firehawk12
Subete no aware
A lot of the pacing feels like budget and/or television pacing problems.
In terms of what is happening?
I liked how it was handled in the movie, but that's because they had the advantage of ending the movie on that incident. The series doesn't have that luxury unfortunately. In terms of the entire situation altogether... well, on the one hand the entire series builds to this moment, but on the other hand it turns out that space exploration is pretty fucking boring. It's why Americans stopped caring and only launched 6 more missions after Apollo 11 and the only time NASA makes the news for their manned space program is when tragedy strikes. So there has to be a crisis in order to create drama.
The alternative would have been a rehash of the capsule arc, where it was just a matter of seeing these people live on the moon for several episodes doing real science, and I would have been perfectly fine with that... but I'd probably be in the minority in that regard.
Of course, this arc also pays off the entire Brian Jay character, so at the very least I have to give them props for that much.
The alternative would have been a rehash of the capsule arc, where it was just a matter of seeing these people live on the moon for several episodes doing real science, and I would have been perfectly fine with that... but I'd probably be in the minority in that regard.
Of course, this arc also pays off the entire Brian Jay character, so at the very least I have to give them props for that much.
So I assume this covered that Arlong arc that you and a couple of others (Uchip, I believe) wanted to watch when I started watching the show... last year or whenever it was.
You are right about it hitting a lot of the same notes as Yoshiwara, especially since Nami and Tsukuyo are pretty much analogous here. Although, I will say, after watching the latest episode of Wafuu Busters, the whole
secret sacrifice thing
What shocked me is that this arc, according to the wikia, is 14 episodes. So at least twice the length of this movie. God damn.
I think the movie could have been a little tighter (the whole thing with that sea cow creature was completely pointless), but I can't imagine what they could have added to this story to stretch it out to 14 episodes. More exposition? More fighting? I just don't know. But I guess that's precisely why I probably can't watch the series proper - hopefully they'll just do digest versions of the entire anime and have them all out by the time the show ends. (One Piece Kai please).
I do have some thoughts about the movie itself, and these are probably things I've expressed before when I watched the series, but I find the depiction of violence extremely odd - and I assume it's because it's a show for children?
They have Arlong kill Bellmere and actually show it on screen (for the most part), and it serves as the turning point of the film. For one of these types of stories, it worked perfectly even though I knew exactly what was going to happen. Hell, the exact same thing happens in the Courtesan arc, and it's a very classic way to garner sympathy for a character and more importantly antagonism for an... antagonist very quickly. That's all fine and good.
What I don't get is why the good characters aren't allowed to express the same kind of violence? The assuming is that Arlong is dead at the end, but we have no idea if that's true or not. Even the guy with swords isn't allowed to actually cut anyone with them and presumably just knocks the other guy unconscious.
The Courtesan arc twists this by having
Takasugi kill the bad guy
I'm not sure how I feel about the ethics of that, because you don't really want to glorify violence for the children watching the show - Brad Pitt isn't carving any swastikas here - but you also don't show any consequences for the good guys using violence whatsoever. Luffy doesn't have to have PTSD dreams of killing his enemies because he never actually has to kill any of them.
I assume the entire series is like that? Especially since the primary mode of action is martial arts and short of breaking necks, there really isn't any way to make it bloody and disgusting (hey, even Wei Shen had to use the environment to fuck people up in Sleeping Dogs lol). I think maybe this is one place where I'd give the edge to Gintama, because as jokey and shounen-ey as Gintoki can be, he's not above murdering his enemies.
Also, people were right about Oda not being able to draw women. I couldn't unsee the whole hourglass thing.
Oh yeah, the hair!
What's amusing is that I saw someone that almost had that exact same haircut, although she had a mohawk. I wonder if Oda saw some punk girls whenever he came up with that character.
And hey, a hair upgrade!
