Okabe’s mind (from the future) can recognize the contradiction regardless of whether he sees himself. Either way, the idea of the universe self-destructing after causality is broken is silly: causality has already been broken. Furthermore, if we assume that all possible universes exist (as is implied), an infinite number of self-contradictory universes exist. Goodbye multiverse.

A similar application of anthropocentrism occurs in Noein. Haruka is the Steins Dragon’s Gate, and hers is the absolute reference frame (she’s the only one who matters when it comes to looking inside Schrodinger’s box). Some guy dies behind a door, and Haruka knows it. If Haruka opens the door and looks at him, he’ll die for real, and if she doesn’t he won’t. It depends on the mental act of seeing rather than the physical or mental act of observing.

This is just silly. Why are these stupid humans so full of themselves?

Hououin Kyouma Returns

Bwah ha ha ha!

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Working’!! — First Impressions

Impressions,

The second season of Working!! starts in October, and they decided to air the first episode a month early, as they did for the first season. There seems to be some controversy over the naming scheme: Working!! ==> Working’!!, but for those with a mathematical background it makes perfect sense. If you have a variable name (i.e., a) that you’ve already used but need to use again, you name the second variable a’ (a prime) rather than resorting to less descriptive names or subscripts. So it’s not an apostrophe, it’s a prime symbol, and the pronunciation would be “Working Prime!!”. Either way, the title is much better than counting the number of explanation marks at the end, which seems to be the current trend.

On to the episode itself. This was one of the last comedy shows that I thought needed a sequel. While I enjoyed the first season, by the end the jokes were starting to become repetitive. We have the millionth joke about how Poplar is cute and tiny, how Takanashi likes cute things, and how Inami hates men.

This episode took all those overused jokes and hit us on the head with them over and over again. Literally half the episode was about Poplar being short and cute, and Takanashi obsessing over her. They’ve had a year and a half to come up with new jokes, and this is the best they can do?

I’ll still watch it, since it can be funny when it’s not stale, but I won’t be blogging it. Talking about what’s funny is boring anyways.

Oh, and happy Labor Day. A perfect time to talk about working.

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