the message in the bottle is the booze

I know everyone knows, but oh my god.

Evangelion was such a big part of my early nerdhood. I had all of the episodes on VHS - probably still do, somewhere. I had a wall scroll of Rei turning into an Angel and making the world into soup.

I understand it a lot better now than I did back then. I don't know if I should watch it again!

omfg guys she's doing it again.

that attention whore sudaki has written another stupid post complaining about my bleach fics. no one's making her read them! for someone who claims to have better things to do with her time she spends a lot of time obsessing about what i do!

Listen, you stinky fish taco:

1. if you don't like kenpachi/byakuya, DON'T READ

2. if you don't like vampires, DON'T READ

3. if you don't like scrabble, DON'T READ

its not rocket science. i can write what i want and you can NOT READ IT. i don't want people like you reading it anyway. you might get your stupidity all over it.

Second, even if you could use proper nouns in Scrabble (and you can't)

you can totally use proper nouns in scrabble now. but you didn't know that, cuz you probably can't even read british, just like you can't read japanese (everyone knows you're a liar).

and yes they can play scrabble in soul society if they want to. i don't expect a zaraki/hanataro shipper to notice details but in chapter 83 ichigo brings them the board. and i put in a warning for explicit scrabble anyway so WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT.

Even if Kenpachi was turned into a vampire I don't think he'd cry about it, but [personal profile] kutsuwamushi has him crying EVERY SCENE. Literally.

that's because my kenpachi is in touch with his feelings. your kenpachi is just a stereotype which is why you pair him with someone boring like hanatarou, so they can be boring stereotypes togehter. my kenpachi has depth and emotion! and he's a vampire so of course he's crying all the time, that's what it's like being a vampire, haven't you ever seen the tom cruise movie?

i didn't have anything against zaraki/hanataro shippers until you came along and proved they're all delusional.

Take that, Edward Cullen.

There seem to be two animated versions of Hellsing. I thought I would try this one, because I couldn't remember if it sucked or not, and because someone on Netflix said it was the version truer to the manga.

So far it has been mostly pulled from the manga, just slightly rearranged. It loses something in the transition, though. The animation shortcuts make it drastically less creepy, and attempts to emulate the style of the manga fall flat. I'm not sure if the visual style of Hellsing is suited to animation, but a decent attempt would require a bigger budget. And more imagination.

That and condensing the storyline made it even more stupid. We have two things: clumsy exposition, and violence. The manga is completely ridiculous, but it has something that makes it entertaining all the same. Style, a bit of a story... Not so much this anime.

I think I'll remove the rest of this from my Netflix queue unless someone says, "no, wait, it gets better!"

---

MEANWHILE, IN THE SPACE CRAVAT ANIME, A LOT HAS HAPPENED.

When I last watched, the Tytanian dukes were embarrassing themselves by losing important battles to various types of riffraff: pirates, doctors of philosophy, men with no cravats. Fan Hyulick, a member of he latter category, had been particularly annoying, and so Tytania was after him.

Alses, Duke Zarlish's horrible little brother - from now own referred to as "the squid" - captured the woman in stupid pants and decided to use her as bait.

It backfired, because he sucks.


Fan Hyulick rescues the plot device. Kind of.

( The rest of this post contains spoilers. )

Winry is hot.

So I didn't like the first two episodes very much. I thought that there are too many important plot points crammed haphazardly into too short a time frame.

Now I'm up to episode six and I'm starting to like it more.

The storytelling flows better, although it's still moving at a very fast pace. Things are revealed in episode six of Brotherhood that are kept until episode sixteen in the original anime. It has all been streamlined: filler cut, story condensed. This isn't universally bad, but I feel like I'm not really being given time to become attached to the characters before Important Plot happens.

I'm appreciating the updated animation, especially during fight scenes.

Although...

I feel like I'm being pandered to. The increased emphasis on the painful parts of the plot--how they're telegraphed in advance, how there's no time to rest between blows--it's as if the creators are proclaiming "THIS R SERIOUS ANIME" in a very loud voice. The original was better balanced.

I've been watching the original and the new one concurrently, which makes the differences stand out even more.

Episode seven is in the download queue. I'm really looking forward to when Brotherhood substantially diverges, which it hasn't yet.

It took so little time for me to give up on the Antique Bakery anime. One minute and eleven seconds, to be exact.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the original manga, it's a charming series about four men who work in a pastry shop in Japan: the owner, who mysteriously detests sweet food; the homosexual pastry chef who has a mile-long trail of broken hearts behind him; the apprentice, a former boxer who had to quit boxing due to injury; and finally, the owner's manservant, who works as a waiter because he isn't good at anything else.

It's written by Yoshinaga Fumi, who turns almost everything into gold with her delicate touch.

The first thing that I noticed about the anime is that the art is bad. On top of it being strikingly bad, it doesn't bear any resemblance to Yoshinaga's style at all. It took me a moment to realize that the guy having a nightmare-slash flashback on the couch is supposed to be one of the main characters.

When I realized that it was Tachibana on the couch, reliving his most painful memory, at one minute and eleven seconds in -- that was when I gave up. I knew that they had missed the point. I could image the writers going, "Hey, these emotional conflicts are too subtle and nuanced. What we really need is some more melodrama and some tiny violins!"

I kept watching a little while longer to see just how bad it could be. There was nothing as horrible as the beginning, but even the scenes that were copied directly from the manga seemed off. There are a lot of reasons why I thought they were off, but it's late, and what it boils down to is that even in its best moments the anime is only a pale imitation of the manga; it adds nothing worthwhile to the experience of the story.

In summary: Tiny violins are too crunchy and do not go good with cake.