Jeanne d'Arc in Manga is less Gender Normative

So I already commented on how the Anime about Jeanne d’Arc I’ve seen has disappointed me when it comes to Jeanne’s gender bending potential.  Well now I’m familiar with some Manga that actually does better.

First is Puella Magi Tart Magica, a Madoka Magica spin off.

In this one Jeanne does have shorter hair, and once she begins her mission dresses fairly masculine in her normal form. And even her Magical Girl form has a bit of a Knight quality to it.

But I would say the most Bifauxnen character in the Tart manga is Riz.  Even though her hair is long, in her normal form she has an Italian Cavelier look, which makes me think of characters like Regina in Paul Feval’s Bel Demonio (which I’ve so far only read in an abridged form called Woman of Mystery), and Nisida in George Reynolds Wagner the Werewolf.

I think it’s possibly over all the best Madoka spinoff Manga, I recommend it.

I also recently took an interest in the Requiem for the Rose King Manga, loosely based on Shakespeare’s plays about the War of the Roses.  I have however only been able to read the first 6 chapters.  It does quite a few interesting things, and Jeanne d’Arc’s crossdressing is a plot point in it. 

My 2017 Seasonal Anime Experience

This is not actually about all the anime I watched this year.  But my looking back at my first time spending an entire year watching at least some currently airing Seasonal Anime.

Technically I started the year finishing two 2016 shows I followed, Flip Flappers subbed and Izetta The Last Witch’s Simuldub.  Both I enjoyed immensely at the time, I’m not sure how they’ll fare looking back.

For the Winter Season I followed 3 shows to completion, all three of them Simuldubbed.

Dragon-Maid is a show of the year contender, it’s like the Sit-Coms I used to enjoy, but with kick @$$ Animation.  Apparently some people think the Dub downplayed the Yuri, the Dub I watched seemed pretty full on Yuri to me.

Tanya The Evil was incredible, I feel like it quickly surpassed Izetta as an Anime Alternate History World War premise.

ACCA I also really loved.  It’s different from what I usually watch in Anime but reminded me of some of what I used to enjoy in normal nerdy media.  A lot for the complaints I’ve seen from people who dropped the show early reminds me a lot of the hate The Phantom Menace got “whah I don’t want taxation disputes and senate scenes in my Star Wars” which only assured me that their opinions don’t matter.

I think as a whole I might have enjoyed the Winter Season the most.  The amount of shows I completed never became less, and some shows I watched since may long term stick with me more.  But in terms of how it averages out I feel like I had the most fun that season.

Later in the year I watched all of Gabriel Dropout and wished I’d watched it when it aired.

The Spring Season is the only one where I watched more Subbed then I did Dubbed.  But it again totals three.

Twin Angel Break was the best show of the Spring season, it was a great fun little Magical Girl show that felt old school and fresh at the same time.  I highly recommend it to any Magical Girl fan.

Eromanga-Sensei was a fun guilty pleasure, it's best watched if you also watch Digi and Nate’s podcasts on each episode after viewing it.

The only Spring show I watched dubbed was Attack on Titan season 2.  I enjoyed it, but not as much as I did season 1.

For the Summer season I started a number of shows I wound up dropping.  But again finished three.

Fate/Apocrypha is two core, I’ve been following it subbed, but also now got to see the first core dubbed. I’ve enjoyed it.

I also followed subbed to completion Princess Principal, which is also a show of the year contender.  I recommend it to people who are into Steam Punk, or Pretty Little Liars, or the books published by BlackCoatPress and talked about on CoolFrenchComics.

I watched Dubbed In Another World With my Smartphone.  I also really loved it, it got me into Isekai.  I watched some stuff that qualified before, like Tanya above and maybe SAO, but this was my first introduction to the proper Isekai formula.

For the Fall Season, I probably won’t be finished with them by the time I post this.  Definitely with the Simuldubs, of which after dropping some I’m down to three, Anime Gataris, A Sister’s All You Need and Code:Realize, the last of which I also recommend to BCP fans.  I am enjoying all three of those shows.

Fate/Apocrypha’s finale might air on New Year’s Eve, but the fansubs might not be up before the year’s over.  No matter how much it’s ending might disappoint, it’s been a fun ride, only those into other Fate/ stuff are likely to get into it, but still a fun ride.  If I’m able to see the last episode before the year ends I’ll add an update at the bottom.

Yuki Yuna is a Hero’s prequel series was great.  And I’ve seen 3 out of six episodes of season 2 as of writing the first draft of this, it’s also good so far, but I’m on edge to see how it ends due to Madoka Rebellion related fears.  It turns out there is a break before the last episode so I definitely won’t be finishing Yuki Yuna before the year ends either.  Having seen episode 5, with only 1 episode left, it could still go either way.

It’s an experience I do not regret, and for the most part hasn’t interfered with my ability to also watch old shows, both ones I’d seen already and hadn’t.  Maybe when a new season is starting and I’m still watching some shows I wind up dropping later I might feel too busy.  But once things settle down I have plenty of time.

I also this year watched SAO for the first time, and Toradora and three Miyazaki films, to name a few.  I spent October watching some Halloween relevant Anime and November devoting some more time to magical girls.

And Smartphone again got me into a whole new Genre.  And from there I watched No Game No Life, Problem Children, Outbreak Company, the first season of The Familiar of Zero, and Overlord.  All of which I enjoyed.

And it was this year I started watching more Gundam then just the 00 series.

And that’s leaving out stuff I watched for the first time this year because it was this year the Dub dropped.  As well as re-watching stuff I already liked, if there is anything I found more time for it’s that, but I still did a decent amount.

Update December 31st 2017:

Well, I was able to watch the final episode of Fate/Apocrypha before the year ended.  It was a very enjoyable show, but I wouldn't recommend it to people who aren't already into Fate/.   I gave it an 8 on MAL.

My final thoughts on Pretty Little Liars

For a while this may be my last post on the subject of PLL.  I have my doubts I'll bother with the Perfectionists.  So I want to give some final thoughts before the year ends.

I wasn't quite watching the show exactly from the beginning, but I did jump on before season 1A ended.  When I started the show I was still calling Buffy my favorite TV show of all time, but a more relevant context is that my favorite currently airing show at the time was The Vampire Diaries.

By the time unmAsked aired it had become my favorite current TV show.  It was during Season 4B, which I still consider the show's best half season, that it became my favorite TV show of all time.  And it's still my favorite western TV show, as well as favorite live action TV show.

Once Ali was made part of the regular cast, the show lost some of it's original mystique, but remained pretty entertaining for awhile.

For the first nearly 6 and a half seasons the show provided the best Lesbian representation on TV.  Then came Game Over Charles and the show's legacy within the LGBT community was tainted indefinitely.  It was real sad watching Heather Hogan's passion for the show deteriorate.

I still enjoyed plenty of the last season and a half, including the final episode.  But it wasn't what it once was.

In a lot of ways revealing CeCe to have been the second -A could have been perfect, if they just hadn't added the whole Charles narrative.  There is something about introducing her and using her as a red herring repeatedly, then seemingly explaining her role at the season 4/5 cliff hanger and besides a cameo or two mostly forgetting about her till the big reveal came, that worked perfectly.

And I could have been fine with the main villain of the show being a Trans woman if she hadn't been the only Trans representation the show had.  Charlotte is a great villain, and the show does make Patriarchal Transphobia the cause her issues, but her being the only representation Trans women have on the show is still really problematic.

None of these issues with the show's final act were enough to destroy all the enjoyment I had and make it no longer my favorite American TV show.  But it is really unfortunate that it had to end that way.

My recommendation of the show to others shall always be that the first 4 seasons are perfect.

Sometimes looking back is part of moving forward

I've a done a post on Why I like Prequels, and one about how they've been part of Genre fiction as long as Sequels have been.

Today I want to address how sometimes the Anti-Prequel mentality is expressed in very Progressive terms, Progressive fans feeling that going backwards narratively is counter-intuitive to moving forward.  Like the BrosWatchPLLToo people in their opinions on Star Wars.

What they're forgetting is a lot of good liberal and leftist movies have been period pieces, the left looking back at our intellectual ancestors.  Showing how things have changed for the better and yet some problems still remain.

And sometimes societies do regress.  A Prequel is often the best opportunity to tell a cautionary tale of how that can happen.  And that's exactly what the Star Wars Prequels are.

In the post about Prequels having always been around, I decided not to go further back then Alexandre Dumas, since that's where modern Nerdy Genre fiction is born in my view.  But for the purposes of this post I think it shall be necessary to go back to Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's history plays were not written in chronological order.  Eight of them can be viewed as a consecutive chronicle of English history from the rise of the House of Lancaster to the fall of the House of York.  Those eight plays are commonly divided into two Tetralogies.

However the Tetralogy about the history of the War of the Roses was written first, in fact Henry VI Part 1 is often considered the birth of the History genre, the few arguable examples that might predate it are not Shakespeare.

Some question whether or not the plays within that Tetralogy were even written in order (the three Henry VI plays originally had different names, they weren't always numbered).  The way Henry VI Part 3 ends feels kind of like it's a Prequel to Richard III.  Though Richard III's negative reputation already existed by this time, and he was even the subject of one of those possible Pre-Shakespeare history plays I mentioned.  So the original viewers of the Henry VI trilogy might have viewed them as a Prequel to that play.

The point I'm going for here however is that the very first play where Shakespeare dealt with the subject of Henry V was Henry VI Part 1, where Henry V is already dead when the play starts, but his legacy is constantly mentioned, he's viewed as symbolic of a lost golden age, a theme of the play is the death of Chivalry.

So later when Shakespeare wrote the Henriad, it's interesting how he arguably deconstructed that very legacy as it was presented in his first History play.  Henry V is depicted as being a manipulative war criminal.  And that makes the Henriad just like the Star Wars Prequels, where the idealized memory of the Jedi is presented as being much more complicated, and even Yoda did not live by what he later taught Luke, that a Jedi should use his power only for defense, Yoda drew his Lightsaber first when he confronted Darth Sidious.

The Chronologically first of these eight plays was Richard II.  Most of Shakespeare's plays about monarchy really had no choice but to be written consistent with the Divine Right of Kings doctrine of Anglican England.  Thus bad Kings, whether outright evil or just incompetent, are usually usurpers, people who shouldn't have had the Throne in the first place.  From King John to Richard III to Macbeth to Claudius in Hamlet.  It is Richard II that is the odd one out, Richard II is depicted as a bad King even though there was no dispute he was ever the rightful one by birth.  But Henry IV taking the throne at the end doesn't solve things either, he quickly starts doing the same things.

So basically it is the Prequels of Shakespeare's history saga that allows them to be read as possibly anti-Royalist, or as close to being that as he would have been allowed to get away with.

George Bernard Shaw was not quite as hostile to Shakespeare as many make him sound.  His preface to Caesar and Cleopatra includes a lot of praise.  That play is the only play Shaw wrote specifically with the idea of addressing Shakespeare.  Shaw was also someone much more progressive then Shakespeare could ever have been allowed to be.  So it's interesting that in his attempt to take a more modern approach to a Shakespearean subject, he chose not to write a remake or a sequel, but something that would effectively serve as a Prequel to two of Shakespeare's plays, Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra.

Ya know, I think the most, intentionally or not, progressive book of The Chronicles of Narnia saga was A Horse and His Boy, a book written as a prequel, sort of.

One prequel I did briefly mention in my earlier post was Paul Feval's La Louve (The She Wolf) a prequel to his earlier Le Loup Blance (The White Wolf).  A novel that happens to be about the first female masked vigilante.

In the world of Anime, the most progressive, and praised by progressives, installment of the Lupin III franchise is The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, which was also a prequel set in the 60s.

Season 1 of Agent Carter was a pretty feminist show, and it was both a Prequel and a Period Piece.

The reason Prequels don't work out so well for Star Trek is because there is too much continuity.  Yes you could argue Star Wars has just as much, but Star Wars is mainly a series of movies, so not that much of it actually matters.  Star Trek was a TV franchise first and foremost, which means continuity was being added to on a weekly basis.  So with Star Trek the best way to free itself of the continuity shackles should be to leap forward a century, that's the best way to get a relatively clean slate.  But they keep refusing to do that.

Much of what The Last Jedi did (that progressives like) it couldn't have done without the Star Wars prequel trilogy having been told first.  It needs the Jedi's dramatized failure in order to work.  So it's an example of looking back being needed to move forward.

But I still think the Prequels are the most progressive Star Wars movies, the new Disney films may have more diverse casting, but they also often remind me of how in their own way the Rebellion was just as Fascist as the Empire in the OT.  Every Star Wars story that takes place after ROTS is ultimately a Pro-War story, and that hinders my enjoyment of them.

I enjoyed Ordinal Scale

I watched it recently as the Dub finally became available.

A lot of Yuki Kajiura fans have felt her SAO stuff has been some of her weakest stuff.  But this movie had some tracks that blew me away, that's the Yuki Kajiura I know and love.

The climax of the movie a lot of Fanservice, which I mean (mostly) not in the perverted sense but in the Rogue One sense.  However I felt like it was earned and pretty awesome.

The thing that bugs me is purely a meta issue, that this wasn't adapted from one of the Light Novels but was a newly created in-between story.  They chose to save the next Light Novel for the next TV season of SAO.

I feel like a lot of Light Novel based Anime would be better served by being movies rather then TV shows.  Most TV Anime fit their serialized structure because they're adapted from a serialized source material like Manga, or were created for the TV format.

But most Light Novels are by that very definition not necessarily very large novels.  They may be telling a serialized story, but not in a a very episodic fashion.  With Haruhi for example I think Disappearance is the best Haruhi Anime, and the the 6 episodes based on the Melancholy Light Novel could have made a decent movie.

SAO is no different, much of the criticism of the first three arcs is predicated on how the stories feel dragged out in order to fill 12-14 episodes.

So getting a movie could have been a good chance to see if the film format would serve adapting them better, but instead we got an original story with no source material to compare it to at all.

However, given what I hear about the Light Novels, we might not have gotten so much Asuna if the movie had been based on one of them.

Alex Drake

This is going to be an awfully short post for one I'm so late in making.  But I should before this year is over talk more specifically about PLL's final twist.

I'd heard about the Twincer theory before, mainly from the BrosWatchPLLToo people bringing it up.  I never took it seriously, they already satisfied the people who expected some sort of Twin reveal.

So as I was watching the final episode.  We got to the point where Spencer woke up, and was looking at her "reflection" and I instantly thought "they're trolling the Twin theorists" because the finale had already done that kind of meta trolling a few times.  Then I noticed that the mirror had some little holes in it and found that odd.

Then the hand dropped, and my brain just froze, I was stunned.

That reveal was pretty damn well executed, and Troian gave a great performance because she is the greatest actor of all time.

But it still feels cheap to me, to have the final Big Bad of the show be a character who effectively only existed during the last episode.

I also agree that it was dumb to have it be Toby rather then the Liars who figured out which Spencer was real.

The last episode was fun but flawed.  Doesn't matter that much cause as I've said before it's about the journey not the destination.

Yuki Yuna is a Waifu

Well, I did not see this one coming.

The Shintoism is strong in this one.

My taste in Acting is different

I am a big fan of Anime Dubs, whether they're from FUNimation, Viz or Aniplex (or back in the day ADV).  And I've talked about many aspects of that already.

Digibro is not like many others who dislike Dubs, there is no purist argument.  He simply doesn't like the voice actors who are usually used.

I however not only am fine with them, I like them more then almost any other English Language voice acting I've heard.  In fact my love of the voices I was hearing was probably vital to my getting into Anime in the first place.  And so I kinda want to hear them doing other roles.

Explaining why this is involves some context.

First of all the context that even my taste in live action acting is not what's currently main stream.  I'm someone who kind of resents the influence of Marlon Brando, Brando himself I always seem to enjoy (my favorite Brando performances are Julius Caesar and Mutiny on the Bounty), but his influence seems to be a perception that his genius was mostly in how he was often understated.  Early talkies were largely just stage actors applying their craft in front of a camera, Brando broke with those conventions when it was helpful, but people forget how he was still often quite theatrical.

Now I am as I've said before relatively easy to please.  So this acting pet peeve of mine isn't constantly ruining my ability to enjoy post-Brando movies.  And I can appreciate an actor being very good at what they do even if it isn't my preference.  But my preferences can make a big difference in my deciding whether to give something a 9 or a 10, or an 8 or a 9.

One old classic that is a personal favorite of mine is Becket, staring Peter O'Tool and Richard Burton.  The DVD I have of it includes an audio commentary by Peter O'Tool and some guy who had nothing to do with making the movie.  In it O'Tool talks about how he hates modern whisper acting, that he doesn't get why people think that is more realistic, he doesn't know anyone who talks that quietly in real life.  And I went "Yes, someone else does feel this way".  I'm sick of watching a movie at home and constantly needing to turn the volume way up during talking scenes but then way back down when the explosions start.  And this quality of Becket overlaps with a lot of the old Hollywood Biblical and Historical epics I love.

So in SFDebris' review of the Sci-Fi Channel's Dune miniseries, when he complained about how because most of the actors were stage actors they didn't know that "you don't' have worry about making sure people in the back row can hear you", I felt rather annoyed.  I love that Mini-Series precisely because of it's theatrical acting, and the follow up Children of Dune is even better.

George Lucas was also going for a similar older style of acting in the Star Wars movies.  They're often not the best examples of that kind of acting cause Lucas was trying to get it out of actors who weren't used to it, and because they weren't given the best dialogue to work with.  As a Prequel fan I keep pointing out that these same cringey acting moments were all over the OT as well.  Still part of why I like the Prequels more is because they had more theatrically trained actors and so much more of them do that style of acting justice.

However, what I want from Voice Acting in Animation is different, or more specific.

One example is that in Live Action I do not want it to look like it's obviously Dubbed over, I can tolerate that in campy stuff likes Dubs of most Godzilla movies or Italian Sword and Sandal films, otherwise it annoys me.  And so that's why with foreign projects I'm much more inclined to watch Subs if it's Live Action.  Which again returns me to Becket and that commentary, Peter O'Tool took great pride in how they made sure the audio came from what they performed on set as much as they could.  And the 2012 movie of the Les Miserables Musical did the same thing.

[[Since I've brought up Becket so much talking about Anime, I should mention it's a movie that Fujoshi and Fujonshi should check out.  I watched it to begin with because a Gay Man recommended it to me.]]

Animation is the opposite in this regard.  I think part of why I prefer Anime to western Animation is that in Japan they draw the animation first and apply the voice acting later, so the lip flaps often don't match even in the Japanese.  As Digi has said this is why even Anime inspired stuff like Avatar still obviously isn't actually like Anime.  I like that about Anime, I think it hinders the animation flow in the west when they're trying to animate it over the acting.  I generally think it turns out better to just not care that much about the lip flaps.

I talked before about how a lot of my issues with the DC Animated movies are them hiring Movie and TV draws instead of people who's primary talent is Voice Acting.  Disney is generally better, which is why the Ghibli dubs I can enjoy in-spite of them generally not having the usual Dub actors.  When Disney does hire a name, they get them to understand how Voice Acting is different, Karen Gillian talked about how she had to adjust for her role in Princess Monoke.  And Theatrically trained actors like Patrick Stewart or the Broadway stars they hire for the semi Musicals, are often the most adaptable.

Digi talks about how FUNimation mostly just hired people who lived in the area.  Thing is when you hire local actors they're often stage actors, since even a town as small and dying as mine has a local theater or two.  Kevin Conroy, everyone's favorite Batman voice, also came from the stage before he got that role, his first instinct was to compare the character to Hamlet.

This YouTube video confirms how in all likely hood any new up and coming Anime Dubbing studio will probably hire local theater talent.

And indeed as a bit of a Shakespeare buff, I'd love to hear how Shakespeare would be performed by my favorite Anime Dub Voice Actors.  Like hearing Crispan Freeman say "Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war".

Basically I like "overacting", I like hearing hearing Crispan Freeman and Monica Rail give over the top performances.

Digi complains about the Cute Girls being voiced by obviously older actors.  Thing is "Moe" voices were never meant to be realistic, The Anime Man talks about how Maid Cafes are unpleasant cause the Maidtresses try to talk like Anime girls, and in real life it's annoying.  Now I rarely dislike the voice acting I hear when I do watch an Anime in Japanese.  But when I do it's usually girls having overly squeaky high pitched voices, Wixoss was unlistenable in Japanese to me.  I also find Yuno Gasai annoying in the Japanese, her Dub actress however gives a phenomenal performance.  And in other cases I'm far from inclined to be the most critical of the female actors, when she was still alive I was the only one defending Elizabeth Taylor's performance in Cleopatra.

Non Anime English voice acting also commonly takes advantage of how you don't need to cast actors who are the right age, Kelly Hu voiced a teenager on Phenius and Ferb and it sounded believable to me.  In live action the constantly casting 20-30 year olds to play Teenagers annoys me as I ranted about before.  But in Animation you don't need to look the part, you just need to sound it.  And for Cute Anime Girls you just need to sound Cute.  Rebecca Forstadt is still able to sound Cute even though she's in her 60s now, so I see no reason to complain.

Plenty of Anime Dub actors have more range then they get credit for.  Crispan Freeman proved he can do a more relaxed role by playing Kyon.  Noir is my favorite Anime, and is so largely for it's Dub.  For a long time I thought Mireille was the only one I was often hearing show up in other Anime (and I'm always happy to hear her voice), but then I checked the MAL pages for the others, and found my favorite character shared a voice with several characters I'd listened to and failed to notice.

I'm going to talk about Doki Doki Literature Club

First, I'm going to say do not read this post until you've played the game, or watched a Blind Let's Play of it.

If you want to know my opinion on it, I highly recommend it, if you're able to play Visual Novels at all you will enjoy it.  If not watch someone let's play it which is how I know the story.

This post will be all spoilers.

Visual Novels have a lot in common with Stage Plays

Another topic that comes up a lot in KyleKallgrenBHH's videos on Shakespeare is how suggestive Stage Plays are, especially of the Elizabethan era.  Just actors reciting dialogue and monologues in front of a backdrop that only slightly changes.

Visual Novels, which get accused of being pretty boring, are very similar.  The story is mostly told by just the text, which consists of dialogue and inner-monologues of the main character, and perhaps notes or such things the MC might read.  Visually the characters are represented by what look almost like Cardboard cut outs in front of a handful of stock background pictures.  But some key moments might have specially drawn images that get refereed to as CGs.

Because Visual Novels are one of the least respected mediums of story telling right now, my suggesting a parallel to one of the most respected can be written off as an attempt to defend them.  I personally have never played one yet, but I've spent a decent amount of time watching Let's Play footage of some.  Thing is, the Stage was not a respectable medium in Shakespeare's time, while he lived Shakespeare was probably viewed as the Zack Snyder of his day.

In my opinion Visual Novels ultimately shouldn't be classified as Video Games, they are their own medium of story telling that happens to typically use the same hardware as Video Games.  They have an interactive element, but still not exactly what I'd call a game.

There are however video games that incorporate Visual Novel elements, like the Neptunia games, as well as visual novels that are written with plot points and story elements that take advantage of the assumption that it's mostly gamers playing them.

Visual Novels sometimes have voice acting, it might be an optional feature that can be disabled.  But one factor that can tend to discourage that is if it wants the player to be able to name the player character.

However because the art of Acting is sometimes there, the most important difference between a Visual Novel and a Stage Play is the interactive nature.  Including the multiple routes and endings.

And that is why my mind has started thinking about the prospect of adapting famous plays to the Visual Novel format.  A lot of Visual Novel stories are already about trying to prevent a tragic outcome, from Higurashi to Steins;Gate.  So why not take the Tragedies that have come to define what a Tragedy is and present players with the challenge of averting them?

The ideal Good Ending for King Lear would be to end with Cordelia on the Throne, which is how the original myth ended in Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Brute Tysilo and I assume also Holinshed's Chronicles.  But you can also add the potential to screw up and make things even worse.  How could Hamlet's ending be made even worse?  Imagine if Denmark didn't even have Fortinbras to provide stability in the end?  Oh, wait, most movies leave him out anyway leaving the impression Denmark now has no government at the end.  As far as giving Hamlet a good ending goes, it could again return to the original myth Shakespeare adapted to have Hamlet take the throne at the end, the original story was more of a traditional Hero's Journey.

Marlowe's Edward The Second would make a great Fujoshi Bait visual novel.  But a few Shakespeare plays have Yaoi potential as well.

From there my mind wanders to ideas that had already been in my head about adapting Shakespeare to Anime or other Otaku centric media.  Like re-imagining Richard III in the context of the Student Council of an all girls Japanese High School.  Whatever setting you give it however, Richard III is definitely the best model for a visual novel where the villain is the player character.

So, yeah, I think this is a pretty meaty parallel to make.

I cannot relate to people who complain about CGI at all.

It's largely a generational thing in an odd sort of way.  There are definitely people my age and younger expressing frustration at CGI in films, but they are people who have their own reasons for revering a lot of old cinema, people who still put Star Wars and Indiana Jones on a pedastool.  The success of crap like Stranger Things shows we have a significant portion of Millennials who've bought into the overly pedaled narrative that the 80s was some kind of Golden Age.

Whenever I hear "looks like a Video Game" being used as an inherent criticism, like SFDebris in mentioning Attack of The Clones in his Star Trek Nemesis review, I instantly tune out.  I don't play truly advanced games much, but I've watched footage of them, YouTube videos that edit them into massive movies (often more like a miniseries) and sometimes Let's Plays.  Particularly when I watch the cinematic Cut Scenes in Final Fantasy XII or XIII I go "why can't movies look this awesome?  I want to see this on the Big Screen."

I keep hearing all this talk about "when it's practical effects there was something actually there" and I go "no there was not, you're looking at light reflected on a screen either way".  I feel like these people should stick to watching plays if they feel that it is so necessary to be truly authentic.  I don't say that to denigrate plays, I would go see a play live every month if I could afford it, and where I lived had more.  But what I want from movies, especially nerdy fantasy block busters, is to see things that are inherently unreal.

When I saw Rogue One, I was really impressed with what they did with Tarkin and Leia.  I know pretty much everyone who critiques films online for a living went on about "uncanny valley", but trust me the average film goer didn't notice anything wrong, the people in my theater went "Woah" when Tarkin's face appeared on screen.  Similarly with the use of CGi to de-age actors recently in Civil War and GOTG2.

And from that I honestly started thinking, why use this only for dead actors and de-aging old ones? Maybe we should just phase actual live acting out of live action films altogether, at least for Sci-Fi and Fantasy?  Since I'm tired of marketing campaigns trying to assure us that A-List celebrities do their own stunts when I know for a fact that insurance companies will not allow that.  Motion Capture tech can enable us to use the talent of actors without needing to have them in the right place or care that much if they look right for the part.

All that above is a post I've been wanting to make for awhile but putting off.  And I'm glad I delayed it because when I saw The Last Jedi yesterday, they played the Battle Angel Alita trailer.

I'd been hearing about this project for awhile, and even heard about the trailer recently.  People saying "they put Anime Eyes on a real human face and it looks creepy" and even I was skeptical, I who made posts on this blog about wanting Live Action movies to look like Anime, didn't think that sounded like a good idea.

But when I saw this trailer on that massive Ultra Screen I went "Wow, this is beautiful".  I've decided I want to not watch the Anime till I see this movie so I can view it on it's own terms.

There really is just about nothing we can't do now.  I know you're probably thinking, "aren't you just saying you'd prefer movies that aren't even Live Action?"  Most fully CG animated movies disappoint me, mostly because it's old school 2D Animation they're trying to complete with not Live Action.  What I'm advocating for is a further blurring of the line between Live Action and CGi.  That we quite revering what's real.  Once again I'm gonna recommend a KyleKallgrenBHH video Yes, Monster Factory is an Artistic Masterpiece.

Yuki Yuna is Sad

Guess it couldn't be avoided.

Not sad enough to dampen my post TLJ high.

I have a feeling that like with Fate/Apocrypha there is a lot I won't fully understand till I can see it Dubbed.  Hopefully it gets a Dub.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but The Last Jedi might be on par with The Prequels

It's a mind blowing film, I highly recommend it.

Clannad and Twilight

As someone who when I was into the Vampire craze a few years ago kinda, sorta, defended Twilight.  What bugged me most from the Twilight haters was when they'd say "Bella gave up her family and friends for her boyfriend".

Bella's family was broken and her friends were fake.  The biggest problem the movies have is Anna Kendrick made her character to likeable.  Bella gained a family by joining the Cullens.

I'm someone who very much appreciates fiction that carries the message that family isn't just about Blood.  There is no personal reason for me to relate to it so much, I wasn't adopted and I'm not planning to adopt.  But I do.  It has a lot to do it being important to my Faith, a key New Testament theme is Gentile believers being adopted into the family of Abraham.

So it bugs me when these Twilight haters think they're being Feminist by saying that.  Conditioned to think it's always problematic for a female character to chose her boyfriend over anything.  Yeah it fits patriarchal norms when it's the woman leaving her original family and joining a new one via marriage.  Thing is though all the Cullens were adopted.

As I've been watching more Clannad lately, and looking at Tomoya's relationship with his own as well as Nagisa's parents, it's kind of the gender reversal of Twilight's situation.  Tomoya has no Mom and his dad is a drunken degenerate.  But he very much becomes part of Nagisa's family, it's all quite touching.  Nagisa's parents are the coolest parents in Anime.

Update:  When I eventually finished Clannad I was quite annoyed at how one arc near the end was about excusing Tomoya's father.  I'm all for forgiving him but they more or less tried to suddenly say he didn't do anything wrong at all, which boggles my mind.

Yuki Yuna gets a Christmas Episode

I didn't feel like repeating the "Is Sad" title joke a third time, not yet anyway.

It was a nice episode, mostly I think build up for what'll happen next week.

Another post on Fate/Apocrypha

I am firmly enjoying this show, it's not the masterpiece Fate/Zero or the original Stay Night are, but it's a darn fun show.

A couple weeks ago the Dub for the first 12 episodes dropped.  I held off on watching it for a bit, and wound up binging all of it between episodes 20 and 21, it was an interesting experience.

I like all the Dub voice actors, my only issue with how it's "translating" Paladin as Hero in reference to Astolfo.

It further confirms what I already knew, that sometimes I just can't avoid missing things I shouldn't when I have to watch a show Subbed.  I appreciate the story as a whole much more now thanks to what I got easily in the Dub that flew by me watching it Subbed.

So it's a dub I recommend, check it out.

Now below shall be spoilers.

Yuki Yuna is Dope

Well, episode two was a fast paced adventure, I loved it.

But I'm annoyed at the Subs now calling the Taisha the Amnesty.  WTF???

Now for something I should have said last week.

This is how you should do a Sequel when you did a Prequel in-between.  Bring together the original cast with elements distinctive to the Prequel.

The Force Awakens had small references to the Prequel Trilogy.  And as a Prequel fan who wants to be optimistic about the New Star Wars films because I don't want to become like those who've made me miserable for the last 15 years. I eat every one of those up.  But there should have been something more substantial.

Abrams has said Episode IX will be bring closure to all three Trilogies.  So I'm optimistic about that.

But back on topic.  Yuki Yuna is awesome and Miragephan is wrong.

I want to recommend Princess Principal to Tales of The Shadowmen fans

It was an Anime that aired during the Summer 2017 season.  I loved it.  And it reminded me of my time spent reading BlackCoatPress and Rocambole books quite a bit.

It's set in a Steam Punk alternate history London.  Now maybe it's only because I've read more 19th Century French popular fictions and English that it reminds me of French stuff more.  But there are some obvious French Revolution references, and the Dukes mentioned sound like French Dukedoms.

Like a lot of Anime, it is very Rocambolesque.

For the current season Code:Realize is explicitly referencing most French novels yet with a London setting.  So perhaps that's just how Anime currently does it.