Got to the :cnet post
I have no comments because I'm not going to get banned
I do not approve of these posts, because I'm pretty sure all the things that I got SOS'd for were about incest, and while I enjoy incest plots sometimes and am willing to defend them, I certainly wouldn't say they're my "thing" that I would want to be identified with =/
From the New World Series Review
[snip]
So I've been following your impressions to this series, and I must admit I was quite baffled by your reactions to some of the events.
Mostly I was taken aback by your obsession with wanting the show to explain itself. Which could be somewhat understandable in the very early episodes where the show makes a point of not telling you anything in order to build up the sense of mystery and foreboding "wrongness"...but then there was the massive infodump in episode 4. I was expecting you to react positively to that episode, since exposition seemed to be what you were after, and that episode provides more than enough information to get a good feel for why this world is the way it is. So I was pretty shocked when you seemed to instead have the opposite reaction, and chose that episode to complain about the show not explaining anything. That's just bizarre to me.
The whole point of the series was how it slowly built up a picture of how this very alien (from our perspective) society works and why it has to be the way it is, through the eyes of a group of children who are growing into adults and slowly making these same discoveries for themselves, starting to question their whole world. But it seemed from your reactions that you wanted nothing to happen without the how and why being immediately clear, and blamed the show for "bad storytelling" whenever it left anything ambiguous for the viewer to think about. I don't think that's the right way to look at this kind of show at all.
I also found it a little odd just how badly you reacted to the relationship aspects. I personally thought the show did a great job of showing a believable culture that's quite different from our own but still not too difficult to understand. After the first timeskip, I found the show established quite quickly - by showing, not telling - that there was a cultural norm in this society of starting out by forming "safer" homosexual relationships during the early teenage years, somewhere between friendship and true romance, before moving on to more serious heterosexual relationships once they were mature enough to start looking for life partners.
This seemed like a natural extension of the society's genetic predisposition to sexual experimentation for stress relief purposes that had already been established in the earlier episodes, as well as making a lot of sense with the fact that their society was designed in all aspects to promote harmony and avoid stress in general. After all, what could be more stressful than trying to rush straight into serious relationships as teenagers before you're ready? It makes much more sense in a way to build up to that by "practicing" with quasi-relationships that are just an extension of existing friendships before moving on to the real thing. And of course, this teenage time period was where the show really started to explore the dangers that could ensue if a person
did become mentally unstable, so it slotted in nicely to the overall narrative.
plus y'know, yuri is just really hawt
...Ah well, I guess in the end maybe this just wasn't really the kind of series for you. You did, however, manage to identify the best episode (19), so that's something =p
