Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Is Netflix's Revisions Worth Watching?
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meiam
Posts: 3448 |
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So let me get this right, the guy who act all smug cause he think he's the main character who is going to save the entire world.... turned out to be the main character who saved the entire world? Doesn't that completely validate his point? If someone saved my life but act like a smug asshole about it, It'd still have a very positive view of him because of the whole "saved my life" part... Heck, I might be misunderstanding from the write up, but it sound like the main character believing he was the main character is what allowed him to become the main character and save the world in the end...
I mean, I'm all for knocking down mech main character, if I somehow become unbelievably rich one day you'll know cause Bone will announce Eureka Seven: sans Renton. But it should at least work in the story. Wouldn't it have been far more tonally consistent for him to actually be "prophesied" to become the savior but because of how he react to this he actually become unable to be the savior and so somebody else has to step up in his place (but with far worse results). |
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Arale Kurashiki
Posts: 773 |
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Yeah, it sounds like it's just another show that has internalized other peoples' self-awareness without truly being self-aware. The idea of this awful sociopathic pseudo-Shinji, I thought that seemed so interesting, but then as I kept scrolling down and seeing more tropey BS like "haha we're girls so we talk about boobs!!!!" I began to doubt that this work had any real commitment to criticism. Sad.
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hissatsu01
 Posts: 963 Location: NYC |
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When the first trailer for this came out I thought it looked stupid. Turns out it is stupid. Taniguchi's work varies so wildly in quality. This would appear to be on the skippable end.
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nightjuan
 Posts: 1473 |
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Revisions is a strange show, I will agree, but in my experience the core story still worked as a commentary on why it's a mistake for protagonists to act like entitled individuals and believe in prophecies without doing something to earn such a position first. In other words, you can't skip class and cheat your way to the top. There has to be some balance involved.
Of course, I suppose the irony or paradox is that Daisuke still needed to develop those flawed beliefs first, at least before he could be put in a position from which to overcome them. The whole time travel aspect wasn't all that confusing to me. I suppose they didn't try to address every single question about the mechanics right away, yet the basics all fell into place. A few issues mentioned were also brought up during the show, sooner or later. For instance...the matter of why can these particular children pilot the robots. I believe they briefly said Milo and company had specifically tuned the String Puppets in advance for these students, because of their original prediction. Yes, I guess there are some silly or stupid elements to the show, but I think they were still useful as part of an entertaining spectable. Why must everything be deadly serious or sophisticated? I was highly amused by Nicholas, the stuffed dog, so I don't think it's a bad thing to have that sort of thing as part of an anime series. I got enough entertainment value. I think the small scene with the teacher trying to seduce the protagonist was primarily meant to show the drastic lengths some people would be willing to go during such a stressful crisis. That said, I imagine it's also at least in part a reference to a more substantial subplot from Infinite Ryvius (although in that case the characters were much closer in age, not teacher and student). It's an older anime by the same director albeit with another writer. I feel like there wouldn't be a point to excessively nitpicking or disagreeing with some of the other statements or interpretations in this column, but I will comment on the issues below.
No, not exactly. One, it was only when Daisuke essentially stopped thinking so much about himself and was no longer taking the prophecy for granted, particularly after suffering some of the worst consequences from his previous hubris and egoism, that he actually started to become more of a decent person and made a genuine effort to help others in a legitimate way. He finally had to live up to the role and make it true, not act like an entitled jerk about everything. Two, I would say the rest of the team still contributed to the resolution in certain ways, including Keisaku, so it wouldn't be accurate to say the protagonist did everything to solve the problem.
Honestly, if the standard of judgment we're going to use here is that absolutely no anime tropes should ever be used whenever an anime series is attempting to present any form of criticism or commentary about the genre or other related subjects, then Evangelion itself also fails such a test. I could do without some of those scenes, mind you, but it's a practical reality that anime is still a product. Not some pure, idealized form of art that is above us mere mortals and only meant for the intellectually fit. Last edited by nightjuan on Thu May 23, 2019 5:07 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Arale Kurashiki
Posts: 773 |
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It's not the appearance of tropes, but the mindless regurgitation of the worst of them. If we can't criticize awful writing, I don't know what else there is to criticize that has value. If the best defense one can give for it is "they wanted to make money", that's a bit telling.
I don't think there's anything in Evangelion that is un-selfaware copy-paste to fill a quota. |
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rahzel rose
 Subscriber Posts: 831 |
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Basically all I got from this article was that Daisuke’s role was made for Uchiyama Kouki.
 I’ll have to check the show out later.
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vonPeterhof
Posts: 729 |
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Great Rumbler
 Posts: 334 Location: Oklahoma |
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Not really a major thing, but "casualty" can be used to refer both to deaths and just injuries.
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nightjuan
Posts: 1473 |
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Of course we can criticize "awful" writing, but simply having an entirely typical anime scene (a bunch of girls talking in a bath, how many shows have done that before?) is not some sort of worst case scenario. I think it's a minor aspect, not a critical flaw that makes or breaks a series. I think you're forgetting quite a few fanservice elements from NGE/Rebuild movies, which were not strictly necessary and are just as much of a "copy paste" job, but I won't stress the point. ----- Either way, I think Revisions is an interesting though flawed anime and appreciated its willingness to take a risk by relying on an intentionally unlikable protagonist as its center of attention. It didn't come up during the discussion above, but I think the 3DCG mostly worked pretty well. Not perfectly, perhaps, but the overall visual quality was above average for an anime series. I liked a bunch of the scene composition and cinematography too, which helped out. Last edited by nightjuan on Thu May 23, 2019 5:58 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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steelmirror
 Posts: 342 |
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Minos_Kurumada
Posts: 1182 |
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Little known fact:
Schrodinger thought Quantum Mechanic Theory was BS, his Cat example is actually him mocking the concept and is meant to show in little words how absurd the concept was for him. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11586 |
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That particular trope has reached the point of overuse where it very nearly does make or break a series for me (not just talking, talking about boobs and grabbing them). It at least kills the entire episode when they use it. It's just so mind numbingly stupid and insulting that I have to ffwd or just turn it off to save my brain from turning to jelly. |
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Arale Kurashiki
Posts: 773 |
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^ This. I can't stand shows that have the characters obsess over their breasts; if it's only one scene, that's egregious in its own way because it clearly isn't part of their characters at all. If your show isn't going to respect its own characters, why the hell should I? Yes, this is a huge make or break thing.
And about Evangelion, I'm obviously not talking about Rebuild at all because that's a different work. I'm talking about the original series + movie, because obviously there's dozens of Eva spinoff media and merchandise... a lot of which is (from what I gather) even worse about this than Rebuild. Anyway, while you might call some scenes fanservice in Eva, I don't think any of them override characterization in any way. There's no time where the characters' personalities are sidelined or disrespected so they can do something sexy for the audience's sake. |
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1796 Location: South America |
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I watched, it was entertaining. True, it was not really "good" but I found the plot entertaining. I love this kind of science fiction stories that feature elements of transhumanism.
I did not find the MC problematic. I thought it was interesting to have a character that behaved in such a weird manner: he was certainly deluded and I found it entertaining to watch. Overall, the only thing I found unsatisfying is that the could have fleshed out more of the worldbuilding. We did not get to know a lot of the world, besides the local base of the virus-mutated humans (and apparently there were only 3 virus mutated people alive and conscious, as most of these "monsters" brains had degraded to the point they were not conscious anymore). |
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jroa
Posts: 546 |
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"Good enough" is my verdict on Revisions. Not too bad, not too great. You know, I actually felt glad for Daisuke and co. at the end of the road. I wasn't expecting that at first, but I did sort of grew fond of their little team even with their disputes and such. If I had to draw a line, I would say the second half of the series became more interesting than the first parts.
I share the feeling that there were some loose ends with a few subplots. If this was a 24 or 26 episode series instead of only having 12 episodes for this kind of sci-fi storyline, they could have probably covered more ground with those and expanded the world-building. Which is also part of why it felt like the civilian population was having such huge mood swings. With more time, they could have handled that more gradually. As a side note...I didn't get the idea that the show was saying the police officer was ideologically admirable. He was right about opposing the Mayor's power grab, but otherwise his politics weren't a topic of discussion. Do some folks think that maybe they're considering to make more or at least leaving that possibility open? I dunno. That could just turn out to be a red herring. In any case, I found that it at least ended on a decent emotional note, so the main story isn't lacking closure. |
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