Once it’s published, fuck that.

Floridian here.

We’re not okay.

Oldies

Yeah that’ll happen.

Classic rock

NO CLASSIC ROCK IS A SPECIFIC GENRE GOD DAMMIT EMINEM WILL NEVER QUALIFY BECAUSE HE’S NOT A FUCKING ROCK ARTIST

That site is festooned with annoying clickbait.

Didn’t they finally kiss, like, a month ago? Dude really had zero plans past the will-they-won’t-they.

Honestly, good call.

T3 was interesting only for completing the major types of time-travel story. T1 was a fixed loop. T2 was “screw causality, I’m cancelling the apocalypse!” T3 demanded a self-consistent universe: time travel had already happened, so it must eventually occur. Paradoxes are impossible --> paradoxes don’t matter --> paradoxes get solved.

And listen - if Terminator 2 had sucked, we’d be just as mad about it screwing up The Terminator. ‘It was a perfect loop! She had the Polaroid! How did any of that happen now? Whose kid is that?!’ Fortunately, Terminator 2 fucking rules, so we just roll with the implication of disconnected parallel universes or whatever. It is genuinely difficult to care about the details when everything onscreen is so goddamn cool all of the time.

If Terminator 3 had been anywhere near that good, we’d also be talking about Sarah Conner’s expectations as excellent philosophy but dodgy science fiction. But it’s nnnot. It’s a fat wreck of a movie that turns squeaky preteen delinquent badass John Conner into a whiny loser who does not deserve to be a protagonist. The bad guy is not as cool, because what possibly could be. The plot neither embraces the twist ending as a reveal or nudges the audience with dramatic irony.

It’s five pounds of mediocre ideas rolling around a ten-pound bag. Then they filled the rest with bad CGI. T2 famously had very little CGI, because James Cameron was an effects dork who ascended to writer-director status, and he knew exactly what he could get away with. By 2003 the empty suits pushing this product already thought computers meant they could get away with anything.

It could’ve been good. It just super wasn’t.

The what-if I like to pitch is that the resistance does not send back a terminator. They send back John Conner. So half the movie is Old John and Young John setting up post-apocalyptic supply drops and outsmarting some roving murderbot. Young John is still a drugged-out loser, but more the wiry conman type, dealing with PTSD and paranoia through stimulant abuse and identity theft. Old John is loving life as a mildly precognizant veteran in a city with only one unstoppable killing machine hunting him down.

The philosophical core of this nonexistent movie is that he is being handed more responsibility than any human being ever was, but that he has been uniquely prepared for that trial. His father was the most badass soldier of a ruined wasteland. His mom had the resolve to become a psycho guerrilla ready to fight god. His childhood was an anime assassin’s backstory. And now he’s being given a cheat-sheet for future events. He knows he survives, and that then, he has to come back here and do it all again. That is how much is required to save humanity from the machines.

Ah. You’d figure Google of all companies would be better at catching that. When the second episode of The Amazing Digital Circus premiered, every single comment had an identical reply full of generic trolling.

Recently they’ve made them a tremendous pain in the ass to find and to see, thanks to an absolute dogshit redesign.

And honestly the quality of Youtube comments has been above-average in the last couple years. At least for whatever nerd shit I’ve been watching.

Video needs mandatory licensing, immediately fucking yesterday. Streaming services are a market failure. This situation is not good for consumers, and it’s not even good for the companies. They tricked themselves into ruining an effortless money spigot.

That is some Xavier: Renegade Angel shit.

WeCanSexy, twelve years ago:

cooperate propaganda

Friendly bastards!

Back up. Is one of Sand Land’s main characters basically Jeremy Clarkson’s P45?

They’re remaking an anime that’s both ongoing and comically long?

Oh, probably to shorten it. Because otherwise: what the fuck.

I have a simple explanation that’s more Doylist than Wattsonian:

Anno is kind a dick.

Evangelion is a long series of borderline rug pulls, culminating in possibly the most infamous rug-pull that’s not just “it was a dream.” There was never supposed to be a textual climax and payoff. It was always scripted as a suck-zone for you to care about the characters so you could appreciate the introspective what-ifs in the last few episodes. Like if Tolkien stopping halfway through Return Of The King to say “fantasy is bad, actually.” And then spent six chapters litigating the dynamics of Frodo and Sam’s relationship, because that’s what all this Middle Earth bullshit was really about.

And then the movies and the rebuild are various forms of Anno targeting critics of all perspectives and finding genuinely creative ways to say “fuuuuck yoooou.” Like, thematically? The “curse of Eva” is ingenious. But the whole exercise is a giant middle finger to anyone foolish enough to care about the story he’s telling.

It’s satire that doesn’t work. It’s too functional as a sincere example of the genre it’s aimed at. If the man had been dragged from the studio, kicking and screaming, somewhere after episode nineteen and LCL splashing against a van on the road - if the last half-dozen episodes had been rewritten to play the story out, to its extremely final conclusion - it would still be revered among giant-robot anime. Its influence would be nearly identical. But all the philosophical payload that needs two left-turn episodes to “explain” would be known only to one pouting young director and a few co-writers. Vanishingly little of it is in the work, three-quarters of the way through the work. God help us, if the wrong hired gun took over, “get in the robot” might’ve been Shinji’s major character arc.

Contrast how The Last Jedi leaks “anyone can be a hero” from every seam, despite the finished product being roughly hammered back toward the status quo. Half the parts people like and most of the parts people hate are beautifully attuned to that lost moral. Meanwhile Eva can’t get people to go ‘ohhh, escapism is bad!’ even with two episodes beating them over the head, and a film sequel that spits on everyone who saw it, and a remake that loathes its own existence.

You don’t seem to understand.

Cowboy Bebop is the definition of understanding the assignment. It’s a space western that gets westerns. The good guys are barely scraping by and the bad guys are mostly caught in even rougher circumstances. The protagonists are deliberately flat in a way that makes them crucial actors in other people’s stories. They themselves are stuck. Each of them is trapped at what they think is the end of their own story: Jet betrayed and cut off, Spike marked for death, Faye stranded in the future. They’re alone together.

Also the music is fucking awesome. Late-90s anime benefited tremendously from budgets rising while stuck with ink-on-film production and standard-def broadcasting. Looking any better was really difficult. Sounding better was an easy choice.

No, it’s fitting: Grave of the Fireflies was originally a double feature with My Neighbor Totoro. Traumatizing children out of nowhere is on-brand.

Late-90s anime had tight budgets and fantastic music. Drawing is expensive and it still looked so-so in standard-def. Recording was massively cheaper - especially with computers - and stereo sounded great even on VHS. Audio was a solved problem during the awkward transition from traditional ink-and-film animation to high-definition digital wizardry.

So the original Hellsing (back when the manga had just started) had some occasional Quality™ scenes… but the OST is this jazzy shoegaze affair that’s genuinely better than in Hellsing Ultimate.

Elfen Lied, which I wouldn’t call bad but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend, opens with this unreservedly fantastic choral piece over overt homages to Gustav Klimt.