Anime that sucks but we love anyway

Because it only took Viking-Sensei three years (and the approaching end of Errant Story) to come up with a better name for "General Discussions"
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davester65
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

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Sareth wrote:Oh! Then you're gonna LURV Shenhua to pieces...
I just watched the episodes with Shenhua in them. Her methods of killing people is similar to my character, but Revy is closer in personality.

Edit: There's also the fact that I can't get past that Shenhua has about the most annoying voice in all of creation. :D It's like if Gilbert Godfrey sucked on helium. :shock: I prefer the subtitled episodes, because usually the Japanese voice actors have less annoying voices than the American ones, but not in this case.
Last edited by davester65 on November 10th, 2008, 3:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

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zanntos wrote:It might play into the tropes because adults are either the "sexy profession X", which is when they are the taller type, or the "boring housewife" which actually isn't much taller than the teenage females.

Shakugan no Shana is a fantastic example of this if i recall, Yuuji's mom is about the same size as the highschool girls (maybe a hair taller) but Margery Daw towers over the others as the "sexy" character (granted she isn't Japanese), and Wirhelmina as the middle ground also has a middle height.
I can't quite figure that one out. First, why did that outsider choose and train a mighty swordbearer-hero who looks to weigh 80 pounds soaking wet? And how old is Shana supposed to be? I first got the impression she was about 11 or so, then later that she's 14 or 15 and really, really small and underdeveloped. Margery keeps referring to her as a "midget," she's so smart the teachers are all intimidated, but Yuuji's mother talks down to her like she was a grade-schooler.
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

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The real mind blow is that Shana may well be considerably older than she appears, it depends how long she has been a Flame Haze as it seems gaining cosmic superpower pulls some kind of cosmic stop watch, again see Daw who i sclearly several hundred years old in the story.

As for why the midget got chosen i think it's a combination of "trained all her life for it" and "huge capacity for awsome" since she can
Spoiler: show
summon Alustor into reality (at least one at end of season 1)
and not self-immolate in the process, normally that is death and is talked about as such. And the talking pendant DOES explain "that's why i chose her"
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davester65
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

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I just watched a couple of episodes of Claymore. Apparently if you mix human and demon DNA you get Scandinavian Supermodel Killing Machines. Who would've guessed? 8-)
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." - C.S. Lewis
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

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Hmmm . . . kinda missing my point twice . . .
zanntos wrote:The real mind blow is that Shana may well be considerably older than she appears, it depends how long she has been a Flame Haze as it seems gaining cosmic superpower pulls some kind of cosmic stop watch, again see Daw who i sclearly several hundred years old in the story.
I'm not referring to Shana's chronological age per se, but to the physical age category of her body, emotions, and mind and what category people believe she belongs in. Another question is how someone could be as well educated and trained as Shana is and also do what she does for so long and yet be so bone ignorant of simple cultural tropes.
zanntos wrote:As for why the midget got chosen i think it's a combination of "trained all her life for it" and "huge capacity for awsome" since she can
Spoiler: show
summon Alustor into reality (at least one at end of season 1)
and not self-immolate in the process, normally that is death and is talked about as such. And the talking pendant DOES explain "that's why i chose her"
Being able to blow up a 60 ton steel monster with tracks and a turret with a hand-launched rocket is an awesome power, but if you only had the resources to train a handful of soldiers to use that weapon, why, if you had a choice, would you choose seventy pound pre-pubescent females with almost no real-world survival knowlege? Why not 150 pound female or 200 pound male fully mature adult athletes with broad educations? People like that would have far more physical, emotional, and intellectual resources to draw on if the fight got complicated. Which it always does?
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings’ bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly. --- Henry Fabre
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

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I think part of it you CAN'T just chose someone to get someone with the spoiler tagged ability, It's very rare even for a lesser Flame Haze familiar much less Alustor (the pendant). Shana just happens to have the capacity to do it, perhaps due to some relation to the previous Shana, (various season 1 crap :p ) the ability is almost unheard of since in the movie the lack of that ability is how Friagne the Hunter was able to take down the Flame Hazes he hunted.

As for the socially oblivious routine, she didn't need to interact with people since she normally operates in a time-stop field, Yuuji put a stop to that since he can operate in one and he was carrying something important enough that they couldn't leave or kill him. She didn't learn it because she didn't really need it to do her job normally. Hard to embrace culture when you're moving around the world constantly and view everything as one monster attack away from "torched" oblivion.

Ok, yes i'm a bit of a fanboy of that series.
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

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So i found Billy vs SNAKEMAN over on Animecubed the other day. Anime (mostly Naruto and Bleach, but some other things) goof game kind of like Kingdom of Loathing. Figured it would psuedo-belong here since it's a deliberate farce game of Anime tropes but i'm enjoying it.

Of course i get bonuses for referrals so i figured i'd be upfront that on that :p Just a good game for giggles. If you play feel free to look me up, i'm currently lurking in Finale village, screen name "zanntos."

Also Princess Resurrection has come stateside in subtitles format if you need a bad B-Movie horror anime fix. Love that series even if it's chezzy B-Movie monsters.
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

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davester65 wrote:
Sareth wrote:Oh! Then you're gonna LURV Shenhua to pieces...
I just watched the episodes with Shenhua in them. Her methods of killing people is similar to my character, but Revy is closer in personality.

Edit: There's also the fact that I can't get past that Shenhua has about the most annoying voice in all of creation. :D It's like if Gilbert Godfrey sucked on helium. :shock: I prefer the subtitled episodes, because usually the Japanese voice actors have less annoying voices than the American ones, but not in this case.
Narf. I guess that's a Japanese voice actor's idea of what a bad Taiwanese accent sounds like. The English dub uses an Asian actress who sounds a bit like Margeret Cho's mother.
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings’ bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly. --- Henry Fabre
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

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Wow, i must be slipping, i just read back through our "Doesn't Suck" list as well as these that we love anyway and there is no mention of Inukami.
Fan service, monster hunting by absurd means, WTF-sauce guys in costume side characters, and of course "look mama, Elephant." Sadly the Anime has never made it to the US so you will need to youtube it or pick it up off lolipower or something, yarrrrr avast all that.

A truly delightful series because it's so bad it's GREAT. I stand in awe of the fact that the manga is being released here since it's something i figured had slipped through the cracks, and it's more than a little oddball :p

*enters X anonymous confession mode*
Hello i'm Pierre and i like weird and somewhat twisted anime/manga.
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Re: Anime that sucks but we love anyway

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Boss Out of Town wrote:
davester65 wrote:
Sareth wrote:Oh! Then you're gonna LURV Shenhua to pieces...
I just watched the episodes with Shenhua in them. Her methods of killing people is similar to my character, but Revy is closer in personality.
Edit: There's also the fact that I can't get past that Shenhua has about the most annoying voice in all of creation. :D It's like if Gilbert Godfrey sucked on helium. :shock: I prefer the subtitled episodes, because usually the Japanese voice actors have less annoying voices than the American ones, but not in this case.
Narf. I guess that's a Japanese voice actor's idea of what a bad Taiwanese accent sounds like. The English dub uses an Asian actress who sounds a bit like Margeret Cho's mother.
For additional laughs, check out Revi’s attempt to speak her allegedly native English while in Japan. The series is fuzzy about which languages are spoken in Roanapor, where the local dialect is probably Thai or possibly Malay. However, the American characters presumably speak English among themselves, the Russians speak Russian, etc. This might help explain why Revi winds up buddying with Etta: Revi is from New York, while Etta is allegedly from Alabama and various other places in the States. The American voice actress certainly doesn’t have her speak with any trace of a southern accent.

Anyhow, Revi does not speak Japanese, and Rock presumably speaks English when conversing with his “friends” in the Black Lagoon company. When Rock and Revi go to Japan, where Rock interprets which I presume is Japanese to English for the negotiations between a Japanese Yakuza and the Russian Balalaika. Revi left alone, talks to some school-boys about guns, addressing them in the Japanese voice actress’s version of English, which they, as good Japanese school boys, all know as a second language. However, the production company did not put much effort into the translation or rehearsals. It took me four run-throughs to pick out all the butchered English words in Revi’s dialogue.

Having had a chance to watch more of Black Lagoon, right into the second season, and it is one of the series where I consider the English script to be noticably better than the Japanese script. While I am not fond of the "stream-of-expletives" dialog style, it works perfectly here. The entire artistic premise of the series is juvenile psuedo-macho self-indulgence, and the language fits right in. If you lived in a world in which being a stone-cold sociopath or a giggling psychotic made you a more deadly fighter or assassin and being subject to outbursts of uncontrollable rage made you harder to shoot, this is how people would talk!

That said, the series has some good writing mixed in with the cartoonish violence, with lots of serious comments about the brutalizing effects of human evil. The despairing end scene, with its slow, tragic music, ending with Revi ready to use the shotgun on whoever is intruding on her pain, sums up the series nicely.

Pointless Digression . . .

It was so much easier for the guys making those World War II movies. They had a selection of Asian-American actors, most with classical training and desperate for work in Hollywood, and two common options: the chopped, “sing-song” version of a Japanese accent, which even a Euro-American actor in thick yellow make-up could muster, and the “I went to Harvard” excuse. Since it was known that many Japanese military men had actually studied overseas, the Japanese-American actor could justify speaking better English than the actors playing the Americans and get some good lines.

It occurred to me that there were many ugly racist caricatures of the Japanese floating through Hollywood from the 20s through the 50s, which makes it sometimes awkward to portray the ugly truth about Japanese behavior during that period. To the Chinese, in particular, Japanese soldiers were like Nazis without manners. They really did, by all accounts, toss babies on bayonets for laughs, and their officers really did have contests to see how many helpless prisoners they could behead with their swords in one timed minute. One ironic point I sometimes make: the biggest death toll for a bombing raid in World War II was not Hiroshima, or Dresden, or the Hamburg firestorm, or the fire-bombing of Tokyo. It was the American Doolittle Raid in 1942. Only a couple of dozen American aircrew and Japanese died, but the Japanese army, hunting for crashed American fliers in China, butchered as many as a million civilians in official and unofficial reprisals.
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings’ bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly. --- Henry Fabre
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