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This Week in Anime - The Mouth of Madness




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Mad_Scientist
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PostPosted: Tue May 23, 2017 3:25 pm Reply with quote
"You know what I'd like to go back to not understanding Heybot!"

Pretty sure you never started to understand it, Nick. I'm pretty sure even MICCHY doesn't understand it, and she watches it each week.
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Agent355



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PostPosted: Thu May 25, 2017 12:05 pm Reply with quote
I enjoy this article as a light, comedic take on currently airing shows, but the lack of clear differentiation between the shows they discuss makes it literally hard to read, because if I'm not up to that episode yet (or haven't started watching the show yet, but plan to) and I start reading the current episode discussion I'll get spoiled. For example, I'm watching Attack on Titan 2 dubbed on Toonami, so reading the discussion on the latest Japanese episode it spoiler city. If you guys could clearly delineate separate sections for each episode discussed in the article, I'd really appreciate it (and I think more people would read it).

That said, I got a big lol out of "Detroit Hell"! Very Happy
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JacobC
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PostPosted: Thu May 25, 2017 1:10 pm Reply with quote
Agent355 wrote:
I enjoy this article as a light, comedic take on currently airing shows, but the lack of clear differentiation between the shows they discuss makes it literally hard to read, because if I'm not up to that episode yet (or haven't started watching the show yet, but plan to) and I start reading the current episode discussion I'll get spoiled. For example, I'm watching Attack on Titan 2 dubbed on Toonami, so reading the discussion on the latest Japanese episode it spoiler city. If you guys could clearly delineate separate sections for each episode discussed in the article, I'd really appreciate it (and I think more people would read it).

That said, I got a big lol out of "Detroit Hell"! Very Happy


Already have! Those sections are clearly delineated by the buttons at the top of the page.
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Agent355



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PostPosted: Thu May 25, 2017 1:38 pm Reply with quote
I didn't realize that. That helps, but when I scroll through the article on my phone, each section looks exactly the same, and I don't know where to stop scrolling to begin reading. Maybe clear headers between each episode discussion would help? The awkward segues are not easy to pick out.
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Mad_Scientist
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PostPosted: Thu May 25, 2017 10:37 pm Reply with quote
I typically use the screenshots to help me differentiate sections, as they always use one when they switch to a new show, but I agree some sort of distinct header too might be nice.


Changing topic, speaking about Suka Suka, to answer Nick and Micchy's confusion, the fight in episode 6 was a flashback and continuation of the fight we saw at the start of episode 5. Same beasts (a timere and some unknown one that sprouts from inside it), same island (15), the retreat was announced right at the end of the scene in episode 5 and was still being announced in the fight scene in episode 6. Also, both scenes feature Ctholly's red eyed creepy voiced visions, and indicate that this is the first time she's dealt with them.

So yeah, fight in ep 6 was definitely a flashback and continuation of the fight in episode 5. I thought this was made pretty clear. BUT:

I still understand your confusion a bit, because after the fight in episode 5 we were told that they failed to defeat the beasts on island 15, that the new beast that emerged from the timere sent the battlefield into chaos, and so Limeskin declared defeat and sunk the island.

In episode 6, we see Ctholly apparently defeat both beasts in a last burst of strength, but she splits the island in half in the process, and the island sinks.

And "we defeated the beasts, but accidentally destroyed the island in the process" and "we couldn't defeat the beasts, so we accepted defeat and sunk the island purposely" are rather different things. So which happened?

I can't tell you what happened in the anime for sure, and I've read the light novel.

I know how it is in the light novel. (I guess I should spoil tag this, though none of this is really spoilers, just clarification on how it went down in the light novels.) spoiler[In the LNs, Ctholly purposely split the island in half using the last of her strength, because if they waited for the rest of the fleet to arrive and bombard the island to sink it, it would take hours and hours. And the timere might be able to then launch spores onto other islands during that time, bringing about the end of the world a second time. In fact this was very likely gonna happen.

And she couldn't just use the last of her strength to kill the timere because the timere has the ability to self resurrect itself. This is referenced briefly in the anime. When Ctholly says "this makes 217" at the start of the fight in episode 5, she's talking about how many times they've killed the timere. It's brought itself back to life over 200 times.

There is a limit to how many times a timere can do this, but it's impossible to know for sure what the limit is until you reach it and the timere dies for good. They just know that the larger the timere is, generally the more it can do this. (And this is if I remember the largest timere they ever fought.) They also know that a fairy self destructing can create such a strong venom explosion it can overwhelm a timere and stop it from reviving even a single time. That's why, when especially large timeres threaten the islands, they have a fairy sacrifice herself, because if they don't then they might get exhausted and lose their ability to fight before the timere loses it's ability to revive itself.

Like what happened on island 15.]


Now, the way the anime framed Ctholly splitting the island is completely different. So I honestly don't know if the anime decided to change things from the light novel, but just did a half assed job and left some parts of the original plot in, or if the anime didn't decide to make that change, and just did a terrible job at explaining things.

Because the anime has problems explaining things from the light novel a lot. The light novel is full of inner monologue, and a fair amount of exposition, and of course this just doesn't work that well in anime form. (Some would question how well it works in the light novel even.) I do think this is a weakness of the light novels for Suka Suka, they rely on this too much for understanding both character motivations, and even the basic plot and worldbuilding.

And it's clear that the people making the anime are struggling to figure out what to replace this expository text with in the anime. because you can't just cut it out and replace it with NOTHING, or else you get confusion and characters acting in ways that don't seem to make sense. The writer of the light novels is doing the series composition for the anime, so I wonder if he's at fault, if he just doesn't know how to write for an anime series, and how to communicate important stuff with brevity.

The director is also pretty inexperienced at directing full length anime series, so maybe he's at fault? Perhaps both are partially to blame? Regardless, some of the decisions they've made are baffling, and results in the wonky editing and timeline confusion you've commented on before.
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