We’ve reached the throwing shit at the wall era
dont matter tbh
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the toonami superman show giving clark a magical girl transformation and making deathstroke a cute bishie is pretty good
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watching some adventure time. its swerves into the surreal and grotesque still feel fresh. got to the episode where princess bubblegum rips off ricardio’s leg and beats him with it until he crawls away
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the gradual loss of the grotesque from CN cartoons was such a bummer for me at the time. Flapjack was revelatory, Adventure Time was grand until it swapped out the surrealism in favor of millennial bathos, steven universe was good but it was so squeaky clean by that point, all it really had left was catfingers and that was one of the earliest episodes.
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It all pales in comparison to Superjail
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superjail gave me the prep i needed for tiktok
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I’ve finished watching all of VOTOMS now, minus Mellowlink which I’ll try to get to eventually. Overall I thought it was pretty good although I have a few spoilery gripes:
Spoilery Gripey Rambles
So they spent most of the TV series presenting Chirico as just a regular nobody soldier who just happens to be surprisingly proficient at surviving anything thrown at him, seemingly just because he has seen so much combat that he is just that good at it.
Then right at the end they reveal actually no, he’s some kind of godlike superhuman ‘Overman’ who is genetically and magically predisposed towards surviving pretty much everything. The entire final arc pretty much goes overboard with magical nonsense which is a far cry from the ‘Apocalypse Now in space’ stuff that filled up the first half of the series. It’s not exactly terrible or anything, and I think it ties in with the themes the show was addressing from the start, but it was pretty far from what I expected based on how it started out.
The main problem with this twist is that it pretty much overrules everything that comes after it. Almost of of the OVAs are entirely centred around Chirico being the most important man in the universe who is an unstoppable force, and they keep building upon this idea until basically they’re explaining that Chirico’s genes can literally alter causality and control the actions of those around him so that bullets always miss etc. He’s able to survive nuclear explosions with only a few scrapes. It sort of ends up making him seem like video game protagonist controlled by a player who’s save scumming and min-maxing to make everything super easy mode.
The other problem is the prequel OVAs suffer from Phantom Menace Syndrome, where they start cramming the backstory with things that overcomplicate and cause inconsistencies. Like Chirico and Rochina apparently already met before the TV series even though they don’t seem familiar with each other in that. And Chirico also already knows he’s a superpowered genetic anomaly, so his shock at the reveal at the end of the TV series no longer makes sense.
The OVAs were generally pretty good though when taken on their own merits. I think I particularly liked the Pailsen Files. The Genei - Phantom Arc series was probably the weakest as it was mostly just nostalgia pandering with a lot of rehashing of situations from the TV series.
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I agree with those gripes! It feels like a consequence of being an 80s mecha series so it almost went to a gundam-ending by default. For me, the highlight of the series are the first two arcs; the last arc is still good but not really the same as the first half of the show
that being said, I don’t think he was supposed to come across as a sort of everyman soldier even from the start. He has a ludicrously high killcount for a nobody, which was at least supposed to hint that he was linked to the Perfect Soldier program by more than just coincidence.
The OVAs sound like they really fuck up the plot so I’m retroactively glad that I haven’t really gotten to checking them out
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mellowlink is the best so it’s cool you saved it for last
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fucked up that no-one’s officially released it in english
I think i heard the masters were lost, so the only way it could get a release these days is via some kind of laserdisc upscale or something
or all on one disc as a sd bluray? that’s fine. i can’t believe anyone would prefer no release at all
i have an encode of mellowlink from bluray that is definitely actual hd video from scans of film it’s probably on nyaa
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oh my god it’s so good at capturing the vibe of being in a band. rick musicians ARE all little malformed weirdos!!
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It’s out (but still no known release date outside Japan)
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Man how is The Wind Rises already ten years ago? Ten years?
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Boro The Caterpillar was only 5 years ago!
I think Boro was 2018, i have a little pull-cord toy caterpillar i bought from the museum when I was there that year