Mysterious Girlfriend X Ep. 02

(Quick Preface, if you ARE going to start watching this, Get the SubDESU version, which is under the Japanese title Nazo no Kanojo X. The translation seems to be a lot better, they don't edit out the interstitial, and they translate the songs.)

I'll get back to Deadman Wonderland shortly (I've recently downloaded a different translation), but I just got episode 2 of Mysterious Girlfriend X and I had to say, at least this far, it's very interesting where this is going.

Akira is struggling with the idea of having his first girlfriend, and has no idea of what to do. He's asking his friends for "Hypothetical" advice, which isn't entirely helpful because they haven't got much experience either, and yet, he doesn't want to admit to anyone he's seeing the weird girl. But nicely, they haven't gone into the "wacky hijinks of trying to hide their relationship" thing. I'll be disappointed if they go there.

And Mikoto of course, won't have any of the "normal stuff". Everything is on her terms. Not even holding hands while they walk. She also demonstrates a new skill, which I will call Scissor Fu, a Martial-arts style of paper cutting. She carries a large pair of scissors tucked into the side of her panties, and she can whip them out and slice the hell out of anything in microseconds. Maybe there's an anime trope for the dangerous powers girls can have, dating all the way back to Lum's lightning bolts. Anyway, she's got it.

There is a Very Important scene in this episode, important not only because it's obvious "buy the BD bait", but because it completely explains what's going on with the drool thing. And I'm going to actually be a little cagy here because I am enthusiastic enough about this show to want others to see this. Basically she takes him someplace private, an abandoned building up beyond a shrine, and makes him close his eyes so that she can demonstrate just how special what is going on between them is. Remember what I said about how important visual metaphors are in this show? Well as I watched it, I thought the images of ants stripping a dead cicada were just part of showing how decrepit the building was, but after it was over, I realized, It's all about Pheromones.

What REALLY surprised me was that it worked both ways. That is the first time I have EVER seen a girl in anime get a nosebleed, and her reaction was totally unexpected, unless you account for how anti-anime girl she is.
more...

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Mysterious Girlfriend X Ep. 01

A lot of people read the various fall preview Synopses and upon reading the bit about the drool, said "Ugh, not for me." I can totally understand that. But for some reason I decided to give it a try (The anime, not the drool), and I'm actually kind of glad I did. (Although since it's the HorribleSubs translation, I'm curious what I'm going to miss). As usual here, I'm NOT going to hide spoilers, since I'm often talking about shows nobody else intends to see.

Our Hero is Tsubake Akira, who has been having strange dreams lately, being of that age where he's learned about sex, but hasn't had any experiences. He is about as ordinary a high-schooler as you can get. Things get interesting, as they do in most Anime, when a new transfer student is introduced. Urabe Mikoto is clearly an odd bird, so odd that the true depths of her oddness are probably yet to be plumbed. She is definitely withdrawn and in her own little world, and mildly amused by the rest of us, when she can be bothered to pay attention. Right from her introduction you can tell how apart she is, from the funny little martial Left Face she does upon entering, to the way her face is hidden behind her bangs, to her traditional introduction speech, which consists only of the word "Yoroshiku."

Naturally the only open desk is next to Akira, and being the bright innocent soul he is, he offers to give her any help she needs.

What she really needs is a course in how to be Japanese, because throughout the rest of the day she demonstrates how she is completely the opposite of every behavior trait the Japanese have been taught since birth. At lunch, she rudely blows off the girls who try to welcome her to the class so that she can continue to sleep face down on her desk. And in the middle of Algebra, she bursts out laughing so hysterically she falls to the floor.

But you know, that moment is actually what won me over. There was something charming about it. Also, her voice actress has a very unique voice, totally atypical for anime girls, but appealing.

Then comes the infamous drool scene, which many critics jump on saying "Why would he do that?" Well, aside from flashing back on that oddly prophetic sex dream, Akira too suddenly exclaims "Why am I licking her drool?!" and runs home. But that night, he starts thinking about her, and soon, she's appearing in his dreams.

And at this point, I should mention that there are a lot of visual metaphors in this show. You need to pay attention to what you're seeing, whether it's echoes of shapes in pools of various liquids, or the far more telling one of Mikoto's hair. Those bangs represent her barrier to the rest of the world. When Akira wakes her up to tell her school is over, he suddenly gets a look at her whole face, and that glimpse resonates with something in him, even though it takes him a while to realize it.

A couple weeks later Akira is so sick, he starts missing school. Mikoto comes to visit him, totally unexpectedly, and begins explaining things to him. She is remarkably blunt and straightforward, and so un-Japanese, her weirdness manifests even more manifestly (:-) as she tells him why he is sick. Somehow she knows what he did after she left the classroom. Somehow she knows things she couldn't. But on the other hand, it's not so easy to take her word for it. Unlike some say, sorceress or demoness explaining how things are going to be from now on like you'd get anywhere else, when she starts telling him he's going through withdrawal he rightly doesn't believe it. But she denies there's anything special about her saliva (nobody seems to notice its thick, honey-like consistency), and that he's just lovesick for her and that's why he's feeling withdrawal.

It's a very peculiar scene, especially once you notice how her hair works, and because of how matter-of-factly she says he must be in love with her, but she doesn't really seem to react to it. It's oddly dispassionate, but there's something behind it, a mystery that will take time to work out. You really do begin to wonder if she's maybe an alien, or something occult, or really, just a very strange little girl who is leading him into her strange little world.

That gets you about halfway through the episode. The remainder is the beginning of their relationship, which is as others have said, very quirky. You find out why she was holding back earlier, and Akira finds himself getting drawn in more and more. And frankly, I'm very curious how this is going to turn out.

Now I do have to say, this is definitely a show for which the TV Tropes definition of Author Appeal was written.  Yes, clearly someone involved in the creation of this has a near spiritual obsession with drool, or more specifically, women sleeping and drooling.  This is especially evident in the end credits where most of the female cast gets the treatment.  But if you can put that aside for the moment, it's really just a vehicle for this story about a very strange girl and a very ordinary guy who end up getting together, and I think it will become a remarkably unusual, but strangely charming love story.

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Renton Thurston goes to Jail (Deadman Wonderland Ep. 1)

Seriously, that's what I thought the moment I saw the character design. Igarashi Ganta reminded me entirely of Renton Thurston from Eureka Seven. You have a 14-year old boy whose main "Character trait" is alternating between despair and determination like a manic-depressive on crank, all the while being completely unaware of what's really going on around him, and screaming "Why?" about everything not working the way it should.

Right off the bat this series commits Steven Den Beste's cardinal sin. It introduces a cute girl just to kill her brutally in the first scene. It does this so that another character can be said to resemble her, but seriously, I don't see it.

In the first episode, Rent, er, Ganta's classmates are discussing their upcoming class trip to "Deadman Wonderland" a Prison/Amusement park where the prisoners are the attraction. And everyone is okay with this. The discussion also introduces what will surely become an important plot point, that Ganta forgets the past really easily. It helps with his constant state of bewilderment.

Suddenly this monstrous red man floats outside the window and blows the place to bloody smithereens, killing all of Ganta's classmates, and when he comes to, the first thing he sees is his friend Mimi's decapitated head hanging by her hair from the monster's hand. No, wait, apparently he has zoom lenses for eyes and only sees her head at first and asks her if she's okay, THEN he notices that she's bodiless and hanging by her hair and he freaks out. Framing tricks work for cameras, not eyeballs, Mr. Director. Anyway, the big bad man forms his blood into some kind of crystal and jams it into Ganta's chest.

Next, he's in the hospital, and the police come in and charge him with Mass Murder. Evidence? We don't need no stinking evidence. A public defender introduces himself, and one quick trip to Kangaroo Court later, Renton, er, Ganta is sentenced to death. Then the director, in a fit of brilliance, AFTER the sentence is passed has someone pop up some doctored video of him confessing in front of the Public Defender. That must be the overwhelming evidence the Court was talking about, because it sure didn't come up at the trial. This is also the first display of his gear shifting, because he goes from numbly going through the motions stunned at what's happening to him to screaming about it, for all of ten seconds before he collapses on the floor.

Now mind you, this all goes screaming by so fast because they really don't care about HOW he got here, they just need to push him into the "Wrongly accused guy in prison" role as fast as possible. They've got a lot of set-up to get through, and they've got to get through it fast or else you'll start questioning the stupidity.

So Ganta gets shipped off to Deadman Wonderland, which being privately owned, apparently the prisoners are property with no civil rights at all, and everyone's okay with that. Oh, and in passing it's mentioned that Tokyo was wiped out by some kind of black hole thing ten years ago, but moving on, that's not what the story is about. Just know that the proceeds from the prison/tourist attraction are gonna be used for reconstruction, so it's all good.

While he's on the bus, we first see Shiro, which is a VERY imaginative name for an albino girl, don'tcha think? She mentions that Ganta is coming, by name, somehow knowing this from her perch atop the prison. She is very athletic, wears nothing but a white bodysuit with some red designs painted on it, some sort of oversize collar, and what look like boxing gloves that are strapped on. Now supposedly even though she's albino, and dressed like some kind of circus gymnast, and has uncut hair, Ganta thinks she looks like his late classmate Mimi, who had straight black hair cut in bangs (Plus she's got a different voice actress, and their eyes aren't even the same shape). Sure. How could I have missed it?

Maybe it's the smile. But you could chalk that up to the style.

Now I have to say, the Albino nutgirl is the only reason I decided to stick with the series. She's the single most nonsensical thing is this pile of nonsense, which ends up making her the most appealing thing there. In a later scene, when Ganta is moping around saying he wishes they'd just execute him and get it over with, she says "If you wanna die, I'll be happy to kill you," in a cheerful voice, and tries to brain him with a pipe. She uses the fact that he dodges (several times) to prove to him that he's lying about wanting to die, and therefore he should cheer up. Absolutely a nutjob, but she makes more sense than anything else.

"If you wanna die, I'll be happy to kill you,"

"Why'd you move?"

Slightly before this scene, we get our obligatory prison commandant intro. Captain Makina is the perfect fetish prison mistress, with high heeled boots and an enormous chest stuffed into her tightly tailored uniform. She carries a sword and freely slashes the chest of one inmate just to prove she's crazy-bad tough. And one of the new arrivals has to prove what a lowlife he is by talking about her boobs. Unfortunately this is a HorribleSubs job, and they prove how correctly they are named in this scene, because even with my sketchy Japanese, I can tell they've taken some liberties.

Makina: Koko made de nani ka shitsumon wa? (This far, are there any questions?) "Any Questions this far?"

Inmate: Ano, nani cuppu desu ka?(Those, what cup(size) are they?) "How big are those titties?"

Makina: G da. (They're G) "G-cups."

Well, glad we cleared that up. But that prisoner's line is pretty off. Makes you wonder how unreliable the rest of the translation is.

"Thank you Mistress!"

The scene also introduces the control collars, ripped off from god knows how many crappy sci-fi prison movies. They've got tracking, and tasers, and some other stuff in them. But the writer forgot to mention the most important thing, so he had to crowbar in a scene later to explain that for those inmates on death row, the collar doses them with a slow-acting poison and they must earn the antidote candy by working the park in the most deadly attractions every three days.

And yet, the "Slow acting poison" is SO predictable, that the collar has a digital countdown that can be relied on to the SECOND for when the poison will suddenly cause instant death. They show this by having some other death-row inmate take a hostage, and Makina tells the guards and her assistant to just make small talk while he expires. Hmmm, what about the built-in taser?

We also see Makina go up to the office of the prison's director, and what do you know, it's the Public Defender! I DID say it was a Kangaroo Court. Apparently he knows all about the Monster that killed the class, and he wanted Ganta in his prison because of it. Makina though, has been kept in the dark about this.

Then there's a final scene where we discover that Ganta too has this blood-borne power. Hey Prison Director, nothing like blowing up a tower in the middle of your amusement park full of the public to try to drop it on him to force his power to come out. Wish I had your confidence.

The end credits feature photographs of all the characters in their pre-prison pasts. And apparently there are pictures of Ganta and Shiro together as little kids. Good thing Ganta is so forgetful, I can't imagine an albino playmate is the kind of thing anyone with a normally functioning brain wouldn't remember.

Okay, so I'll stop this here for now. I know it's probably pointless to keep reviewing last spring's series, but I've got a LOT of stuff to catch up on, and I finally found a copy of the OVA to cap this off. So I hope my single reader isn't disappointed that I'm not going over Moretsu Space Pirates like everyone else.

One advantage of reviewing old stuff is it really doesn't matter if I reveal spoilers.

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When Bridge Bunnies Lose It

Mostly an image test, but I thought this was a particularly funny bit in a recent episode of Wakfu.  A fleet of Pseudo Atlantean warships are bombarding an Island that is the landing point of an invasion of demons (shu-shus) from dimensional portal in the sky.  They are awesome, but they are being overwhelmed, and the prince's crew of bridge bunnies are starting to crack.  This one ends up screaming and kicking her feet.

Now I've tried using the Re-size tool, and now the listing for the image says it's 640x360, but inserting it again jumps back to the original 960x540 image.  The file directory is the only thing that things I re-sized it.

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Just because you can, doesn't mean you should

In this case, I'm applying it to CGI, and more specifically to Blassreiter.  The messy plot involved a nanomachine virus taking over Germany turning people into mindless biomechanoid horrors (Except main characters who manage to hold on to their minds and thus become superpowered), TWO Messianic figures, Lots of motorcycles and motorcycle-like machines, and ample fodder for those with battle/flight/space-suit fetishes (yes, they exist).  Halfway through it turns into an unbearable morality play about ethnic hatred, repeated over and over through everyone's flashbacks, as if between disks 2 and 3 they changed directors and writers.  You can tell because suddenly the original pseudo military team on motorcycles is replaced with a different force mounting semi-combinable robots, and the plot goes even more to hell (Why would Messianic Figure #2 need a mole in the team if he was the one in charge of the whole thing?)

But to get back to the title of this post.  They did the biomechanoid creatures in CGI, and everything else in traditional animation.  Not only is that jarring when you put them in the same frame, but it really goes wrong when the directors forget some of the basic tenets of filmmaking.  Just because CGI allows you to make a camera zoom in and fly through and spin and twist in the middle of a battle, and also allows you to make excessively elaborate character designs with glowing neon details and animate them in high-speed choreography, doesn't mean you should take all that and turn it up to 11.  The result is that your vision of a mind-blowing string of cool images instead turns into a eye-strain and motion-sickness inducing mess of visual noise that's as hard to make sense of as the plot.

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Rin: Daughter of Mnemosyne

This was pretty cool, but not for the weak stomached.

What do you do when your heroine is immortal, but not indestructible? You torture and kill her in some rather gory ways. But if this anime were simply a vehicle for some nasty snuff (and it IS nasty at some points early on), I certainly wouldn't be writing it up like this, because it was actually rather intelligently written, and I really enjoyed it.

The show itself runs 6 44 minute episodes, so it takes a much different pace than the typical "Half hour" anime. It also spreads the story out over about 60 years, which leads to one of the more interesting aspects: how Rin and the few other Immortals introduced deal with regular society, and in particular, Rin's interaction with several generations of one family.

At this stage of her Immortality, Rin is playing around with being a sort of Private Investigator, with her partner Mimi, who is far older than the youthful appearance she was frozen at makes her seem. Immortality is caused by one of the tree of memory, Yggdrasil's "Timefruit" becoming lodged in the body. For women, this results in immortality, very much along the lines of Captain Jack Harkness from Torchwood being a "Fixed point in time", meaning that eventually they can literally pull themselves together from the most horrific of injuries. For men, they become fearsome "Angels" whose short lifespans are marked with super strength, blood-red wings, and an insatiable appetite for the immortal women, who are absolutely helpless in the face of desire for them - when they're not terrified of them.

But you know what, that's not what the story is about.

Eventually yes, the story becomes a plot about control over Yggdrasil, but the journey is far more interesting. We see the characters they interact with age and advance through their lives (or not), and the observations about the changes in our lives, especially in terms of technology, really comes out in the timeline. From pocket pagers in the '90's, to modern internet phones, to immersive virtual reality to Augmented Reality, and the social changes that result (The young man from the VR generation becomes the father who tells his daughter to put on some REAL clothes for once).  The Humans change while the Immortals do not.

The animation is very well done, and the visualization is brilliant, and within those six episodes all the questions are eventually answered without a single giant info-dump. I have a friend who hates it when Anime gets to its last episode and gets "All glowey" and the characters wander around on a white background spouting nonsense like a perfume commercial that is SUPPOSED to be meaningful. When dealing with the supernatural like this, it's hard to avoid falling into this trap, but Rin keeps it mercifully brief.

Oh, and it's only a slight giveaway that Mnemosyne is the Greek Goddess of memory, mother of the muses.

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NyaaTorrent Trackers down

I was just checking Nyaatorrents, and in the shoutbox they mention that the trackers are down.  Torrents are still available, of course, and DHT seems to be serving me well.  It's a little annoying because I finally figured out how to get the ratio tracker to know it's me.

What's even MORE annoying though is that a lot of torrents are substituting UDP trackers.  Oh, I know it's supposed to be the "Wave of the future" and less bandwidth intensive (really now, how much traffic is there on a tracker vs your peers?).  But the problem is, everyone insists on putting these UDP trackers on Port 80.  Damn near all of them.  And unfortunately, my ISP blocks UDP specifically on port 80 supposedly for some network management purpose.  They even admitted it openly.

It's worse on EZTV though.  Torrents you get through them, they strip off all other trackers and substitute FOUR UDP trackers on port 80, and one on 8080 which never responds.  At least with those, you can go into uTorrent and dump on a whole bunch of other trackers and get the results you should.

I should probably just go to btJunkie instead, but they don't have RSS or the other episode management tools that EZTV has.

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Undead Soldiers

So here's a theme that crops up in a lot of anime: Our hero is dead. But some babe has brought him back to like and acts like she owns the guy. He considers this a burden, but there are perks, like incredible power, and an infinitely prolonged lifespan. On the downside, he's dead, and he never gets the babe.

Four examples leap to mind. The recently started High School DxD, The slightly less recent Kore wa Zombie desu ka?, The terrible "Princess Resurrection/Monster Princess" reviewed below, and when I remembered the ancient 3x3 Eyes, I realized this has been going on for a very long time. The question becomes, how many others can you think of?

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Breath of life

Latest in the mailbox is Princess Resurrection. I'm only partway into the first disk, and I'm seeing so many parallels to the later (And still mostly unwatched) Kore Wa Zombie Desu Ka? I might go into more detail after I've finished both series. But what struck me were the parallels and improvements. Both feature a powerful woman who can raise the dead. But Zombie puts limits on her. On the other hand, the boy in PR gains little except for healing from his return from the dead, plus a time-limit that he can be away from the sorceress ("Hime"). It looks like both involve a collection of supernatural women, PR has just introduced an attractive half-werewolf woman, but really, she can't compare to a chainsaw-wielding magical girl (on the other hand, Hime herself was wielding a chainsaw against an invisible man in one episode).

Anime is like history. It repeats, but not always the same way. Often it improves.

(Update) And boy believe me, there was PLENTY of room for Improvement!

Princess Resurrection, also known as Monster Princess (Kaibutsu Oujo), committed the worst sin any series can commit.  It was DULL.  And it maintained that dullness for 26 episodes.

"and you verified this by watching all 26?"  Well, yeah, I thought the werewolf chick was kinda hot.  Well, a little.  and since I was stuck with the DVD's anyway....  But it DID take me a while to force myself through them all.

So the setup, available on the back of any DVD or plot summary website is that this kid, Hiro, gets killed protecting this strange woman from falling girders, and she brings him back to life, but now he must be her servant.  It turns out she's a princess from the royal family of the Monster world.  It's a chance encounter, since his sister has been hired to be the live-in maid in the mansion that the princess is moving into, and as part of the sweet deal, he was going to live there too.  How Convenient!

So over the course of the first disk we accumulate the cast.  First there's the princess, whose actual name isn't revealed until the end of the series, so she has everyone call her Hime.  Apparently her former estate and all her retainers got wiped out, leaving her with only her android maid, which is why she's moving to this mansion in our world.

Flandre is the robot maid in question.  Built like a little girl, weighing multiple tons, insanely strong, and apparently only capable of saying "Huga" which if you've been around her long enough you can understand as complete sentences.  She has a tendency of running out of power at critical plot junctures.

But why have one maid when you can have two?  Sawawa is the human girl Hime hires as a maid.  She is, apparently, a great cook, and brews a mean cup of Earl Grey.  But she is utterly oblivious to the weird goings on around her (so much so that fairly early on they drop the pretense of her brother trying to shield things from her).  She's also utterly oblivious to the attention her enormous bust attracts from all the men around her, including the proprietor of the Parfait shop she seems to spend her every spare moment in pigging out (Well, at least we know where it all goes.).

Hiro is the "Hero", the center of this... well, I wouldn't call it a Harem, since nobody's really all that interested in him.  He's the viewpoint character, I guess.  He's utterly ineffectual, perpetually out of his depth, and incapable of standing up for himself, so he's usually reduced to stammering "but but but" after being steamrollered by everyone else in the cast.  He occasionally has his moments, which typically go to waste, and frankly, seem out of character for him anyway.  Having him suddenly get brave and interpose himself between Hime and an attacker is usually a wasted effort, as he gets slaughtered and cast aside.  Fortunately, having been gifted with "The Flame of Life" by Hime, his wounds always heal instantly, but he is tied to her by the fact that she has to recharge him every three days or he will die for good.  Thus, slave for life.

And yet like every good Japanese kid, he still goes to school.  That whole thing has always bugged me.

Soon they add Lisa Wildman, a half breed werewolf girl (only her forearms turn into enormous paws).  She's a hot-tempered tough girl, riding around on a dirt bike all the time, always angry, always wearing this tight, tight mare-midriff shirt and loose green cargo pants.  Originally she's going after Hime because she killed her brother, but when she finds out that it was because she was (apparently unbeknownst to her) held hostage by one of Hime's siblings and he was forced to fight and lost, she joins the crew determined to get revenge for her brother.  But she insists she's not one of Hime's entourage, although clearly she is.  Occasionally she shows a moment of softness towards Hiro, but then the writers forget about it and she blasts him as worthless.

Reiri is a Upper-class high school Vampire girl.  As a pure-breed vampire, rather than a converted human, she has powers like flight and the ability to go out in daylight.  For some reason she attends Hiro's school, where all the boys and girls are in love with her, and so once she's nice to Hiro (because of his supernatural associations) the boys all gang up against him (another Anime trope I've never understood).  Of course she thinks rather highly of herself, and speaks in very formal Japanese.  Originally an opponent, she sought to drink Hime's blood because it would make her immortal (apparently these Vampires age), but once she realized she couldn't get it, decided to hover around the group because watching their antics was "Interesting" (Maybe to her, but to us....).  Eventually when the church(!!!) she's living in gets burned down, she moves into the Mansion.  She and Lisa are natural enemies, and she taunts Lisa about being a "Dog" and laughs at her temper tantrums.

The secondary cast includes:

Hime's little sister Princess Sherwood, a pint-sized pettanko  full of ego and self-assurance of her irresistible beauty (stop me if you've seen this before), who for no good reason decides that Hiro is in love with her and should be her #1 servant.  Originally a rival of Hime's, they form an alliance because more Whacky Hijinks can ensue if they add her household to heap more abuse on Hiro.

Francheska is Sherwood's android maid, modeled after a full grown woman, she also only says "Huga" in a lower voice.  But she's also got better combat programming, and an interesting talent where she wields a handful of steel ball bearings like a sniper rifle, flicking them out with her thumb to devastating effect.

Then there's the Panda bear.  Probably the single dumbest addition to the cast.  Sherwood goes to the Zoo, the Panda falls in love with her, escapes and comes to her mansion, wants to be a servant, and is generally worthless, although strong, and moderately capable of fighting.  And for some reason he likes to afflict Hiro by dogpiling him.  For a brief period, there were three of them (his two brothers) but they disappeared shortly thereafter.

So, if you're done rolling your eyes, I'll tell you what they do with this WONDERFUL lineup.

Virtually nothing.

Seriously.  Being a Dispossessed Princess apparently involves a lot of sitting around drinking tea and doing nothing, being "Enigmatic", and waiting for the next assassin to attack.  Apparently there's a highlanderish battle for succession among the offspring of the Monster King, and she's not really inclined to participate.  Occasionally there's an outing where they end up in some haunted town or motel where they are also attacked, and Hime knows something about what's going on, but doesn't really bother to tell anyone.  Hiro "Wah"s and sputters and acts confused and gets his butt kicked,.  Lisa gets to act tough.  Reiri gets to tittle about how entertaining it all is, and Hime whips out her last minute butt-kicking skills and dispatches the foe.

Repeat for 20 episodes with minor variations, with virtually no continuity other than a few encore encounters.  Then at the end they make a stab at some big picture that I'm really not going to go into, because it's just another layer of stupid and contradiction on top of this mess.

As for the DVD's themselves....  Judging by the user reviews on NetFlix, too many people out there are too stupid to find the subtitle button on their remotes, because the menus don't include a subtitle setup page, so the default mode is Japanese with no Subtitles.  It's not dubbed, and thank goodness, because I get the feeling that if it were, the budget would result in something that would make an ADV dub sound like a Disney/Ghibli production by comparison.

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Samurai Gun

So the latest blessing from NetFlix was the Samurai Gun series as mangled by ADV films.

The setting is a little interesting, a time near the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate, with the appearance of some elements of the Industrial Revolution.  But that's about the end of the interesting bits.  The rest of it is purely by the numbers.

The "Samurai Gun" are probably more accurately called Ninjas, simply because they USE guns, which were the downfall of the Samurai as a warrior class, and they operate for a secret underground anti-shogunate "Council" which we don't see.  The earliest members were trained from youth, and often come from a background of personal tragedy.

Our Hero (meh) is one of these, a half-breed Japanese, we get endlessly reminded that his sister was raped and murdered in front of him before he got taken in for the intense Samurai Gun training.  And as a result, when he's fighting, he's some kind of mythically good fighting machine.  Of course, in Anime, he can't be a hero if he doesn't hate himself for being good at killing.  He keeps saying he'll refuse Kill missions, and yet, the missions they give him always result in him killing Mooks by the magazine-load.

He has regular partners, the deadly woman stereotype, who daylights as an entertainer at the tavern where our hero has a cover as a bar back, and another fellow who gives him someone to talk to.  There's nothing special about him, really.

He's also got a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold girlfriend.  I guess it's a Japanese trope that the hero has a girl in the bordello he spends his time and money on, but doesn't sleep with.

There's not much point in going into any more detail.  The series is incomplete.  Just about the time they let the hero know that someone in the shogunate might be someone who used to be with the council and might have been behind his sister's end JUST to get him as a trainee, it's over.  Guess the second season didn't happen.  Probably for good reason.  The stories are pure overused tropes.

I also get a trifle annoyed at the writing when they try to talk about guns.  These professional shooters try to talk shop about their weapons, and show that the Japanese really don't have any actual experience to base the dialog on.  A real shooter might talk about how the weight of a gun helps steady one's aim or absorb recoil, but an anime writer who's only read about them would say something about a really light but powerful gun being "Faster" and therefore better.

And as for ADV mangling it.  The dub was SO bad and irritating, I HAD to switch to Japanese with Subtitles.  ADV must be run by a bunch of teenagers or twenty-somethings who think you can make something hardcore and edgy by stuffing the dialogue full of profanity and slapping an "adult" label on it.  It was so forced, as well as poorly acted that it just pulled you completely out.  And you can further see their respect for the source material by an Extras feature called "Fun with Audio" where the vouce actors basically make fart joke level humor with their lines.  It's not out-takes, but deliberate, and each outing features an even worse parody of the song the deadly woman sings in the bar.  Although I have to admit, they did save one good joke each time for last.

They also screw up by including an un-aired episode that occurs near the 2/3rd's mark through the series at the END of the last DVD, rather than inserting it in sequence where it might have actually made sense, since the events in it are referred to in the later episodes.  And if I had been buying these, I would have been annoyed at the 3 episodes per disk packaging.

If you like kinky stuff, on each disk there's at least one episode where semi-random females are abused by the bad guys to help prove that they're bad.  But the electro-torture, target practice, and sexual abuse are toned down to broadcast standards, since these were shown on TV.  Perhaps that's part of why it failed.

Posted by: Mauser at 04:40 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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