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Been enjoying Kowloon Generic Romance quite a bit so far:
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Daicon (3) restoration that looks better than the other five daicon 3-4 restorations out there courtesy of ‘D*rkieBigPeenus’
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We’ve saved the ReBoot D-1 masters from the brink! Here’s our big update on the last few months of this project.
We’re looking forward to sharing more good news about the restoration process in 2026! Stay tuned.
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In a worldview built around monster origins, Godzilla: Singular Point (2021) is very outstanding. The tension from the countdown covers the shortcomings in character development. I would watch again.
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Started watching Batman Beyond. I slept on this for so many years because I didn’t really like the cape-less batsuit design and the slightly more simplified character design/art design they moved to in season 3 of Batman: The Animated Series. But dang, watching the first few episodes of season 1 this is a pretty good show huh.
What got me into it was watching the Batman Beyond movie Return of the Joker. I enjoyed that and the show being a sequel series to the original animated series gave me the nudge I needed. Now I’m hoping that rumor about Rocksteady working on a Batman Beyond game are true.
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some teasers for japanese cartoons i’m excited about next year
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Got excited that A Witch in Mongolia was A Bride’s Story for a second
still excited for new yamada
Finished season 2 of Hazbin Hotel, I think it’s a good deal better than the first, largely thanks to having a much better villain. Christian Borle as Vox carries fully half this season as he cavorts and gloats and schemes, and really sells each of the many songs he’s given.
If your show is about demons in Hell it helps to actually have a cacklingly evil warlord as your bad guy! Strange it took this long to get one.
On the whole this thing does not rise above its target audience of teenagers and young adults, but there’s a lot of fun details and great VA picks, so, it did the trick for me as a piece of entertainment. I continue to be history’s greatest fool for always hoping these series will do something way cooler than they ever decide to.
This show is like candy, it goes down easy and you forget about it in a couple days.
(Requisite statement that I will make no apologies for how cringe it is or insufferable the fandom is etc etc do not speak to me of this here or in regards to Deltarune)
Vox Songs and Thoughts
I always a fan of any villain who loves what he does, is genuinely very cruel, wants something specific, and is unapologetic about it. This is typically what villains are allowed: They don’t have to take anyone’s well-being into consideration, they’re utterly uninhibited, they’re mired in vice and are typically passionate about whatever they’re evil about. So, good songs usually.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrmkVVlbfrE&t=54s
Got a real kick out of watching this jagoff indulge himself.
His backstory song is kind of tedious but I loved how he ended up with a cult in life, and took them all with him as it was his own undoing. Presumably his sycophants are what gave him power in Hell initially.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJQpBUcKhTk
I do wish he’d been a little more of a threat, it never seems like he’s not just being played by Alastor or hurtling towards his own self-imposed doom, but, whatever, fun having someone hateable. If this is as close as we’re going to get to Alastor having actual competition, you could do worse.
https://youtu.be/zPHlGO4Dvyc?si=-4Ghpx1S5xzFFJtX
This one drives me insane because it’s a really fun song for exactly the first half, then it grinds to a complete halt so they can introduce four completely new warlords who - I can’t stress this enough - do not do or say anything this entire season. WHY. I fear this is a musical thing where it’s normal to stop a song in its tracks to stuff some plot exposition in. If it has a name, I hate whatever that thing is.
Anyways, Vox is never not rubbing it in everyone’s face throughout, which I like in a villain. He is shitty in even how he receives everything he’s ever wanted.
https://youtu.be/1USxshmIk_A?si=ndKLbfL2j8LjcpO1
I do have to note that he has a tiny vtuber top hat because of course he does.
The Bad
First off, this show has still not explained how life and death work. If you get run over by a car during an action scene in Hell, is your soul obliterated and you’re permanently dead? Or do you come back somehow? Or does that only happen if you’re killed by an angel’s exorcism blade? At one point Vox says that killed demons meet “the true death” but that’s contradicted a bit by Angel Dust earlier saying that he didn’t know what happened if he died, “Where am I gonna go? Super Hell?”. I try not to think about it but it comes up a bunch as a central aspect of the show, how imperiled or not everyone truly is here.
Anyways, the show still is pretty irritating in how it wants to introduce twenty thousand of Vivzie’s random-ass characters when only a handful are at all relevant to the story. It really, really gets in its own way by wanting to show off rather than let the thing be what it’s going to be. Do we need to stop songs to introduce five new warlords of hell, none of whom have speaking lines? No. Do we need to introduce four new angelic leaders when they are given probably three lines total? No we do not. Is it necessary to bring in an entire wild west gunfight area of the city or a cannibal district when we do not return there ever? I do not think we do!
With the character design, there’s also a fair number of characters that have too much shit stapled on (like gacha characters or vtubers), and need another pass to take off a pair of wings or animal ears or floating halo or tiny hat, it’s very tumblr character design. Simpler is better! Keep it to one or two design elements! The alcoholic gambling cat with the floating cards and a top hat does not need to have angel wings! The cell phone-obsessed Heidi kingmaker warlord maybe doesn’t need to also be a doll also! If it has nothing to do with her character! Does the snake guy need to have twelve eyes also? Ask yourself: Does every single character in my show need to have heterochromia?
Though the depiction of Heaven doesn’t really support this, I liked the notion that when you are cast into the pit of Hell, you take on a form that is somehow linked to your sin. The TV guy was a cult leader through television, so he’s a TV. The snake guy as deceptive and cowardly in life, so he’s a serpent in Hell. The porn star power bottom killed his father… in an… underhanded way… so he’s a spider. The Disco Queen warlord was… careless and destructive in life so… she’s a… busty, giantess scalie in death? Okay it sorta falls apart when I think about it too hard.
The music is generally good and fun, but at least two songs per season get fucked up by trying to force in character introduction or some plot element relevant to the story. This doesn’t happen too too often, but lord, it sucks to have a pretty decent song fall apart because they wanted to bring in someone who isn’t going to be around once the episode’s over.
I think lastly, everything regarding Heaven this season was really really one-note. There were hints in season 1 that there was a base-level paradise we saw, but that the leadership was corrupt and decedent, but this really does not come up at all. Heaven is exactly as it appears. All the angels are foppish and weak and listless except for the one villain angel inexplicably.
The Good
In terms of the music, Vox sort of stole the show but I did enjoy Angel’s lounge number, Keith David’s delightful drunkard song, Pentious’ love song (and to a lesser extent his redemption song), Niffty’s “the hotel is gross” song, and Rosie/Alastor’s duet.
I like the way that Hell is literally a crater, a hole in the ground, this pit that people are literally cast into. That’s real biblical. It’s cool that the thing is as large as a giant glowing pentagram and that this pentagram is their entire sky:
The designs of the demons are pretty fun, you can sometimes guess what their sin was based on what they’ve manifested as. The guy that is a sentient talking bloody knife, for example, may have committed a sin relating to stabbing a guy with a knife.
The core cast of characters is generally fun, I enjoy watching them do stuff:
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Charlie is sort of a Twilight Sparkle-lite who is a much-needed counter to the edginess and the awfulness of the sinners under her care. I wish she was more competent, being the daughter of Lucifer and having grown up with sinners her entire life, but it’s easy writing to have her blunder into things by being too optimistic. I like how she is full of hope and optimism but the character would just be way better if she maintained that in spite of most of the people she interacted with, it would make her a lot stronger. I think her panic would fit really nicely into the desperation of her hopeless task, and it’s a bit strange the show doesn’t go back to that well too often. Her mom’s mission to redeem the sinners should seem fucking hopeless a lot of the time.
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Angel Dust is pleasant to have as a typical sinner but one who doesn’t seem like a bad guy. He is mired in vice but it doesn’t really harm anyone, so it feels unjust that he is punished for it. It also feels like he would be miserable in Heaven, which is a thing I wish the show put more stock into - a good deal of conflict should stem from the fact that almost none of these people would actually fit in among those who were allowed past the pearly gates. I love his VA and his song was one of the best this season:
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Alastor obviously is the character the fandom is the most obnoxious about, but I like him when he’s not in the hotel, honestly. His warlord side is quite fun, and he acts like an actual irredeemable demon, which is something I can only really say about Vox and a few other characters in this show. Your show is about demons! Let them be evil! This guy is at his best when he is being extremely cruel, toying with Charlie’s dreams or using people and throwing them away.
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Lucifer’s stock dropped a whole lot this season but I do still enjoy this depiction of the devil as a fallen angel who was clearly of Heaven’s world, who is generally a good dad. The reveal this season that he has no ability to actually harm a sinner is insane, as it just reduces him to an aloof, powerless buffoon, whereas before he was at least a widely-feared buffoon, which is a very fun kind of buffoon to have by my estimation.
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Pentious won me over this season by being a lens through which he took Charlie’s childish ideal and vocalized it as a difficult process of failure and fear that one survives. His love affair with his arch-nemesis is adorable, and I like the detail that he’s from the 1880’s and she’s from the 1980’s. I love that his reason for being cast into Hell is due to inaction and cowardice.
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Rosie’s entire deal as a flapper warlord, and an adept and cruel one, is a delight. I wish she got more screen time, because this show needs more actually evil, actually dangerous demons. People who seem like they deserve to be down in the pit! She feels like she owned her own little world in life and now owns a portion of the Pentagram down in Hell.
Beyond that, just really nice to see tons of gay and lesbian relationships with main cast characters. The two major relationships are Charlie with her girlfriend, and Angel with his boyfriend. Everyone in Hell is utterly without shame, so you get the good and the bad of that concept. Good getting gay bad guys too!
The Ending
It issssssss absolutelyyyyyyy insane that this season ends with everyone joining hands and singing an Equestria Girls friendship song about how they are all unified in soul and hope, and that this creates an Elements of Harmony magic blast that blows away the big bomb that was going to destroy Hell. I kept expecting this to get subverted in some way but nah it’s just a Disney movie.
And I know this whole show is Amazon’s Disney musical! But the entire premise and gimmick here is that these are all horrible sinners who are trying to rise above their doom! You can’t just have everyone involved be genuinely good people who are willing to do exactly the kind of toothless gesture that Heaven would! These are supposed to be edgy arms-crossed fanged-smile gremlins!
It just blew me away that this was what they decided would be a fitting way for the warlord sinners of Hell to win the day.
https://youtu.be/YpjNXkHRTmQ?si=zEnmt9wJlxi1QFsG
This is virtually the ending to every My Little Pony season. You guys got to do a little better than this.
Nice enough song though!
The reveal at the very very end that Lilth will now be speaking to Charlie is truly batshit because that is the exact cliffhanger they left season 1 on. We went an entire season without progressing the story! Not that I minded much but that’s pretty nuts when you step back and look at it.
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Still enjoying Batman Beyond but I’ve also started asking questions like why is Batman using his grappling hook in this instance when he can literally fly now or why is Batman choosing to sneak around and hide from these guys when in the previous episode they established he can make himself literally invisible. Guess the writers were not exactly coordinating with each other on what new things Future Batman would be able to do now with magical future technology.
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to be fair, i can definitely see Grumpy Old Batman mandating his successor make regular use of the classic Batman skills
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from science saru, directed by naoko yamada and abel gongorra, with character designs by kenichi yoshida? know nothing about the manga but i am very excited for this.
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yeah thats the big one for me
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I’m going to be really depressed if their ghost in the shell adaptation isn’t good.
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no lines for ayo edebiri this season… i hope mr worthington finds some time for her in his busy schedule in future
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really interesting 2005 north/south korea animation recently unearthed to the greater web
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