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choosing the true chaos route for my first viewing of legends of the galactic heroes by watching both adaptations simultaneously
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i love dynazenon what a great anime
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See you space dragon! I like gridman’s antagonists’ arc a lot more and it was really that series’ strength but as far as protagonists go I like Dynazenon better, although I feel Gauma had a lot of unexploited potential after the first episode.
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DYNAZENON really is incredible. i forgot the episode would launch today, so it was a nice surprise.
some of the tiniest moments really tugged at my heartstrings . . .
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I’m kinda torn on DYNAZENON. In many ways I feel it has better characters and a stronger emotional core but feels a little to light for me. I wish a few more things were said outright between some characters. Alot of characters problems were set up and outside of Yume they don’t feel as strongly resolved outside of being real life problem that are tackled in inches than dramatic miles. I feel like I’m missing something when it comes to the thematics of the kaiju and the eugenicists. They say they’re created from the emotions of humans so that makes it seem like there will be a near endless supply of them but then ups and says there will be no more like humans have conquered their emotions or something. I’m sure alot of it would mean more if I’d seen original Gridman in full so I would catch a few more nods outside of the first 4 I’ve seen.
It’s still an amazing toy commercial with alot of heart put into almost everything it has.
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it was interesting how dynazenon worked within the gridman universe but was generally wholly unconcerned with the logic or rules of it, being almost purely a character study about these people who can only reach actualization via giant monster fights. the context of the city being constantly destroyed (as opposed to being reset like in gridman) didn’t really even register much outisde if koyomi trying to save his pals husband or the mention of the victims at the very end. it’s like the logic of sentai battle collateral damage viewed at such a weird angle. i wonder if there’s another ssss show if knight and second will just continue to travel from world to world or if yomogi having “dominated” sizumu or having the powers of a kaiju eugenicist will come into play. it almost feels like this wasn’t one of the grid worlds or the “real world” from ssss gridman just like a seperate dimension of it’s own. i do feel like the eugenicists character arcs felt sort of incomplete or half baked to a degree. this show just has me buzzing thinking about it. i’m sure half of this is explained in some art book or japanese wiki or something
Emotions aren’t enough, you also need kaiju cores, which a still unknown hand spread all over the city all the way back in the very first minute of episode 1. They soak up human emotions and grow into kaiju. In a way it’s kinda crazy they never even mention them directly, you have to infer it from Goldburn growing from the one Chise picked up or remember there was one at the heart of each of Akane’s sculptures in SSSS Gridman. The original Gridman isn’t much help for that bit because kaiju worked differently there.
The main thing from the original Gridman that’s interesting to know in regards to Dynazenon is that episode 18 was about an ancient chinese mummy, of a dragon tamer who fought for an ancient kingdom and fell in love with their princess but was ultimately betrayed and killed. The princess buried him with a number of dragon-shaped objects then committed suicide to join him in death. The mummy was temporarily revived by the kaiju of the day but could only unsuccessfully search for his princess. A dragon statue buried with him was the inspiration for the episode’s new assist weapon, the dragonic cannon which is also the core of the further power up dyna dragon.
Of course the mummy is Gauma, the statue is Dynazenon and so people could mostly suss out Gauma’s arc from the get go kinda like how you could guess some character relationships in SSSS Gridman if you’d read the right convention-only transformers comic. Also should you be wondering about a mirror they’re talking about in episode 11 that’s just bad subs and they’re talkin about the mummy, mira in japanese (the disappearance of which is actually first mentioned in episode 1).
It was announced at the end of dynazenon, actually! But only on the broadcast version. We only know it’ll feature both Gridman and Dynazenon, no idea when further details will be revealed although apparently there’s a Tsuburaya convention soon. Trigger’s next show is Cyberpunk Edgerunners, a poster of which can be seen in the school festival.
I didn’t get the kaiju eugenicists until the final conversation with Shizumu, but their whole thing is they actively avoid connecting with people, it’s what gives them power (just like how Akane isolated herself). Presumably, Yomogi having chosen his bonds over kaiju in the end means he’s lost the ability to dominate kaiju, just like Gauma originally lost his by choosing his love for the princess.
Ultimately I attribute the visual parallels between the Gridman and Dynazenon cities to the whole toku-but-anime thing going on. After all, in Kamen rider or the Ultra series it’s often supposed to be different cities but they constantly reuse the same shooting locations. Kinda like the not-quite-joke of the episode 6 kaiju requiring two dominators because in a live series it’d be a two persons costume.
The relationship of the show to trigger’s 2016 series Kiznaiver is also interesting. The basic idea is the same, of a group of unsocialized teens who had to learn empathy and eventually friendship by having an unnatural bond forced upon them (not a robot dragon but networked pain in their case, through a S-shaped scar they shared) but it’s easily Trigger’s second weakest show (despite a great opening and character designs) and Dynazenon feels like redoing it right.
It amuses me a lot because I remember they mentioned way back then that Kiznaiver had been planned as something much “more Trigger” with monsters and fights and stuff but whoever was in charge decided to aim for something “more normal”. Imaishi made Luluco on the side because he felt very strongly about the idea that attempting to be “normal” is absurd. In the end, Luluco was good and Kiznaiver wasn’t, but years later we get a sorta-Kiznaiver with monsters and a giant robot dragon and what do you know, it works much better (I guess it helps that it’s also much better written).
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The final stretch with the shared scars instantly resurfaced the experience of watching kiznaiver. It almost felt like a bad joke having to remember that it existed. Now that you mentioned it it really felt like they wanted to turn it into some kind of Sentai show until they decide to just leave it up to Mari Okada.
Ok, that really helped put things in perspective. The show never really explored the motivations of the villians so they just feel like stock toku villians because we need villians. This opposed to Akane that we at least knew what was driving her if not the exact reason til the end. Granted it’s not hard to find reasons to hate humanity but you still never really knew where they were coming from.
I also didn’t catch that seeds where a catalyst to get kaiju and kinda just assumed they were just a “natural” process that preceded the kaiju.
i finished the castlevania show, i’m glad they are continuing it in a more creative way rather than just tacking another story on to the very conclusive ending of s4. i still think the show has very irritating pacing issues and lots of clunky dialogue, but overall i still enjoyed it.
near the end of the last season i started thinking about how it was weird that there was a very specific reference to death that wasn’t followed up on at all and then it was later that episode thatdeath reveals himself, so that was pretty cool. one of the few plot based things that i actually thought worked really well.
i mainly just found it really weird that every episode would jump back and forth between all of the different subplots. i think it would have worked better if they just devoted full episodes to each of the characters’ stories, because they don’t really intersect that much or resonate thematically with one another or whatever. also a lot of the stuff with hector didn’t really go anywhere, and it was a weird choice to delay alucard reuniting with the rest of them for so long. also grant danasty erasure 
the biggest disappointment for me was st germain’s arc in the last season. i feel like it kind of works in the abstract but the character doesn’t really sell it. idk. maybe if some of the back story with his girlfriend was more compelling it would be better?i get that he is sort of supposed to parallel dracula in that regard but it just felt like a lesser imitation / afterthought
but anyway posting mainly to say how my appreciation of the writing has increased a ton by realizing how much of the stuff in the show is adapted from the games, which i’m not super familiar with. unexpectedly relies a lot on stuff from curse of darkness, a game that i didn’t think anyone actually played. it’s pretty cool how the castlevania games mythos takes a lot of stuff from vampire lore and other medieval occult things but changes them pretty recklessly, then the show incorporates some of those elements but also brings back in some of the historical stuff the games took out st germain going from real life alchemist → video game time traveller → cartoon time traveling alchemist, etc
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yeah I didn’t realize at all that a lot of the side characters all came from the one PS2 game that’s also in the castlevania 3 chronology, then I looked into that game and everything about it is atrocious, so honestly hat’s off to them for the use of the source material
100% agree with this though, the fourth season’s villain arc was the only thing in the whole show that I felt didn’t come together
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I really enjoyed the show a huge amount and as I reflected on why I think a substantial part of it was that it was written originally in English. The characters could have muttered asides and little ejaculations that all flowed perfectly naturally out of the dialogue, and they were precisely animated too. Made me wish I knew Japanese to watch anime.
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see: final fantasy 9
Peter Chung has upped two episodes of Æon Flux in high-def to his Vimeo.
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did people on here already talk about the great pretender? i’ve only watched the first 5 episodes so far but it’s pretty cool. i was surprised by how ‘right’ their version of los angeles felt despite being set in very cliche neighborhoods, it still felt more like the real versions of those places than the way “BEVERLY HILLS” (etc) usually appears in media.
i am sort of getting a kick out of how much of it seems to be about the constant humiliation and bullying of the protagonist, over and over again. it feels sort of like an entirely hazing-based heist structure which is weird. it will probably get old soon though.
New Godzilla show seems unobjectionable, which is to say a mild miracle for anime
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