November 22, 2011
I'm not sure why I downloaded C when it was first running. I never even got around to watching it, although partly that was because my system at the time was choking on the fast-moving details of the opening credits. But it was there, soaking up space on my hard drive. I had just updated CCCP because another series I downloaded was only available in 10-bit, which only looks better than 8 bit because it looks crappy on an 8 bit codec. (I'm just waiting for the dicksizing to continue: "My new codec goes to ELEVEN!") But the codecs were improved enough that it would play better.
The opening wasn't promising either. "Oh god, not another arena combat Anime." only with an Economic theme. While this WAS a persistent part of the structure of the show, it slipped out of the main focus.
Our Hero, Kimimaro Yoga, is a young boy in college studying economics, living on his own, and all he wants out of life is the stability of a government job. He's broke, subsisting on the cheapest ramen in the cafeteria. And when he gets drafted into the digital/financial world, suddenly he has a small fortune in the bank.
The set-up is this. People are selected to participate in "The Financial District" and must fight "Deal" at least once a week. But of course, one's financial power comes at a cost. Once enrolled, you have mortgaged your future. Go bankrupt in one of these Deals and your future in the real world is gone, which frequently leads to suicide.
There's the rub, the happenings in the alternate world affect the real world, sometimes disastrously. After being forced to fight his economics professor, our hero is shocked to discover that the man's children have been retconned out of existence, and only those who participate know the changes are going on. He is horrified about this, because unlike everyone else, he is not obsessed only with wealth.
That's one of the more interesting aspects of the show, the real-world effects of the combat. This leads to two important figures, Jennifer Sato, a pretty agent from the IMF with a sweet tooth, who by chance also has access to Japan's Financial District, and Soichirio Mikuni, a fellow who has amassed great wealth and influence from the District, but has now organized a cabal attempting to minimize the effects on the real world by having fights that end with the slimmest possible margin of victory at the time limit, and in the real world by using his wealth to counteract some of the negative effects (This includes shoring up the Japanese Government's debt!).
The problem is, all of this trading in futures to shore up the present is corrosive. The money injected into the Entre's accounts (Entre being a person with access to the Financial District) shows up as black currency that only an Entre can see is different from the national currency. As more and more gets injected into an economy, more and more of the future of the nation and its inhabitants is lost. In an extreme case, Singapore is retconned out of existence when its Financial District collapses. Mikuni manages to use his fortunes to protect Japan's economy from the cascading Collapse (Called "C"), which seems to be the REAL goal of the Financial District, but the effort, flooding the economy with Wiemar-like quantities of the black "Midas Money" reduces the country to a mid-80's industrial slum.
Another aspect of the series is that within the Financial District, one's mortgaged future is personified as an Pokemon Digimon "Asset", and Kimimaro's is a cute girl with horns and flaming powers named Msyu (Pronounced Mashu). We almost get a bit of a "Broken Doll" out of her, because in the beginning all she cares about is fighting and winning, but she becomes intrigued by his ways, and curious about his world. She goes from being disgusted by the idea of his eating Cup Ramen to wanting it. And there's a classic "What is this Kiss?" scene, except in classic "Broken Doll" form, he refuses her advances, until the final conflict where admitting love is crucial.
But in spite of all this, what C is REALLY about is an Allegory about deficit spending and cost being one's future, or the nation's.
(I dunno if TVTropes has a name for what I call "Broken Doll" but I'm sticking with it. I should write a more thorough explanation of the key aspects of it. I was quite surprised to find that even something like Elfin Lied can fit the mold.)
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October 13, 2011
Simply put, it's stupid.
Okay, I can give you more. Dokoro-chan is an angel. She goes to live with a boy. Stop me if you've heard this one. She's from the future, and he's marked for death because later on he apparently invents immortality, with the side effect that all women are frozen at 12-years of age. The Angels have decreed that he must die to prevent this. Dokoro plans to stop him without killing him. Except that she's got a hair trigger about using her spiked bat, Excalibog to smash, eviscerate, bisect, or otherwise kill him. (It's about as casually employed as Lum's electric shocks) and then she re-animates him because she doesn't want to kill him. Okay, everyone who's heard of the show knows that much. And of course there's a rival angel from the future who really wants him dead.
Apparently this formula is SO tired that they pretty much abandon it a few episodes in. His human love interest falls by the wayside, he falls for Dokoro-chan. The rival forgets about killing him for real and Dokoro's younger sister (Stated as 9, but built like she's 19) shows up to live with him. The setup now totally forgotten, it becomes a limp mish-mash of "Wacky Hi-jinks ensue" with very little to recommend it.
Let me spoil the only good moments to save you from watching this turd. In the beginning, when Dokoro insists on going to school with him (Why do they ALWAYS do this? At least Lum stayed home) the boy insists that she keep the fact that she's an angel secret - as if the halo isn't a giveaway - and that trope is instantly subverted as she introduces herself as an angel from the future, and everyone in the class is totally cool with it.
The other is when Dokoro and Zakuro (the built younger sister) read a book of Japanese folklore and are terrified of the story of the seductive demoness who hides in cracks in the walls. That was kind of amusing although the rest of the episode about them bathing together is utterly worthless other than for fan service (which can only be satisfying if you DON'T know who the characters are.)
... good: Magical Witch Punie-Chan.
So it starts with a princess in this ultra-saccarine, primary-colored magical kingdom... I thought it would be something unwatchable meant for 6 year old girls. I mean, her magical wand is a heart with a Candy Cane wedged through it. And she's being sent to earth to spend a year.
Then I saw the opening credits, with a song about fighting being the only way to survive, and she is pictured cutely dancing in front of the flaming Temples, schools, and even flying over the burning city-scape of Tokyo. And her magical catch-phrase? "Lyrical Tokarev, Kill them All." It's a hilarious take-down of the Magical Princess genre, and when forced to fight without magic, Punie reveals her brutal abilities with wrestling submission holds, breaking bones, crushing skulls, and choking out her opponents. And it's necessary, because everyone's out to kill her, including her cute little sisters, and the daughter of the royal family that Punie's parents usurped. After all, what's royalty without death schemes for succession? Even her cute little "Mascot" wants to kill her, when he's not playing along with the light fantastical magical girl motif. And that facade is very, very thin with Punie, she's a brute. ( )
Violent, yes, but hilarious as a send-up of the genre.
The whole show is so absurd I was laughing throughout.
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September 25, 2011
Remember the joke about the Old Comedian's Home, where all the jokes have been told so many times they replaced them with numbers? One Comedian says "23" and they all laugh. Another says "82" and again they laugh. A third says "107" and they laugh yet again. A curious newcomer decides to take a stab at it and says "72" and gets crickets. He turns to the first old-timer and asks "Why didn't anyone laugh? Did I say something wrong?" and the old-timer replies, "The joke was fine, but your delivery was awful."
I suppose you could take TVTropes and number all the entries, and tell an Anime series by the numbers. For example, I just finished with DearS, and you could look at a review like this 2005 one from DotClue (http://dotclue.org/archives/002400.html) and put it in a format like this table.
- Our Hero is a high-school loser, who’s never had a girlfriend.
- Girl Next Door bullies him because she doesn’t have the courage to confess her true feelings.
- Dream Girl suddenly appears from another world.
- DG moves in with OH, for no apparent reason.
- OH ends up in a Compromising Position with DG, and is caught by GND, who assumes the worst without waiting for an explanation.
- This is just the first CP; there are many more to come.
- DG has big boobs (usually bigger than GND’s), frequently displayed to best advantage.
- DG has superpowers. (optional: frequent property destruction)
- DG has an unusual and/or unusually large appetite.
- DG knows nothing about life on Earth, and needs to be looked after.
- More Strange Cute Girls begin to appear, some of whom compete for OH’s affection.
- Wacky Hijinks ensue.
- OH’s classmates enthusiastically accept the DG and SCGs, even when their WH result in (temporary) injury, embarrassment, or property damage.
- Handsome Rival attempts to steal/seduce/acquire DG, SCGs, and sometimes GND.
- DG is utterly clueless about HR’s intentions.
- More WH ensue.
- Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
DotClue (Jgreeley) was comparing and contrasting DearS, Girls Bravo and Chobits. Having not seen Girls Bravo, I can't comment on that, but the analysis he makes is pretty reasonable.
You could also add a checkmark for the obligatory Bathhouse/Onsen episode.
But you know, boiling DearS down to just the numbers doesn't do it justice. The temptation is to lump it with all the other Harem shows, but really, in spite of the large cast of female characters, OH doesn't end up with a swarm of women competing for his affections and all moving into his tiny apartment.
In fact, now that I think about it, I'm not sure labeling shows like these "Harem Comedies" is quite correct. I'm thinking this is more of a "Broken Doll" Genre, and although that name sounds all Emo, It's actually hopeful as it typically depicts these damaged cast-off girls (frequently not even able to speak the language) becoming whole people through the power of finding love.
Another plus is that the show nailed me with a lot of laugh out loud moments. One would think that the one-note character of Miss Mitsuka, the terribly over-sexed English teacher, whose exhibitionism knows no bounds would get old really fast, but it's played SO far over the top that when it's revealed she's got a whole section in the video shop where Takeya (OH) works, I laughed. And the misunderstanding that develops when she assumes the gang's study group is an orgy forced me to pause I was laughing so hard.
Then there was the run-up to the Onsen episode. A brief shot of Miu (SCG #1) shows her washing her floor length Anime Hair. And as the camera pans up her back, it keeps going up and up and up the huge stack of sudsy hair.
Personally, I dislike humor that depends on humiliation. It embarrasses me. One advantage of Anime is that since I'm not immersed in Japanese Culture, the things that are supposed to be horribly embarrassing to the characters slip right by me only half-noticed. I can accept Ren's (DG) ignorance of Japanese Culture and the problems it causes. I can understand Takeya being mortified, but it doesn't bother me.
Takeya is a pretty decent Center. He's a fairly upstanding guy, not too easily pushed around, although he sometimes takes a passive-aggressive tack by pretending to not care about what's going on and clinging to his previous solitary lifestyle. Yes, he's unwilling, and he takes a strong moral stance. He does not LIKE the idea of Ren being some kind of programmed slave. Twice she senses him in a state of arousal and moves to "take care of" it, and he refuses. Why? Who would refuse a beautiful woman who wants to be your slave and serve your sexual needs? He does, and for a very good reason. Love should be mutual, and the way she says it like it's her duty, a part of this role she has taken on herself that he does not want, makes him doubt her motivations. In fact, he often pushes Ren to think and feel for herself, but she's not really capable of it yet. Is it tough love, or his hatred of things Alien?
It doesn't help that as childhood friend, GND Neneko fed him a steady diet of scary alien sci-fi movies, making him one of the only men in Japan who doesn't absolutely love the cute DearS girls. So Of Course he's the one who finds the accidentally lost and incompletely programmed Ren. Just like the hero of Chobits finds an apparently BSOD'ed Chi in the trash in the alley. And Of Course he ends up unknowingly completing some kind of ritual that makes him her master and her his slave. At least he gets over the nightmares that she's part of an Invasion force and is secretly horrible behind some mask.
It's not all positive though. There are a lot of things in the series that don't really hit the mark, particularly the threat from the DearS hierarchy to break them up. They only send their least capable operative (The cat-like Nia, who unfortunately adds very little to the appeal, in spite of being cat-like - and why is she the only one? It's very incompletely explained.). The two leaders bickering inspire nothing. And there's a third character (Khi) who keeps getting "Punished" by the whip-wielding Dominatrix-styled female leader (Rubi) for failing to do... something (all offscreen thankfully). There are other plot threads that barely pay off, probably because they were longer arcs in the Manga and were set-ups for a second season that never came. The business with a handsome playboy (HR Hirofumi - not even named until his arc peaks, even though he's appeared in about a third of the episodes leading up to it) working his way through the female half of the student body during "Coffee" breaks in an unused Home Ec classroom could have been completely deleted to no ill effect on the story. He's not a threat to the relationship since he isn't taking an active role in trying to steal Ren. (Well, obviously there IS a scene where this happens, but it's just another in a long list of misunderstandings, rather than an existential threat to their relationship, such as it is.)
There are a lot of unanswered questions in the Anime (surely answered in the Manga). Nia briefly describes herself and Khi as being animal derived. But nobody else has mentioned anything about it or indicated what species anyone else is supposed to be. And Nia herself is the only one with any physical indication of this.
Ren is described as being a "Zero Number", in fact, her name Ren means "Nothing" in the DearS language. But what this means other than her being some kind of blank slate is unclear until a big infodump at the end which only explains the what and not the why. And why she was being shipped in a truck in the first episode if they're being "Stored" on the ship? The backstory, in spite of its importance to what's going on, gets the short shrift.
And why is the real leader of the DearS still frozen on the ship?
And why do the outfits all have those gray nipple things on the shoulders and waists? And could the mouths be any smaller?
I think one pointer to the "Broken Doll" Genre is that there is typically some crisis at the end of the series that forces the hero to finally admit what his feelings are for the Dream Girl, and this usually unlocks whatever mental block she has about understanding what love is. (Indeed, in Chobits, virtually ALL of Chi's mind is locked away in the hopes of finding love, as odd as that seems). In Ren's case, she's still a bit unclear on what she really wants, but at least she evolves her motivation for being Takeya's slave because she wants it, rather than it being her duty. Takeya, for his part, sublimates his desire to for his former life, and gives up not caring whether Ren stays or goes, mostly because of the fate that awaits Ren if he does not keep her. He at least cares that much for her.
If you love Dancing Chibis in the end credits, this is a great one for that.
On the technical side, the circle (Exiled Destiny) who subbed this anime needs to be smacked around a lot. Their use of bottom-justified subtitles really breaks down when they keep two simultaneous lines (including sign translations) on the screen for different lengths of time, without the use of contrasting colors or anything. You lose track of what you're reading when you see:
Line A
Then
Line A
Line B
then
Line A (again)
then
Line A
Line C
Even worse when the Lines are more than one line. Trying to read the bouncing text sometimes requires the use of a pause and backspace. The worst being an extended scene in Episode Eleven where Takeya's stepsister is upbraiding Ren while Takeya's trying to talk with his stepmother. It's a total mess.
But it could be the result of little to no QC of a commercial release, since it's Dual Audio. Perhaps the circle was concentrating on the English language version, and only included a data dump of the subtitle track. If that's what they did, well, their lack of attention to detail shows.
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July 31, 2011
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May 19, 2011
On the other hand, the characters are so bland and pale, even though that fits with the story, it was hard to get too wrapped up in them.
Plot stuff below the fold, including spoilers.
more...
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May 18, 2011
It was kind of interesting in that uTorrent resolves the addresses of peers, and after a while, I started to recognize a few (the little flag icons help). I started to refer to one as "The Romanian Firehose" because whenever I had his attention, I would suddenly have a 300kB/s surge in my rate.
It really is amazing what is out there. On a whim, I looked up Gatchaman, and damned if there weren't SEVERAL different torrents, some very old, but still well populated. I remember watching "Battle of the Planets" as a kid, and it sure would be nice to see it without the Sandy Stank treatment. (On the plus side, this version I found includes the English and Japanese audio streams. On the minus side, it's hardsubbed.)
I still need to figure out the RSS downloader, but I think it's going to make me one happy camper once I do.
This weekend I hope to finally be able to sit down and watch maybe a full season of something and write it up. Hopefully I didn't commit to a dog....
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May 15, 2011
uTorrent has performed admirably. It kept my bandwidth fully utilized from from around 4:23 AM on the 12th through around 11:00 AM on the 14th, and probably averaged around 30 gigs a day. Considering my wireless internet connection tops out somewhere at the 4 megabit/sec level, that's pretty good.
Late morning on Saturday I was left with just three torrents I knew would be trouble: The full BD run of Tenchi Muyo (Which I own on VHS :-P) at about 30 gigs alone there which is coming in pretty nicely now, but is huge enough to take a while; Macademi Washoi, which has only one seed who is feeding it at around 0.2k/sec, when he's putting it out at all; and the Panty and Stocking soundtrack (Which I wanted for the full version of the end theme, and is in this absurd tta format that is even larger than a CD that I can't play with anything, plus a .wav format that isn't broken into tracks) which has no seeds, so I and four other peers are all equalized at 74.2%
Nevertheless, I'm really, really pleased that I was able to recover everything else so quickly. Actually, that's an understatement, I'm ASTOUNDED that 180 torrents came through the air in a tad over two days. (I nuked one duplicate). I really like the way uTorrent operates. I appreciate the control over the queue that is totally lacking in Vuse, so that I could easily move poorly performing torrents to the end of the line. Vuse has an amazing number of rules and controls you can set over how the program operates, but none of that makes it operate WELL. I haven't delved too much into uTorrent's settings, but even the defaults kicked butt.
One thing I have set is my altruistic 2.0 share ratio goal. And I like how they let you spec the bandwidth after you hit that. (I suppose there can be some merit in continuing to share a trickle after that). Vuse's odd ruleset would sometimes continue to squander my limited upload capacity (somewhere under 0.5 megabits/sec) on a torrent over that ratio, once running away all the way to the 8's.
Now to start poking around in the RSS feed settings. It'll be nice to have that working, rather than timing out because "The server at client.vuse.com is not responding." Just what were they extracting from their users, I wonder....
(Oh, and can anyone tell me how to set up the categories on this system?)
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May 12, 2011
Looking at the peer listing, the choice was obvious, uTorrent. All the cool kids were using it, by an average of 5 to 1 or better.
Migrating though was not as smooth as it could be. And worse, I misunderstood how the "Set Download Location" worked because the uTorrent help pages on migration appear to be way out of date. I made a stupid mistake, and while trying to purge stuff out of Vuse, I accidentally sent it all to the recycle bin, which even worse, started purging itself without asking right before my eyes. Everything I'd downloaded for the last 6 months or so vanished. The vast majority of it from the last anime season, and not on my last backup.
Added to that the process of importing the .torrent files wasn't quite perfect either, leaving directories partially converted (thanks to Vuse's odd habit of randomly appending "imported" on the end of a .torrent's name, and the snippet of batch code in the FAQ did not work). Much hand-renaming and shuffling later, I finally managed to get all the torrents named what they should be, and located in the directories where they should be, and much to my amazement, the vast majority of the files still have at least one seed out there.
But for about a dozen, there is nothing. Most of those aren't much of a loss, current US TV, for example, which I tend to delete after watching anyway. But I lost the first season of Wakfu, a delightful French Anime, and Macademy Wasshoi, which SDB recommended, and which I only got a few episodes into. Those are seedless.
(Oh, and I highly recommend NOT searching of Undelete utilities on the web. There's "Freeware" out there that doesn't mention it's actually "Crippleware" which won't undelete anything unless you pay them, and they try to slip in some spyware in the uninstaller along the way. Not to mention all the fake sites you could run into.)
I'll recover, but I'm NOT happy. It's going to take a while.
And dammit, I've FINALLY got time to watch some of this!
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