doomed1 said:
Alright, I'll admit FUMOFFU is good, but after watching
Full Metal Panic! with the TACTICOOL action (I'm a sucker for it) and a not-whiny male protagonist, it felt like a letdown. It's funny, it just didn't fit the positive image I had for the original series. If it had any other name on it I would have likely laughed, but it didn't. It's not that FUMOFFU was meh by itself, it's just that after watching FMP, all I could say was "meh".
And I see that some of you only like FUMOFFU when it comes to the FMP franchise, so whatever, you're not going to agree with me anyway.
I agreed with this, when watching Fumoffu -- it didn't fit with the tone of FMP at all, and that was kind of odd. However, given how once the series did get back to serious it got way too serious, Fumoffu looks pretty good in retrospect... still though, the first season is my favorite.
Twelve Kingdoms 27-30 - On this disc, the series continues with the depressing, tragedy-focused episodes of the previous one. These were overall better than the four before them, but still this definitely isn't exactly what I like about anime -- it's just so bleak and depressing!
Warning - spoilers below, lots of them. I'm not going to spoiler it because macodin's probably the only one reading anyway.
Also, as I've said, I prefer a more plot-focused show; Twelve Kingdoms is clearly much more character-focused, as opposed to plot-focused. The plot is good enough, but it's not the focus, and it moves forward at a frustratingly slow pace while the show focuses in detail on each character and how broken and messed up all three main characters who aren't Youko are (Um, unless you count Rakushun as a main character, in which case he's not broken either). I get it, they're broken. Does it really need to be this slow? But the whole show has been this way, it's a very slow paced series most of the time. Slow pacing can be fine when the show does it right, but here it just often leaves me frustrated that things are happening so slowly.
Anyway, in these episodes, as I said above the tragedy and brokenness continue, but we get our first hints of change for Suzu and Shoukei. Hearing about how a Japanese person managed to become a queen and being jealous of her, both are travelling to Kei.
Shoukei mostly acts the annoying spoiled idiot princess as usual. Ugh, I barely even want to describe it, she's so, SO bad in episodes 27 and 28! She goes completely insane at this point, and runs off from the Queen of Kyou (I think that was the kingdom, or was it Ryou?), stealing a special mount and a bunch of jewelery in the process. She's extremely jealous of the queens of Kyou and Kei (Youko), and thinks that what they have should be hers, so she takes it. The queen of the country said nothing I disagreed with at this point, slapping her Kirin might be going a bit far but her explanations of why Shoukei is wrong are accurate for sure. Shoukei is incredibly spoiled and thinks that she deserves lots of beautiful things, but none of the responsibility that comes along with them -- she just wants to go back to the days when all she had to do were look pretty and dance every so often, and not have to bother with "thoughts" or "actions". Obviously, that isn't exactly realistic. Episode 28 or so is her low point so far, she's just awful up to that point.
She leaves though, for another kingdom we hadn't seen before. The king of this kingdom has been on the throne for 1200 years, but the kingdom seems to be collapsing from the inside, as corruption spreads. Shoukei gets caught because she's a moron and was using the jewels as payment at good inns, instead of trading them for non-traceable money. At the court though, the local official accepts the jewels as a bribe for lettiing her go. She'd run into Rakushun (the mouse-man) at the inn, and tried to blame the theft on him instead of her. They didn't believe her, and despite the treachery Rakushun decides to bring her along with him as he returns to En. Why he'd trust this girl who just tried to get him falsely arrested for a crime she committed I have no idea... he's nice. He makes the first successful effort to show her how stupid she is being, as he says that the fact that she knew nothing about her parents' crimes is no excuse -- in other kingdoms princes and princesses do things outside of the palace, run charities, etc. She did absolutely nothing, and as I said above wants that life back. Maybe if these two travel together, eventually she can be shown why that desire of hers is wrong, and how bad her actions up to this point have been. Given how stupid she's been so far though, we'll see if she can actually improve...
Suzu meets Asano during her journey. He's somehow even more broken than she is, and threatens to kill her and others, before travelling with her (in between regular bouts of paranoia and nightmares). Sure, he can't understand anyone so I'm sure it was hard, but it sure is a big change from when we saw him last. Anyway, Suzu meets a young boy on the ship to Kei, and starts out by yelling at him. The kid's smart though, and as they travel together he points out how she's just pitying herself, instead of doing anything about it -- he says that she clearly likes self-pity. He is right, of course. His perception that the Mistress of the Cavern actually wanted her servants to tell her that they hated her, instead of always lying and saying that they loved her, and that that might have been part of what pushed her to mistreat them as she did, was interesting... I'm not sure if it's right or not, but it's an interesting idea. Learning about how hard the boy's life has been (both of his parents died in recent months) finally starts to break Suzu's deep self-pity.
Then, of course, tragedy strikes and we learn that he's going blind because of an infection. Suzu tries to get him to a doctor, but the ep. 29 preview spoils that he's going to die (why did they do that??). Indeed, at the end of ep. 30, he's killed when an evil lord runs him over in a carriage, when he couldn't get out of the way in time because of his illness. Youko was in the area too, in disguise, but couldn't do anything.
As for Youko, as always her parts are by far the best of the three, but the tragedy element returns for her as well -- she leaves the palace for a trip in disguise around her kingdom, and in addition to running into the conspiracy against her (this plot hasn't gone far yet, she's just chasing people who may know things -- see what I say above about the glacial pace of the plot in this series.) she also finds out that there are some Youma in the kingdom. Two youma attack a village orphan house, and kill all but two of the orphans, who Youko manages to save along with the village elder (they were apart from the rest). But don't worry, none of the dead were ever shown on screen (though their graves are), so it's not that bad... oh wait, yes it is. That's so horrible...
Youko does learn some things about this world and her kingdom, though, in addition to witnessing tragedy. She learns that food is more important than shelter, in winter, here, for instance. In non-modern worlds, having enough food is indeed a big issue, one that a modern day person would find extremely difficult to understand, indeed. Such things don't exist anymore, in the modern world. Also the construction of the villages is detailed. Very ordered and grid-based stuff. What she's learning about the conspiracy is interesting too, did she come here to maybe learn something (she is in the right area apparently), or is it just lucky cooincidence? Seems to be the latter, but maybe it's some of both.
... So yeah, "the female characters learn some things they needed to know from male ones" was an aspect to this disc. Of course though they'll ultimately be the ones doing the important stuff, I'm sure, once they learn more and Suzu and Shoukei stop being so stupid. Also, Youko is certainly still my favorite major character. And this show is still very well made and interesting, but uncomfortable and sometimes hard to watch. I don't like that much tragedy, but I'm hoping that things will get better soon... could go either way though, several kingdoms seem to be slipping farther into disaster as the story progresses.
Seriously, this whole story so far feels like a prelude to something greater, but obviously it isn't as there are only 15 more episodes. It's kind of odd, that way... the whole thing's so unconventional, and I don't just mean that as a good thing. Its uniqueness is both a good and a bad point about the series.
mAcOdIn said:
Now this is just crazy talk.
It may not be objectively better, but Gosick is more fun to watch than 12 Kingdoms for sure.
Seriously, the difference between Kugiloli's is essentially hair color and what they fight with, that's it, it's perfectly reasonable then to just hate them all. You wouldn't press someone with Arachnaphobia over exactly which spiders they fear would you? It's the same with Rie Kugimiya or whatever her name is.
I haven't really watched enough of her characters to say how different they are...
Oh Lordy. Just wows. Basically I quoted this so it'd show up as green for me with my plugin so I could come back later and show you how wrong you are. Shouki's the shit, by the end you will love her character want to print out this post of yours and eat it, in effect to eat your own words.
I wonder what you think of my above thoughts (27-30), I have no idea really.
