For better or for worse, S2 of BoFuri doesn't bring much of anything new to the table. That is to say that if you enjoyed the first season, you will enjoy this one, too. They're pretty much the exact same thing. Simultaneously, if you thought S1 was not for you, this installment will not redeem shit. Be at peace and move on.
The only tangible change I could detect was that of my own deteriorating enjoyment of the series. S2 reveals an unintended consequence of releasing anime in a seasonal format, rather than continuously, as scores of old anime used to. Because it is released separately,
...
rather than a simple continuation, which is what it actually is, the new installment ends up feeling like more of a sequel. This represents an important difference in nuance that cannot be dismissed out of hand.
There is a fundamentally different set of expectations in play when the show goes from BoFuri episode 12 to BoFuri episode 13, versus when it goes from BoFuri episode 12 to BoFuri season 2 episode 1. Like it or not, when you wait months, maybe even years for a new season, you can't help but build expectations to see something new and exciting, rather than just have the story pick back up where it left off and go on as though nothing happened.
Unfortunately, that's exactly what BoFuri does. It just kind of keeps going and nothing really happens, because all of the investigation of the in-universe laws and concepts was already over and done with by the end of the first season. There's nothing left to explore. It's no longer a fantasy adventure show, but rather just slice-of-life – video game slice-of-life of life with no shortage of action, to be sure, but slice-of-life of life nonetheless, because nothing matters anymore. There are no more stakes, because all of the players from the 3 main guilds are friends now. So, you literally get to just sit there and watch them honest-to-God play a terribly designed video game and hang out for 4 hours. Had this been a 2 cour show with 24 episodes instead of 2 seasons of 12, I'm sure I wouldn’t have felt as disappointed.
Granted, you might say that vydja slice-of-life is the whole point of this show. I’ve no argument with you there. Correct, that is indubitably the whole point. I'm just saying what I'm saying to set expectations accordingly.
Mind you, I am also not suggesting that I have a solution for the inadvertent repercussion of the seasonal release format. This is just me pointing out that the problem exists – simply consider it food for thought. I'm certainly not advocating going back to the perpetual weekly broadcast paradigm, especially not when considering the pacing of modern One Piece and Black Clover – and I would rather get waterboarded than see another Naruto filler episode.
What I will say in defense of BoFuri’s second installment is that it's not a cocktease in terms of Maple’s power-ups and abilities. The show won't surreptitiously forget that she can do all that OP bullshit in order to nerf her and introduce tension, as so many other shows are known to do. “Oh, no! I have no idea how to balance this overpowered ability I've given this character and I can't write around it. Never mind, just pretend it never happened!” And you're left there wondering, hold on a minute, why is this character struggling here? Why doesn't he just use that super powerful ability again? No, in the case of Maple, you will get to see it all again as much and as many times as you like, Predator, Loving Sacrifice, Atrocity, Hydra, Machine God, the whole 9 yards.
If anything, for the first couple of episodes, I felt as though the show was being too liberal in showcasing her abilities, but then I remembered, nothing that's happening matters. It's just cutesy moeshit that’s not meant to be serious or go anywhere. It's just supposed to make you feel good about yourself for a little while. Sure enough, she will gain additional broken skills and abilities during this season, as well, but none of them really felt as memorable to me as the aforementioned ones from S1.
Far and away the best thing about it were some of the new zones and vistas. In a select few scenes, the background art gave birth to some environments that I couldn't help but wonder how much cooler and more fascinating they would have been in a story with an actual narrative that was capable of putting them to good use.
As such, I can say I had a decently good time with it, and if you thought the previous installment was nice, then why not give this one the good ol’ college try? Though I must admit, I certainly had to make a conscious effort to stay engaged and watch the next episode every time, rather than let myself get distracted by other, ostensibly more interesting things. There really just wasn't that much to this sequel.
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Feb 29, 2024 Recommended
For better or for worse, S2 of BoFuri doesn't bring much of anything new to the table. That is to say that if you enjoyed the first season, you will enjoy this one, too. They're pretty much the exact same thing. Simultaneously, if you thought S1 was not for you, this installment will not redeem shit. Be at peace and move on.
The only tangible change I could detect was that of my own deteriorating enjoyment of the series. S2 reveals an unintended consequence of releasing anime in a seasonal format, rather than continuously, as scores of old anime used to. Because it is released separately, ...
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Feb 29, 2024
Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu
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Legend of the Galactic Heroes is famed as the best anime ever made. Any self-respecting anime connoisseur is expected to have Legend of the Galactic Heroes on their "to watch" list in order to be granted entry into the Elite Weeb Club. Mind you, you don't have to actually watch Legend of the Galactic Heroes. You merely need to state your intent to watch Legend of the Galactic Heroes. "Come again? Legend of the Galactic Heroes? Of course I plan to watch Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Legend of the Galactic Heroes is definitely on my list!" Thus, your Elite Weeb status is assured.
In effect, ... that's what most of the hype surrounding Legend of the Galactic Heroes (sorry, I just wanted to say it again) is – posturing. There aren't that many people who know about it, and there are fewer still who have actually seen it. Truth be told, it is an odd show. LotGH, as I will be calling it forthwith, started out as a series of novels written by Yoshiki Tanaka-sensei in the 80s. It then got adapted into manga form, and over the course of the late 80s and 90s, it was turned into an OVA. The odd part is the fact that it is an OVA. For those not in the know, OVA stands for original video animation. It refers to direct-to-video anime productions that, for one reason or another, were not televised on any public network. OVAs are usually very short, running for anywhere from an episode to maybe a dozen. A 110-episode OVA is virtually unheard of. As to why LotGH was released as an OVA, I can only speculate. It's conceivable that its contents were deemed unbroadcastable at the time, as there is occasional gore, but I doubt it. I would rather lean towards the theory that the content was thought of as too high-concept for children to be interested in or even understand. Claim as we might that "anime is not for kids", as we are often known to do, let us be honest with ourselves. The main audience of anime is in fact children. Nevertheless, irrespective of whether or not there was anxiety about its potential reception, the actual reception of LotGH enabled it to be later shown on television and the series has seen multiple releases on both DVD and Blu-ray formats. The studio credited as responsible for LotGH is Kitty Films, a production company established in 1972. Starting out as music producers and branching out into live action films in 1979, it wasn't until 1981 that they made their first foray into anime production. Over the next 2 decades, they would become mainly known for producing most of the animated versions of Rumiko Takahashi's manga, such as Urusei Yatsura and Ranma ½. However, in spite of their fame as producers, the actual animation of Kitty Films' works was handled by several independent anime studios, some of which exist today. Hence, I tentatively called them "the studio credited as responsible". The studio they got to animate LotGH for them is none other than Madhouse, the one and only. Having now joined the patrician ranks of the blessed few who have actually seen this marvel, I must say that the only way to ascend out of weeb plebdom is to actually experience this epic, for LotGH is not a story you watch or read. It is one you experience. Even now, as I sit here, I find myself hesitant to even write this essay, for I feel like if I finish it, this chapter of my life will be over. I will be forced to contend with the cruel reality that I have in fact finished the series and move on. I don't want to do that. I can't bear the thought that the journey is over. It cannot be! For what it is worth, allow me to confirm the veracity of the show's fame once and for all. I'll be damned if this isn't in fact the absolute best anime ever made. Take it from me, a veteran of over 600 shows, there isn't anything in the medium that even comes close to this. I never thought a day would come when another show would dethrone One Piece from the number 1 spot in my heart, but here we are. LotGH is now my 2nd favorite thing ever, just above One Piece and well below Lord of the Rings. Taking place somewhere approximately after the year 3500, LotGH tells the story of a never-ending interstellar war that has already been raging on for over 150 years between the democratic Free Planet Alliance and the autocratic Galactic Empire – the Alliance and the Empire for short. As far as the Alliance is concerned, its founding ideals have long been lost to the void of history, and it has now all but degenerated into a cesspool of diversity, corruption, demagoguery, and egoism where cynical politicians spend all livelong day making impassioned speeches about how other people's children ought to be put through the meat grinder of war. Naturally, all of this is enabled by an irresponsible and arrogant citizenry who seems capable of little more than sheep-like allegiance to- and idolatry of a flag and the values for which it no longer stands and they no longer hold. Just you wait until episode 3 when you get to hear their national anthem. I've never heard a more on-the-nose parody of The Star-Spangled Banner before. The Galactic Empire, on the other hand, is represented as a refined, noble society with a clearly established aristocratic system, characterized by all the decorum such a social order entails. In contrast to the outlandish futuristic civilizations you may have come to expect from other sci-fi franchises, the Empire opts instead for the traditionalist aesthetic of a medieval monarchy. Still, in spite of the gentle, high-class, blue-blooded front it puts forward, the Imperial court is not bereft of its own malcontents, malignant plots, and bourgeoisie decadence. Though never described as such, the Alliance and Empire respectively are as thinly-veiled allegories as they come for the United Stated of America and the pre-1918 German Empire. Additionally, there is one more independent planet that has succeeded in maintaining its neutrality in the conflict, the Dominion of Fezzan. With no military force to speak of and populated mostly by merchants - I kid you not, it is literally described as a nation of merchants - the lone nation-planet nonetheless boasts an incredible degree of political influence due to the vast amounts of wealth it has garnered by monopolizing trade with both belligerent factions. Other than garden-variety usury and war profiteering, they engage in more than their fair share of manipulation, blackmail, and galactic-scale conspiracies. So, in a nutshell, we're talking about a galactic war between Space America and Space Germany with Space Israel wedged in the middle manipulating and conspiring. The downside of watching classic anime late, especially really old series, is that your experience of watching everything else up to that point is incomplete. For example, when I finally got around to watching Neon Genesis Evangelion, I was shocked to retroactively realize how many shows I had seen that tried to copy it. Any Eva clone I watched after that, I saw in a different light, a more complete light. It's like watching Jujutsu Kaisen without watching Bleach. Accordingly, I wish I had seen LotGH before I watched Death Note and Code Geass. While Code Geass perhaps more closely imitates the general aesthetic of the space opera, and Lelouch vi Britannia more closely resembles Legends' protagonist than any other anime protagonist in existence, if you've seen Death Note, it will give you the best understanding of the dynamic between the two main narrative focal points of the epic. There is not a shadow of a doubt in my mind that Yagami Light and L were directly based on the duo of Reinhard von Lohengramm and Yang Wen-li. The main engine propelling this tale forward is Reinhard von Lohengramm, the young rising star of the Empire, or "blonde brat" as his detractors call him, who, through his unparalleled strategic and tactical genius, has achieved the rank of High Admiral in the Imperial fleet at age of 20, the youngest ever. Much like Lelouch in C.C. and Light in Ryuk, Reinhard also has a partner in crime in his childhood best friend and confidant, Siegfried Kircheis. Largely uninterested by people's judgements of him, the young genius’ sole ambition is to rescue his sister, Annerose, from the clutches of the Emperor, who took her as his consort by Imperial decree when Reinhard was still very young. Unable and unwilling to accept the notion of his sister being relegated to a life of sexual servitude for evermore, together with Siegfried, he tirelessly toils to rise through the ranks of the Empire's military and one day liberate her - but his ambition does not stop there. Reinhard believes it is his destiny to grasp the breath of the galaxy within his hands and create the kind of world where his sister will be able to live in peace, free from anyone's despotic whims and desires. While this may all seem pretty standard at first glance, as the story unfolds, you get to explore the depth of young Lohengramm's character and the complexity of his motivations, which is a journey you and him will embark upon together, because just as you are trying to understand him, he must walk his own path to understand himself. Just like you and me and any man on Earth, or the galaxy in this case, he is not completely known to himself. Moreover, what is crystal clear is that stagnation is anathema for Reinhard. As he advances and fulfills his goals, new ambitions and motivations will constantly arise, many of which he may have considered preposterous before or never even given a second thought, but as the environment around him changes, so does his Weltanschauung. Meanwhile, on the Alliance side, we have the prodigal young commodore, Yang Wen-li. Though a brilliant leader and tactician, he holds a deep personal loathing for conflict and violence. It was his dream to become a historian and study the lessons humanity can learn from its past. Alas, due to his humble origins, he could not afford conventional higher education. The only way he could benefit from higher education at all was by enrolling into the Free Planet Alliance Officer Academy. Unfortunately, since there is no such thing as free education. The students who did not possess the material means to cover their tuition fees were contractually obligated to enlist upon graduation. Though Yang, himself, never intended to serve any longer than he needed to in order to pay back his tuition costs and secure his pension, the brass had other plans for him. Seeing as he was the sole tactical mind in the whole of the FPA who could hope to hold a candle to the Empire's golden-haired rising star, circumstances forced him to take upon himself ever greater responsibilities within the military and lead precisely the kind of life of bloodshed he despised. The tragic irony of Yang’s life is that he is a historian wannabe who is unfortunately destined to make history himself. In essence, we're dealing with an active protagonist who willingly seeks power and glory versus a passive antagonist who has power and glory unwillingly thrust upon him. By shifting one's point of view, one could even say that me calling Reinhard the protagonist and Yang the antagonist is nothing more than my own interpretation. In actual fact, there is no obvious side to root for here. Neither side are the de facto good guys or the de facto bad guys. At times, one side or other may be the underdog, but that's no measure of moral worthiness. Both Yang and Reinhard are extremely compelling and magnetic characters. The choice is yours. Whomsoever you like more, that one becomes the protagonist. As if to make my point, all opening credits are about Reinhard and the Empire. Concordantly, all ending credits are about Yang and the Alliance. There is no wrong answer. As an aside, all opening songs are sung by Hitomi Konno. They are all pleasant in their own right, but they are certainly not the series' forte. Conversely, all ending songs are sung by Ogura Kei. Much the same can be said about his performances, though he has a very unique and unusual voice in terms of anime singers. The exception is the very first ED of the show, Hikari no Hashi wo Koete, which is accurately translated in English as Cross the Bridge of Light. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard. I could not tell you how many times I've listened to it on repeat while daydreaming or writing. One aspect of LotGH a prospective viewer might be intimidated by is the sheer size of its cast. Certainly, at face value, a plentiful cast of characters is not necessarily anything to shy away from. One Piece, for instance, boasts well over 1100 unique named characters at this point. Compared to that number, LotGH is like a baby. However, OP doesn’t start out with 1.1k characters. In the first episode, you’re essentially only dealing with 3, Luffy, Coby, and Alvida. Then, a couple of episodes later, 3 more are introduced, Zoro, Helmeppo, and Morgan, and after a few more episodes, a few more, and so on, and so forth. The point I am making is that it eases the viewer – you – into it and gives him or her time to acclimate to each new face. LotGH, on the other hand, makes a bold statement with well over a couple dozen characters right out the gate. Anyone who is anyone in this universe, whenever they appear on screen, will have their name and rank or title appear under their face so as to inform or remind the viewer of who they are. You will see a whole bunch of complicated names appear on screen as early as episode 1. Even the first opening, about half of it is a type of slideshow where each character’s face will fade in on screen, they’ll turn to look towards the camera, they’ll smile or make some sort of face, and then the next one will fade in, and then the next one, and the next one, and the one after that. There’s no way you’ll be able to remember them all. Furthermore, since LotGH opts for more realistic character design, as anime character design goes, the characters might even look and feel difficult to tell apart in the first place. Evidently, I’m not suggesting LotGH is photo-realistic or anything. It’s an animation through and through, but it looks a lot more grounded than something like, say, Yu-Gi-Oh!, which is to say no giant eyes or edgy spiky coiffures. What this means for the cast of LotGH is that, since they don’t have the wild and crazy differences in design that anime characters usually benefit from, like anatomically incoherent proportions and candy-colored hair, you might worry that you won’t be able to distinguish between them. Sure enough, from the very beginning, the opening introduces you to 4 separate characters with similarly short brown haircuts. How will you ever be able to tell who is who?! The good news is that you don’t need to. The show neither requires, nor expects you to remember every face or name from the first episode. The simple fact of the matter is that all of these characters are so individually well developed that – forget waiting until the end of the show – by episode 20 or so, you’ll know them all. You may not remember all of their names, especially not last names and all that jazz, but you’ll know their faces. You’ll know exactly who they are. “Oh, that’s the dude who did this! That’s the dude who said that! That’s the dude who’s in charge of the other!” Trust me. After watching it, I guarantee that names like Kircheis, Mittermeyer, Reuenthal, Mariendorf, Oberstein, Bittenfeld, Minci, Bucock, Cazellnu, Truniht, Poplan, Schönkopf, and many others will be eternally burned into your memory – let alone the protagonist and antagonist duo. In particular, I was shocked by the intensity of the emotions Legends drew out of me for some of these characters. The political charades feel so real and hit so close to home, that you’ll grow to hate some of the politicians with just as much zeal and passion as you hate Trump, or Clinton, or Xi Jinping, or Kim Jong Un, or Bush, or Putin, or Zelensky, or any other real politician you can name that you have mixed feelings about. An indispensable aid in this adventure is doubtlessly the narrator. Narrators are a somewhat controversial topic in the realm of visual storytelling. In all fairness, they can be somewhat hit or miss. Nobody wants to hear another Resident Evil movie narration. I understand that. But in a production with twice the scope of Game of Thrones and a fraction of the budget, the presence of a narrator was arguably inevitable, necessary even. Fulfilling this role, Yara Yuusaku does a fantastic job of keeping the audience’s eye on the ball, so to speak. His ability to grip your focus and imbue the events he’s talking about with the kind of meaning that forces you to care about them is remarkable, to say the least. Mostly heard from at the beginnings and endings of episodes, the script has a way of allowing him to beautifully contextualize the various narrative threads being unraveled all across the universe at any given time. You will always know what’s going on, where, who’s involved, why, and where each character stands in relation to another- interpersonally, but also physically. The only thing that undeniably annoyed me about the narration was the constant reminder of what the date is, specifically the year. You see, the Empire and the Alliance use different calendars. As such, our valiant narrator will constantly, and I mean constantly, every God damn episode, remind you of what year it is by Empire reckoning & then also by Alliance reckoning. It just got exasperating after a while. Even so, it behooves one to not make the mistake of assuming that poor Yuusaku-san is constantly talking and expositing. Most of the exposition is, in fact, carried out by the characters themselves, but the interesting point here is that the characters actually talk to each other. You might be wondering, what’s the big deal with that? Whom else would they talk to? The viewer, of course. Ask yourself, how many times have you watched a movie or a TV show where 2 or more characters are having a conversation, and you hear them relay to each other information that it is so painfully obvious they already know, that the whole thing becomes a transparent exercise in just expositing to the audience? Alternatively, take names for instance. Ever see that scene in a movie or a TV show, usually at the beginning – The Promised Neverland comes to mind – where characters will be talking to each other and incessantly using each other’s names every single time they address one another? Think about it, when’s the last time you used your best friend’s name in a direct conversation with him or her? Yeah, I get it, guy, you’re a lazy writer and have no confidence in your audience, so you want to beat them over the head with the characters’ names early. How compelling. Not the case here – Legend of the Galactic Heroes does not treat its viewers like children. Characters address each other with information that is relevant to them, not us. If a character makes a moral argument to another, it is not a veiled attempt to just lecture the audience, with the other character just myopically sitting there and taking it. The other character will actually respond and, get this, make his own case, just like in a real conversation. When’s the last time you’ve seen fictional characters have an ideological debate that does not come across as having a foregone conclusion? Again, these characters are not sounding boards for the author to talk to the audience. They feel like real people who actually have something to say to each other, not us. Even on the rare occasion when already known expository information is relayed, it is still not simply for the audience’s benefit, but rather masterfully wrapped in a believable package of characters discussing it in more depth and revealing new and interesting information. In a show that is as trivia-heavy and in as desperate need of exposition as LotGH, to succeed in making the delivery of all that information feel natural and genuinely fascinating is nothing short of a magic trick. In particular, episodes 40 and 56 take the form of legitimate documentaries. The in-universe justification is that a particular young main character, who is going through a coming-of-age journey of his own, is in transit between two locations both times and, during his journey, he decides to study some of humanity’s history. So, you get to literally watch these documentaries about LotGH’s fictional history together with him. In LotGH’s timeline, human civilization became starborne in the year 2801. Episode 40 is a bona-fide fake documentary with fake expert interviews and the whole 9 yards about the course that human civilization has taken since the year 2801, up until the story’s present day. Episode 56 is a bona-fide fake documentary with fake expert interviews and the whole 9 yards about the history of human civilization on Earth from our time, up until the year 2801. I was transfixed! While, to my mind, episode 40 is undoubtedly the more interesting one, they are both fascinating in their own right and offer some political insights that are more astute than anything coming out of professional political commentators today who, as it were, do it for a living. Even if you’re not overly keen on watching the entire show, I would implore you to at the very least watch these 2 episodes. Yes, you can watch them completely out of context. You don’t need to know anything about the present-day story or characters, nor do these episodes spoil anything in that regard. Think of these like fictional documentaries about the formation of Star Trek’s Federation or about the Romulan War. You wouldn’t have to know anything about Kirk or Picard to understand and enjoy those. Speaking of Star Trek, I know I made the tongue-in-cheek reference to Star Wars earlier, but if I had to describe what LotGH feels like, it would be classic Star Trek. Not the modern remakes – no, I mean Gene Roddenberry’s old school Star Trek. It feels less like some power-fantasy action romp where it’s all about the one dude and how tough he is, how hard he can punch, how quickly he can swing his lightsaber, or how powerful he can make his energy beam, but rather more like a galactic game of chess. The action is less kinetic and more cerebral, and therein lies the strength of the show – and the weakness, to be sure, but we’ll get to that later. It’s mostly about what the characters think and say, and the lion’s share of the action takes place on the bridge of the various ships featured. You will witness the captain give an order, and then you get to see the magic happen. Upon which, in no time at all, you’ll be back on the bridge and the captain will once again be reacting to new information, mulling things over, making decisions, and that will keep you perpetually on the edge of your seat wondering how he will deal with this or how he will counter that. Word of warning about emotional attachment, anyone can die in LotGH. While this may understandably displease a younger audience, it is certainly an aspect that will agree with most mature audiences. Especially since we’re not talking about it being taken to cartoonish extremes like in Song of Ice and Fire, where Martin deliberately kills off beloved characters just to grief his audience and inflate his own ego by reminding himself that he has that kind of power over his readers, which ironically makes the deaths predictable. In the case of Tanaka-sensei’s epic, the death algorithm religiously plays by the rules of war – random, indiscriminate, unfair, and invariably tragic – in an attempt to make the subject matter as real and believable as possible. The sense of loss is always palpable. I started rewatching the show after finishing it and I was shocked to see just how many characters present in the first episodes bite the dust before long. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of LotGH is the fact that it presents the audience with a kaleidoscope of philosophical and political views, which are all developed and argued for in a sophisticated manner. Stories that present the reader or viewer with various opposing ideologies are a dime a dozen, but there's rarely any exploration of either. They'll just saddle you with the pointless knowledge that, yeah, this character has this ideology and that character has that ideology, but it's not like they prove they have any kind of fundamental understanding of the worldview they espouse. They just sort of insist that they're both respectively right, and at the end of the day, whoever has more power of friendship wins. Gee, whiz, we have reached enlightenment. Smooth brains will try to convince you that precisely therein lies the profundity of the work, in the fact that it does not “spoon-feed you knowledge”, as they are so fond of saying, that it “makes you think for yourself”, but no, I’m sorry. That does not hold water. In principle, all you learn from such media is that these schools of thought do in fact exist, which I suppose can actually be enlightening if you're an uncultured moron who doesn't know anything about anything, but to anyone who has read even a single book to completion in their life, there is little value to be gained. Meanwhile, I am tempted to say that LotGH is one of the few shows – but off the top of my head, I would have to say it's one of the only 2, Fate/Zero being the only other one I can remember – that actually present the viewer with cogent arguments to make a case for the ideas they feature. Not only are you presented with a variety of ideas, but they are interesting ideas at that. As Eric Weinstein would say, "There's a there there." There's an actual conversation to be had. It's not like the conflict is between one side saying "Genocide bad" and the other saying "Genocide good". Oh, wow, I wonder who the good guys are in that situation? What a controversy this is! No, in LotGH, the main ideological antithesis is between democracy and autocracy. Obviously, everyone will have their own point of view on the matter, so you, as a viewer, will eventually take one side or other, but what I love about LotGH is that, as far as the story is concerned, there's no obvious right answer served to you on a silver platter. Both sides actually present compelling arguments for their position and build a plenty defensible case. As a hypothetical unbiased viewer with no preconceived notions, you could potentially come away from this anime believing that justice could go either way. Think about it, when's the last time you saw any kind of mainstream modern media that dared challenge current social norms in any way whatsoever? Are you ready for the 8th fucking Hollywood movie this year that presents you with the revolutionary idea that racism is bad? Or sexism? Or xenophobia? Or homophobia? Or transphobia? Or some other kind of -ism or -phobia? How stunning and brave! The only ideology that Tanaka-sensei does not explore with any degree of genuine depth is religion. To be sure, it is still explored with a higher degree of depth than I’ve seen in most anime that try to tackle religion – don’t get me started on Evangelion – so I cannot say that it is handled badly. If a show were to come out today, which dissected religion with LotGH’s degree of depth, zoomers would most likely call it the greatest intellectual work of art since 1984. LotGH’s interrogation of religion simply falls short of the standard of utter excellence set by the dialogue surrounding every other philosophical subject broached by the franchise. It is mostly a surface-level exploration of the dangers of religion and the slippery slope towards fanaticism. One character describes is as the most efficient tool for authority figures to brainwash and exploit the masses. Granted, that certainly is one dimension of it, but that assessment is far from comprehensive, and it betrays a certain lack of care and caution in Tanaka-sensei’s worldview. All this means is that religion is clearly not one of the author’s favorite subjects to ponder, and as such, his understanding of it is lacking, and its addition into the LotGH array of ideologies is less subtle and tactful than the rest. It’s not a huge issue, for it is still plenty interesting, and will still succeed in keeping you on tenterhooks, but I just thought I would mention it. Besides, in addition to not making a simplistic ‘democracy good - autocracy bad’ argument, it also doesn't show an idyllic version of either system. You see, it's very easy to make a good case for the best version of the system you subscribe to. The temptation to sweep defects under the rug and shine a light on qualities is admittedly difficult to resist. However, things are never perfect. Nothing ever goes entirely according to plan. Even with the best of intentions, things will go against you. There will be negative consequences. The challenge is to make a credible case that even in the worst-case scenario, in its absolute worst form, yes, even then your preferred system is still the correct one. As if to make my point, LotGH doesn't pretend that leaders, as long as they're elected by the majority of the electorate, will necessarily be the best and wisest the nation has to offer. One character literally states that, even allowing for the danger that demagogues might get elected into positions of power, democracy is still the way to go and then, get this, he makes an actual argument to substantiate his point of view. Amazing! Accordingly, the series also doesn't pretend that as long as there's an autocratic ruler, the poor disaffected masses will suffer under the most cartoonish despotic oppression you can imagine. Both sides get their day in court. You get to see the best of democracy, the worst of democracy, and everything in between, and accordingly the best of autocracy, the worst of autocracy, and everything in between. An insight I found to be of exceptional brilliance is captured by the following quote: “Humans don’t fight for principles and ideals. They fight for people who embody those principles and ideals. They don’t fight for revolutions. They fight for revolutionaries.” So do people fight for Reinhard and Yang. They are the tips of the pyramids, and underneath each of them, you will find a large cluster of characters who run the gamut of good, to bad, to walking the fine line in-between. How do I put this? It takes a special kind of genius writer to make you root for the side you wouldn’t typically want to root for – to root for the side that goes against your sensibilities, your tastes, your ideas, your worldview. Probably the best example of this comes in the form of the 1981 movie, Das Boot, where, of all things, you find yourself rooting for the survival and success of a crew of Nazi submariners in their endeavor to sink and destroy American ships and lives. I believe that even if one weren’t as hostile to democracy as I am, LotGH still has a good to fair chance of changing your perspective on some eternal human questions of philosophy – at least more so than any other animation I have ever seen, and trust me, I’ve seen a couple. You could be the most ardent supporter of autocracy or democracy there ever was. You would still come away from this story with some questions and doubts, just like the characters themselves. If anything, Tanaka-sensei seems to be slightly confused about how the military works under a democracy versus an autocracy, because there are 2 minor instances where he suggests some bizarre things about a, so to speak, democratic military. In one instance, a female subordinate tells a male superior to give her a clear answer about a particular emotional matter that leaves no room for interpretation, to which he acquiesces. She then remarks how beautiful democracy is, because a corporal can give an order to a lieutenant, which would not be possible under an autocracy. Excuse me? What? That's not possible under a strict military context in either version. This was just a case of the two of them having an amicable relationship that superseded rank. The other instance is a particularly wise old admiral receiving inane order, but having no choice but to obey, because, in his words, such is the nature of the military under a democracy. Hello??? What are you talking about? What do you mean? Are you suggesting that soldiers get to disobey orders with impunity under an autocracy? The fuck? It's still the same thing! Out of all the elements that constitute a civilized society, the military is probably the one thing that functions effectively identically under a democracy or an autocracy. While I'm not quite ready to talk about Tanaka-sensei's crayon-level understanding of martial matters just yet, it is in and of itself an interesting subject worth delving into, because it goes beyond such minor misconceptions, so count on me circling back to it later. In close synergy with its tapestry of ideologies, LotGH also paints a very explicit picture making the fundamental point that the geopolitical landscape, or in this case astropolitical spacescape, is ever-changing, which I was deeply impressed by. By the end of the story, none of the players that were there at the beginning will be the same, and some might not even exist anymore at all. People tend to think of history as something that exists in the realm of the past. They see that throughout history, nations have constantly risen and fallen, appeared and disappeared, but they are often apt to fall prey to the delusion that that's all done now. Whatever happened then is, as it were, history, but what we have now, this is surely the end-product of human civilization. They live with the impression that the current state of affairs will remain unchanged forever. LotGH refutes that fantasy flat-out and beautifully illustrates how just because things were a certain way when you were born, that doesn't automatically mean they will still be the same when you die. In point of fact, even my own short lifespan saw fairly major geopolitical changes – Hong Kong was still independent and Montenegro and Kosovo did not exist when I was born, and barely 5 minutes before my birth, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were still very much a thing. An idea the series will put emphasis on is the notion that since nation X has not existed since the beginning of time, there's no reason to believe it will continue to exist until the end of time. All of that being said, it announces itself as self-evident that Legend of the Galactic Heroes is not perfect. Nothing ever is. In my estimation, the show’s defects boil down to 5 basic faults. The first of which is insignificant and isolated, but I have my own reasons for mentioning it, the second and third are persistent, but also largely negligible, and the fourth is fairly significant, but your mileage will vary greatly depending on your tastes and idiosyncratic beliefs about what a sci-fi story should look like. The only real problem LotGH has is the fifth, but unfortunately, it’s a big fucking problem. It starts out innocently enough, but it gradually metastasizes into a cancer that killed a not-at-all trivial portion of my investment in, say, the final 30% of the show. The first issue comes up in the form of some awkward dialogue writing in the first, second, and fourth episodes. The instance in the 4th episode truly spans no more than 10 seconds. Once it is decided that Annerose will have to live in the Imperial Palace to be the Emperor’s consort, Reinhard embraces her and while hugging her, through tears, he repeatedly calls for her using the Japanese honorific: “Big sister! Big sister! Big sister! Big sister! Big sister! Big sister!” He repeats that shit, like, 8 fucking times or something ridiculous. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not mad that he’s whining. It doesn’t bother me that he’s showing emotion, or having a moment of weakness, or being vulnerable. No, that’s fine. I get it – I really do. All that bothered me is that he’s just saying the same thing over and over again. Like, “Oh, my God, say another thing. Say ‘I don’t want you to go’, ‘I don’t like this’, ’Please don’t leave’, ‘I’m scared’, ‘I don’t know what I’ll do without you’, what do I know, anything, just literally say another thing.” Alas, as I said, the whole thing takes no more than 10 or 15 seconds. The first instance is a bit more irksome and spans both the first and second episodes. Reinhard will constantly play the pronoun game in reference to Yang Wen-li. Now, in principle, there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t have a problem with the pronoun game. If I had to lean one way or the other, I’d actually say I’m a fan. The problem, however, is that every time Reinhard alludes to Yang, then Siegfried, his best friend, will invariably confirm, out loud, Yang’s name and rank with much solemnity and gravitas – over and fucking over again. “I wonder if that man is in the enemy camp. – Yes, Commodore Yang Wen-li.” “I wonder what scheme that man might come up with. – Hmm, Commodore Yang Wen-li.” “Everything should go according to plan, unless that man intervenes. – Ah, Commodore Yang Wen-li.” “Foiled again by that man! – Damn, Commodore Yang Wen-li!” Oh, I’m sorry, what was his name again? Yang, was it? And I believe you may have mentioned his rank at one point? I didn’t quite catch that. Could you please repeat it? It’s like, we get it, man. Dude’s name is Yang Wen-li. His rank is commodore. Ok, I got it. It’s cool. Thanks. Say another thing!!! Again, these 2 complaints may seem overly pedantic, but as I said, I have my reasons for bringing them up. At face value, yes, they are just 2 minor instances of awkward dialogue writing, but the problem is that they are located so very early in the show. On their own, sure, they’re no big deal, but they served to weaken my confidence in the anime’s dialogue writing going forward. See, I had fairly high expectations going into this, as it is natural to have from a work dubbed “the best anime ever made”, and when I saw such stilted dialogue that early on, I cringed and feared for what was to come. Fortunately, that’s all there was to it. From what I could tell, the dialogue is otherwise nothing less than stellar, with some instances even getting dangerously close to the realm of Tarantino. As such, I’m putting this forward as a word for the wise. On the off-chance that you might subject yourself to the same doubts as I did, don’t. The second issue is the next episode previews. I strongly advise you to skip them. To say that they are spoiler-heavy is to be charitable. Matter of fact, I’m no longer asking. I’m telling. Skip them! Aside from garden variety spoilers that kill the excitement of regular episodes, the previews literally ruin all of the significant dramatic character deaths. In one instance in particular, I could not believe my eyes that the preview spoiled it. Somehow, I’m still in disbelief. Thankfully, I didn’t fall victim to it, for I clocked the problem pretty early on and started skipping them ever since, but I went back after the episode in question to see if the preview spoiled it, and whoopty fucking do, it did. It wasn’t even an accidental slip. They may as well have been holding up a neon sign saying that Dumbledore dies. Regardless, as I said, this is a negligible issue, seeing as you can, as advised, just skip them, so it shouldn’t ever actually affect your experience. To the best of my recollection, I don’t think there’s ever any content after the ED. The ending is always immediately followed by the preview, so as soon as the ED starts, I believe you can just safely skip ahead to the next episode. As an assurance, I would advise checking how long the episode’s got left when the ED kicks in. If it’s 2 minutes or under, you’ve got a green light. The third issue is the audio editing. This mostly manifests itself in terms of the mixing of the OST. Normally, when transitioning scenes, if you have BGM playing, as the scene’s terminus point approaches, what you’ll wanna do is either gradually lower its volume over a few seconds to make it elegantly fade out as the scene concludes, or ideally, you wanna cleverly synch the OST with the video so that when the scene ends, the OST also organically ends with it. Technically speaking, LotGH opts for the first variant, but rather than fading it out over several seconds, they BGM will fade out over less than half a second. So, things will be happening on screen, the BGM will be blaring, and then, when the scene is over, the OST just falls off a cliff. The resulting effect was quite jarring. Moreso than being bothersome, it just felt ridiculous, and I couldn’t help but giggle in a couple of moments when it happened, giving my investment a cold shower of sorts. Naturally, the issue with the audio editing goes beyond this. There were any number of instances of badly mixed voices. One in particular stands out in my mind. The commander, on board of the fleet’s flagship, wishes to relay a message to the entire fleet, so his First Mate turns on the intercom (shut up, don’t grief me about the terminology), and he suddenly sounds like he’s talking out of a paper bag. You can ever hear the mic pop when the change happens. All the same, by and large, it’s not a meaningful problem. I suppose it might bother a cantankerous viewer more, but I reckon you’ll be too invested to care in the long term. The fourth issue, and this is perhaps the first one that might actually turn a good to fair amount of people off, is the technology. For a sci-fi epic, LotGH is conspicuously low on the sci part. For starters, aliens are completely absent in Tanaka-sensei’s universe. Forget the wonderful and lusciously colorful forests of Avatar with all manner of glowing and popping mushrooms, and flowers, and bushes, and trees and otherworldly wildlife. Forget the staggeringly creative and intricate variety of all manner of alien species, cultures, and civilizations from Valerian, all with their own bizarre customs and minutiose garb. There is effectively no alien flora or fauna in LotGH at all, not even an alien dog or a mutant daisy or something – nothing. Naturally habitable Goldilocks planets do in fact exist, but the implied conclusion is that all living organisms from most colony worlds were brought over from Earth originally as part of a terra-forming operation. Still, given the variety of plants and fruit and what not that we have today thanks to genetic engineering, it is at minimum suspicious that 1500 years in the future, we still have all the same old shit. Not a single thing stood out. Even so, the very concept of what technically counts as an inhabited planet is contentious. We are told at one point that the population of the Empire is 25 billion. At a different point in time, we are told that the Empire encompasses over 200 star systems, which would, at the every minimum, mean 200 inhabited planets. That comes out to barely over 100 million people per planet, which is weird. What is even weirder, there is one story arc where we get to see a couple of these “inhabited” Imperial planets up close. What we actually get to see is one small town of farmers and simple folk and… that’s it – nothing else. We’re not even talking about an ecumenopolis here. The planet literally has one small village of plebeians somewhere and that’s all she wrote. That counts as inhabited territory. Still, alien life aside, the technology is a real problem. Allied civilization looks no different than any first world metropolitan city in the 90s. With the exception of the admittedly impressive architecture of the main capitol building, there are a number of cities in the world today that look more impressive and futuristic than anything the Free Planet Alliance has to offer. You should see the mobile phones these guys use to talk to each other. They look like those uncomfortable ass bricks people used back in the 80s, which is disappointingly predictable, given that the novels were written in the 80s. And if you thought the Alliance is bad, the Empire teeters on the brink of the ludicrous. I mean, okay, I gotta give the devil his due. When I said that the Empire is based on the pre-1918 German Empire, that’s not just because Tanaka-sensei wanted to avoid any accusations of explicit Nazi idolatry. If you’re imagining the Empire as looking anything like The Man in the High Castle, you’re dead wrong. Tanaka-sensei has an undisguised fascination with the aesthetic of the Enlightenment and Baroque noble society, because Imperial high society looks exactly like that. Aristocrats, without exception, as if by law, all wear wide garments with numerous ornaments, bright colors, silk brocades, lace, and frills – an ode to ostentation. You can see the women dance all around the place in puffy hoop skirts, loose shoulders, and wide sleeves. Meanteaus and virago sleeves are by no means unpopular. Meanwhile, men’s fashion draws from both French and Dutch influences. Male aristocrats strut around in doublets worn over an undershirt, tight breeches, boots up to their knees, and unfailingly a flowing bouquet of lace exposing a ribbon or some kind of a jewel in their necktie area – all in all, lots of locks, lace, leather, and flashy soft fabrics. This was the European fashion of the end of the second millennium. All of their architecture also adheres to the same opulent Baroque style, characterized by extremely detailed forms, marble, large-scale decoration, and bright colors. Now, in principle, there’s nothing wrong with a futuristic civilization emulating the aesthetic of an ancient one, but living like them? For one thing, there’s little to no evidence that Imperial civilization is capable of constructing buildings more than a couple of stories high. Now, in all fairness, a compelling in-universe reason is given for this, but candlelight? Really? No, I’m not kidding. I’m not just saying that to be funny. These guys literally use candles for lighting. I’ll extend an olive branch. I would perhaps accept the candles if they were only ever used in a decorative capacity to light up big ballrooms for official events and what not. You could still gerrymander that into being a larger effort to stay faithful to Baroque decorum, but their scope goes way beyond that. If someone wakes up in the middle of the night and needs light, they’ll literally walk around carrying a Dutch candlestick, just like we do whenever there’s a blackout, but oh, wait, never mind. To be precise, I should say the way we used to do whenever there was a blackout, because not even we do that anymore. Nowadays, every single smartphone has a powerful-enough flashlight and battery. Just look at all the smart lighting systems we have now. It’s daunting to even contemplate what kind of outlandish systems for lighting we will be using 1500 years from now. I doubt people then will even know what candles are anymore. The basic point I’m trying to make is that while I welcome with open arms the notion of a futuristic society abiding by a traditional ambience, we should have seen an amplitude of high-tech quality-of-life gadgets and devices amounting to a series of subtle nods to the fact that: Yes, we LARP as a premodern society, but we don’t actually live like one. Again, for a sci-fi author, Yoshiki Tanaka is manifestly unwilling to engage in any kind of meaningful creative effort insofar as the sci domain is concerned. This, I believe, is one of the main factors that has kept Legend of the Galactic Heroes shrouded in sci-fi obscurity, and has prevented it from seeing the kind of mainstream success that qualitatively worse franchises, such as Star Trek and Star Wars, have seen. One of the great feats of science fiction, historically, has been inspiring the invention of real technology we use today. For example, you may not know this, but the American inventor, Simon Lake, invented the submarine after being inspired by Jules Verne’s electricity-powered underwater ship from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Robots with artificial intelligence were first imagined by Czech author, Karel Capek, as early as 1920. Did you know that the word “taser” is actually an acronym? Yes, really. It stands for Tom A. Swift’s Electric Rifle. Jack Clover, a NASA physicist, invented the taser because of his love for the character Tom Swift and the inspiration he drew from the children’s novels starring the titular character. Martin Cooper can recall the exact moment when he was taking a break in his lab watching the episode of Star Trek when Kirk used his Communicator to call for help for an injured Spock, which later inspired him to invent the mobile phone. Earbuds were inspired by Ray Bradbury’s description in Fahrenheit 451 of the Seashell radio device that is tucked inside the ear. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. Your main takeaway from here should be that sci-fi authors have always been engaged in a manner of arms race against each other to come up with the most interesting and eye-catching fictional gadget or technology. Fictional tech is such a staple of the genre that an entire media empire can be spawned by one guy coming up with the idea of a glowing stick that people wave around like a sword. It is precisely this creative impetus that is utterly absent in Legend of the Galactic Heroes. In fact, as you watch the show, it becomes quite apparent that Tanaka-sensei has gone to great lengths to pull in exactly the opposite direction. LotGH is laden with a cornucopia of mechanics and plot devices that enable our author to actually steer away from technology as much as humanly possible. For example, in LotGH, whenever infantry soldiers engage each other in battle on the ground, they hack and slash at each other with… battle-axes??? What? Why? Now, again, let’s give the devil his due. Melee martial arts are the world’s most ancient form of combat, but as weapons technology and tactics get more advanced, combatants have ever fewer opportunities to engage in hand-to-hand combat. That said, the fascination with physical combat and the desire to somehow incorporate it as a conventional vehicle for delivering action scenes is understandable, and since I just mentioned him, George Lucas is the perfect example of this desire coming to fruition in the best way possible. Instead of coming up with an excuse to circumvent the kind of advanced technology you would expect in a sci-fi story, Lucas created a device that is not only iconic, but his Jedi warriors built an avenue for an outdated form of combat while simultaneously enhancing the futuristic aesthetic of the genre. Yoshiki Tanaka, on the other hand, came up with exactly the kind of MacGuffin that gives him the pretext he needs to circumvent all of that technological nonsense – Zephyr Particles. While they may sound fancy, they’re really not. Zephyr Particles are a highly explosive, highly combustible element used primarily in demolition work. Their exceptional destructive power quickly led to them being used in combat situations. Zephyr Particles are too small to be seen with the eye, don't smell and don't need oxygen to explode, so they can be used in both space and within an atmosphere. So, in a nutshell, they’re basically a highly flammable gas and they are perpetually used in ground engagements, effectively creating a MAD conundrum, so that no one can use their firearms. As such, voilà! Battle-axes! Other than being a contemptible plot device for facilitating the omission of sci-fi trappings, which should be the bread and butter of this franchise, it’s a plain boring one at that. Remind me again, why don’t they shoot? Because of these particles that are in the air. Oh, where are they? Well, you can’t see them. Oh, can I smell them? No, you can’t. Can I at least taste them or something? No, that would be silly. Hear them maybe? No, of course not. So, I just pretty much have to take your word for it and suspend my disbelief? Pretty much. Riveting. Setting aside one’s potential feelings about this perceived evasion, from an emotional point of view, I have to confess I was way into the battle-axes. They looked cool as shit. It’s just that from a logical stand-point, the reason they were used was ill-conceived. Nevertheless, even if I were to grant the validity of the MacGuffin, the whole thing still doesn't hold water. For starters, does it even stand to reason that Zephyr Particles would ever actually be used if they ran the risk of turning both sides of any given conflict into KFC by accident? Rather than going for the MAD stalemate and then getting down to bladed combat, wouldn't it make more sense for soldiers to, you know, just forego the Zephyr and shoot at each other instead? Second, there are plenty of scenes where dudes in armor with battle-axes are charging at dudes who are shooting at them with plasma rifles. There you go. Riddle me that. Why isn't everyone going up in flames? Isn't that the whole point of Zephyr Particles?? That you can't shoot lasers??? And if there are no Zephyr Particles, then what’s the point of the axes???? Why isn't everyone just shooting lasers????? Third, the dudes in armor seem to always be unfazed by the photon projectiles, and you explicitly see the lasers bounce off their suits, the same suits that pop open like bloody gut-filled piñatas whenever they're struck by an axe, which constitutes its own can of worms. Like, what the hell are you suggesting, that a dude swinging an axe packs more destructive power than a futuristic weaponized laser? Seriously? If that’s the case, then fuck it, man. Just go back go regular firearms. I guarantee you that a hollow-point bullet is more powerful than Fritz swinging an axe. Besides, at one point in the show, a particular important character has a pretty emotional death scene after being turned into Swiss cheese by laser fire. Yes, he was wearing the armor. Fucking explain that shit. Fourth, and this is the one thing I just cannot get past: At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I must ask again… battle-axes??? Make no mistake. It's not just the Empire using axes because they’re enamored with the aesthetic of the ancient warriors of Germania or something along them lines. No, no, the Alliance uses them, too, weirdly enough. Even if we ignore all the issues with the Zephyr Particles and the armor and what have you, and let’s say we pretend to accept the suggestion that some kind of set of extraneous circumstances will lead to infantrymen engaging each other in combat with bladed weapons in the distant future, there is no way you would ever equip your armed forces with battle-axes. They're big, awkward, hulky weapons that are a nightmare to balance and difficult to use efficiently. If you had to go for bladed weapons, you would go for either swords, or maybe spears. They're much more comfortable weapons, easier to train with, easier to master, easier to be effective with, and not least of all, easier to mass-produce. There’s a reason swords have been the bladed weapon of choice of every single reasonably successful premodern military organization in history. Sure enough, you may have the odd eccentric fellow who’ll go for the axe instead, but there is no shot in hell they would ever be standard issue. Then there's the issue of computer-guided firing and long-distance communication, which is to say that there's virtually no such thing. You see, it would appear that pretty much the only piece of human technology that had seen meaningful advancement over the next millennium and a half is EMP technology. As a consequence, because in any battle, there’s just such a baseline overwhelming amount of EMP interference, long-range digitally-guided bombardment is a non-starter. Spaceships need line of sight to fire. For that same reason, real-time interstellar communications during military deployments are also impossible. One character even goes so far as to say that during armed conflicts on the ground, they still use dogs and pigeons to relay messages, which is admittedly a bit silly, but it has its own allure. If I'm being perfectly honest, I’m not actually convinced that this EMP business is a negative. As guided firing goes, I feel like having that up-close-and-personal, fleet-against-fleet type of direct engagement feels more dramatic, and it isn't clear to me that having the fights mainly take the form of a tortured species of Minesweeper between a bunch of nerds staring at screens, operating drones, would have been an improvement. Furthermore, as communications go, the impediment creates the ideal environment for necessitating the presence of military leadership directly on the battlefield, which gives birth to the romantic Julius Caesar-like image of the fearless leader standing tall upon the field of battle, shoulder to shoulder with his men, as opposed to the cowardly bureaucrat who hides away behind the safety of his bunker and delegates the dirty work to his subordinates, which is a leitmotif the anime will very much emphasize. On balance, I would posit that the whole EMP shpiel is a positive, but it is nevertheless indicative of a larger issue. Let's call a spade a spade. Had it not been for the spaceships, there would be precious little evidence from which to infer that Legend of the Galactic Heroes is in fact a sci-fi work. As one more aside, since I mentioned the date earlier, I want to express some confusion. How is it that a starborne human race is still using the 24-hour day format and the 365-day year format to measure time? You’ll constantly be told that the date is, say, July 17. Uhm, okay? It is? Where? Days, as we know them, are based on the speed of Earth’s rotation. Are we to assume that every single planet takes exactly 24 hours to rotate on its axis? Because that would be a moronic proposition. Surely there must be some planet out there that takes, say, 240 hours to make that rotation. Over there, it would be July 17 for quite a while. Days would not progress at the same rate across worlds. Same goes for years. You might suggest that they’re just using Terran time-measurements as a baseline, because Earth is the wellspring of the human race, but this sort of reverence to our roots doesn’t really make sense in the series’ context. That said, this brings me to another quasi-unique point of interest. Earth is very explicitly not the center of human civilization. I’ve always found it strange how in pretty much every sci-fi franchise, even thousands of years into the future, Earth is still the heart of humanity. LotGH outright states that even in ancient history, the de facto capital of human civilization changed numerous times, from Babylon, to Memphis, to Athens, to Rome, to Jerusalem, to Baghdad, to London, to Washington D.C. As such, there’s no reason to believe that once humanity spread throughout the stars, Earth would eternally remain its core capital planet. Point in case, in the year 3500, Earth is only vaguely known by those who have bothered to study history as the origin point of humanity, but essentially nobody gives a shit about it beyond being a historical curiosity. Most people don’t even know it exists. I massively appreciated this departure from the conventions of the genre. It is details like this that serve to give LotGH its own identity that make it stand out in the realm of sci-fi as a distinctive work. Tragically, Legend of the Galactic Heroes has one final flaw that comes THIS close to being fatal to it, and I'm sure that to some people, it actually was fatal to their investment. You see, Tanaka-sensei is a great student of history, he is a great student of philosophy, he is a great student of politics, he is even a great student of psychology, and I'm sure many others, but he is unfortunately not a great student of war. And mind you, when I say war, I don't mean the ethics of war, the reasons behind why people wage war, the economic calculations of war, the moral validity of war, the psychology of war, or any other dimension along those lines. I'm talking about the actual martial dimension of armed conflict and the logistics thereof. Now, as I've said before, this, in and of itself, is not an overly consequential problem. It certainly starts out innocently enough. In the beginning, this flaw merely manifested itself in the form of a litany of military tactics and strategies that made very little sense. On the one hand, a lot of Reinhard and Yang’s brilliantly devious stratagems essentially amounted to “Go behind them!”, “Surround them!”, “Flank them!”, and so on, and so forth. I mean, I suppose this stuff is at least a bit more sophisticated than Griffith’s “Guts, go kill everything!” go-to strategy, but how do I put this gently? You don't have to be Stonewall Jackson to come up with that sort of thing. On the other hand, most of the more sophisticated stratagems they employ would simply not work in real life, either because they're not physically achievable, or more likely because they're just daft. Without spoiling anything, let me just say this. The idea of using a disguise is literally one of the most ancient and basic forms of subterfuge in the history of mankind. There is absolutely nothing revolutionary about it, and there is no shot whatsoever that it would ever work the way it is executed in the series. Then there's the idea of hiding inside an asteroid belt and using the asteroids for cover during a space battle. Uhhh, okay, I'm sure that sounds great in your head, but you get that enemy fire can shatter the asteroids, right? And then who's gonna be the most vulnerable to millions upon millions of tons of out-of-control asteroid debris hurdling through space at God knows how many times the speed of sound, creating a chain reaction that turns your precious little field of cover into a hellscape of crushed blood, bone, stone, and metal? You, bitch. You! And I thought you more or less needed line of sight for direct radio contact. Wouldn't mineral-rich asteroids interfere with that process? Probably the most absurd one was the notion of sending a boarding party on a small transport ship, somehow wading through the artillery fire of tens of thousands of spaceships, somehow reaching all the way back to the enemy fleet’s main flagship, somehow penetrating its hull, somehow fighting your way through hundreds of elite guards with barely, like, a dozen people on your side, and somehow ultimately killing the enemy leader so as to win by default… which works. It totally works. When I saw that, I was like, wait, what the fuck?! You can do that? Then why isn't that the SOP? Why don't you just do that every time? Why bother with formations and all that jazz if you can just hit a cheat button, skip all the pieces on the board, and just take the king directly? I'll tell you why. Because it's a dumb fucking idea that would never work, and it would make for a boring story. You wanna know why it would make for a boring story? Because it's a dumb fucking idea that would never work, that's why. Finally, Yoshiki Tanaka seems to be oblivious to the fact that outer space is a 3-dimensional domain. Surround them? What do you mean surround? Did you mean to say envelop instead? No, no, our beloved author means surround. To be sure, there is one singular solitary scene in the entire series where the combined numbers of two fleets manage to completely envelop the enemy fleet, but lo and behold, there are a number of scenes in LotGH where one fleet surround
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Feb 29, 2024
Howl no Ugoku Shiro
(Anime)
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It would appear I owe Hayao Miyazaki-sensei an apology. For the longest time, I've been saying that Howl's Moving Castle is one of the worst Ghibli movies. Incidentally, it's the very first Ghibli movie I've seen. Alas, my first viewing, some, oh, 6-7 odd years ago, was colored by the company and intrusive circumstances I found myself surrounded by at the time. Without going into too much detail, I was exhausted, constantly distracted, and even fell asleep half-way through. As such, it is of little surprise that much of what was happening made little sense to me.
Having now rewatched it properly, I must confess myself ... very pleasantly surprised. The structure of the plot is rather fragile and vulnerable to spoilers. All I can say is that you will accompany Sophie on a magical adventure laden with surprises, excitement, the unknown, faith, and heartache. She is a simple girl living in an unnamed town's tailoring shop. We are given to understand that she is rather attached to the shop, seeing as it held some emotional significance to her presumably late father. Then, one day, her uneventful life if interrupted by the appearance of Howl, a world-famous, yet mysterious wizard, and their fates become entwined. What's more, it appears that Sophie's nation is gearing up to go to war with an unknown enemy. How much truth is there to the rumors surrounding Howl's personage? What is the rhyme and reason for the war? Is there a place for Sophie amidst this dangerous world of magic and wonder? Watch to find out! Princess Mononoke held the record for the highest grossing anime movie of all time for a fair number of years. It wasn't until the release of Howl's Moving Castle that its reign ended. It finally took the phenomenon that was Spirited Away to dislodge Howl from its #1 spot. The Ghibli monopoly was only broken with the advent of Your Name. Since then, I hear that a Demon Slayer and one or other of the My Hero Academia movies have done extremely well and broken all manner of records, but I feel confident in saying that Howl still rests comfortably in the top 10 of all time. Point in case, Howl is considered by many anime fans to be their favorite movie of all time, and for a not-at-all negligible number of Ghibli afficionados, it constitutes Miyazaki-sensei's best work. My thoughts? In terms of it being Ghibli's best, I don't think I will ever change my mind that Princess Mononoke is Hayao Miyazaki-sensei's magnum opus. Truthfully, there is nothing original in Howl. You've got the mysterious locations and technology from Castle in the Sky, the black, gooey monsters and creatures from Princess Mononoke, and the large warship designs from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Understandably, studio Trigger is not the only creative outlet prone to reaching the point of recycling old ideas. Ghibli, and more precisely, Miyazaki-sensei is vulnerable to the same creative ailments as any other artist. That being said, when Trigger runs out of ideas, they churn out vacuous bullshit like SSSS.Gridman. On the other hand, Ghibli graces us with Howl's Moving Castle. I've long said that you don't need to reinvent the wheel every time you engage in a creative endeavor. You don't need a new gimmick. Originality is overrated. As long as you create what you create with sincerity and passion, that will translate to your audience. As if to make my point, though Howl brings nothing new to the table in terms of ideas and themes, it's one of the more visually ambitious and impressive Ghibli projects. In particular, the 3DCG animation used for Howl's actual "moving castle" stands head and shoulders above the film's constituent elements as its pièce de résistance, for it is so beautifully smooth and delicately blended with Miyazaki's signature hand-drawn animation, that it is, in my estimation, the ultimate ideal that all animation studios ought to strive towards. The one thing that stands to the movie's discredit is the justification of some of the plot devices. If you're like me and want to have a plot where everything makes perfect logical sense, where every question is clearly answered, and you cannot be satisfied with answers in the vein of "Just because!", then Howl will to a greater or lesser extent frustrate you. The OST's piano melody is so iconic that if you enjoy lofi hip-hop music, there's a good to fair chance you're already familiar with it. Howl's Moving Castle, to the attentive and engaged viewer, is 2 hours well spent.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Feb 29, 2024
Vinland Saga
(Anime)
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Being that it is part of the Holy Trinity of seinen manga alongside Berserk and Vagabond, I had high hopes for Vinland Saga.
That being said, there was a certain something in me holding me back from watching it. Was it because I felt it was somehow aesthetically similar to Claymore and I thought I wouldn't really click with it? Was it because I heard DigiBro complain that one time about the CG in the show and how it's not as good as the manga? Was it because I was afraid of the Berserk effect and feared that all the hype was just because of its ... association to the dark fantasy epic? Or was it just because I quite simply did not like the way the protagonist looked? Perhaps. Perhaps it was either one of these reasons. Perhaps it was a combination of all of them - most likely. Tell you the truth, I still don't like the way Thorfinn looks. Unfortunately, the first half of the show proved my fears right. It felt like a largely insipid revenge story with no likable characters, at least no main ones. Most of all, Thorfinn, the protagonist, aside from looking like shit, he just is an irredeemable piece of shit. I cannot go into reasons why without spoiling, but suffice it to say that I very quickly went from not being overly invested in his success to outright rooting against him. He does not deserve to succeed. I could talk about other characters and scenes, but even without spoiler concerns, I just got a strong sense that everything happening before me would have hit a lot harder in manga form. Perhaps my biggest disappointment was that I was expecting, or perhaps hoping, this to be a story that glorifies and romanticizes war, bloodshed, and death upon the field of battle, much like 300 or Drifters. Alas, nay, it turned out to be a would-be realistic portrayal of the viking lifestyle laden with moralisms about how war is hell and how the act of taking a human life is a crime. It's like, dude, I know all that shit already. If I wanted a lecture about war crimes, I would have just watched some Jewish documentary about WW II or the Crusades. Where would one get the notion that what I was looking forward to in this action story about vikings is a civics class about how killing is wrong? I don't need you to tell me that vikings were just some disorderly, drunken, cowardly pillagers whose main occupation was the murder and rape of innocents. I already know vikings were just some disorderly, drunken, cowardly pillagers whose main occupation was the murder and rape of innocents. I came here to see something more than that, something fun, something interesting. Imagine if 300 had just been a 2-hour porn film about Spartans fucking each other in the ass. "Well, this is the reality of what the Spartans were like. They encouraged gay relationships because they believed it increased camarade-" Shut the fuck up, I know. Whether it's historically accurate or not is not the point. The point is, is it fun? Is it interesting? Would anyone want to fucking watch that shit? The best example of exactly this problem is the TV show Mad Men. I went into it expecting a show about cool 50s dudes being cool. What I got instead was a show about how backwards, ignorant, and bigoted 50s dudes were. Wow. Riveting. What an eye opener. I never saw it that way. Totally changed my life. I am so entertained. In short, I was let down. Some standout scenes and characters existed, but they weren't enough to grip me. That is until episode 15 or so. A particular character (no, not Thorfinn, don't get excited) takes such a sharp left turn, that he instantly imbues everyone else around him with life and the ever-so precious gift of being fucking interesting. From that moment on, I wasn't merely contented with the show. It didn't put me in an "Eh, alright, fine, I'll give it a passing grade." kind of mood. No, I legitimately got hooked. It becomes a Game of Thrones-esque political game filled with intrigue and possibility. I loved it. I loved every second of it. The ending completely blew me away. I mean that sincerely, I could not believe my eyes. I did not see it coming in the slightest. This still does not obviate some of the glaring issues. 15 episodes is a long time for a show to finally "start". Granted, Shiki took longer to "start", but in Shiki's case, I would argue the 18 episodes of set-up are necessary to enjoy the pay-off properly. In some sense, here, I feel like you could probably skip the first 11-12 episodes entirely and be mostly fine. Naturally, I am not advising that. I am just illustrating a point. Also, Thorfinn is still a piece of shit. The ending leaves the door open to him earning some sliver of redemption and maybe becoming interesting? Somewhat? Kind of? But at the end of the day, he's still morally irredeemable scum. Still, I am now invested and interested to see where his story takes him next. Whatever my thoughts about Thorfinn or the first half may be, the second half is absolutely worth your time. Nevertheless, do not expect Berserk. This is good, but when all is said and done, it is still not Berserk. Enjoy!
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Feb 29, 2024
Boku no Hero Academia
(Anime)
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Recommended
A brilliant modern shounen that improves upon most of the faults in classic shounen series – fillers, inconsistent animation, out of control scaling, awkward pacing, and so on, and so forth.
It's a Bones production, so you know that technical quality is guaranteed. Judging by the background art, I can tell that some of the same people who worked on Soul Eater are also working on this one. As for the anime itself, it's exactly what you think it is. The title is pretty self-explanatory. It's basically superhero Harry Potter. The show has many merits, but if there's one thing it excels at, it's the ability to ... generate hype. When it comes to generating hype for a cool scene that's about to happen, HeroAca stands head and shoulders above everything else. It can be the most mundane, pointless, fruitless action that the protagonist engages in, but the show has a way of getting you to feel like you're about to win a gold medal in an Olympic competition. This has to do in large part with You Say Run, the hype soundtrack from the first season. It turned into quite the popular meme during the show's first season's run, with plenty of "You Say Run Goes With Everything" compilations popping up on YouTube, making the simple point that this soundtrack can make literally anything feel epic and hype. You Say Run has been used less in the show's second season, and almost not at all in its third, so the hype factor has gone down, but it's still there. Another area where the show absolutely shines is the cast. Every character's personality compliments the other, and though the designs of some are a bit strange and not quite aesthetically pleasing, this show sports one of the most likable cast of characters I've ever seen in a shounen. However, the glue that holds the entire cast together is the protagonist. Let's be honest here. Izuku Midoriya, also known as Deku, is Naruto Uzumaki 2.0. There's no reason to deny it. He's just an improved version of Naruto, however, the improvement is massive. I cannot possibly do justice to how much Deku is an improvement upon every underdog protagonist we've seen so far in shounen. It cannot be understated how amazing a character he is. Want to see an underdog protagonist, but who is also actually allowed to prove his own competence and succeed on the merit of his own actions, instead of some demon fox or hollow sperging out and taking care of everything for him? Well, then you've come to the right place. As far as underdog protagonists go, I believe Deku is the best that any shounen series has to offer, or second best insofar as you consider Luffy an underdog. If I were to fault this show for anything, then it would be its simplicity. I like a story with a rich and complex narrative and world. This is why I'm such a sucker for Legend of the Galactic Heroes and One Piece. There’s a reason why they are far and away my 2 favorite anime of all time. In particular, One Piece has over 1000 named characters and the most intricately developed world of any anime in history. In contrast to Oda's epic, Kohei Horikoshi, HeroAca's author, seems to purposely go for simplicity. Plot devices often pop out of nowhere, conflicts aren't exactly remarkably profound, and their resolutions usually come rather swiftly, and it all sems to be done as if to make a point, to say that a story needn't be complex in order to be interesting. On the one hand, it makes me admire how compelling he can make his narrative with so straightforward and uncomplicated a story. On the other hand, it will never be a timeless epic, but then again, it doesn't have to be. It's transient entertainment, but it will give you some of the most intense experiences that anime has to offer.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Feb 29, 2024
Saenai Heroine no Sodatekata
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings
The title is pretty self-explanatory. A high school loser obsessed with anime, light novels, and dating sims, gets inspired to create his own dating sim after he has a fateful encounter with an enchanting girl. He wants to base the main heroine of his game on the aforementioned girl. Alas, the girl turns out to have an oppressively boring personality. Will he be able to turn her into a main heroine everyone will adore? Watch to find out.
Having said that, should you actually watch it? Nah. I’m about to give you a spoiler, but it’s predictable as all hell, and you don’t really care, anyway. ... Look, I’m not one to get into best girl debates. Even if the one I consider to be best girl doesn’t win, I’m fine as long as a decent girl wins. This ain’t one of them stories. This is a story in which the absolute worst girl wins. Yes, the boring one wins. What do people find so attractive about this character? Are incels in Japan so desperate that they think being in relationship with a dead fish would be a good time? Anyway, it’s all in all a pretty boring slice of life romantic comedy. If you’re a fan of the genre, you’ll like it. For what it’s worth, it’s pretty popular. Regardless, there are other much better slice of life rom-coms out there, so unless you’re particularly interested in the genre and have run out of other rom-coms to watch, skip it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Feb 29, 2024
Witch Craft Works
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings
A poor man's Toradora with reversed gender roles meets a poor man's Harry Potter. The result? This thing. Is it good? No. It is enjoyable nonetheless? Sure. It's a pretty shallow rom-com.
For what it's worth, the artwork is very polished. I can tell that a lot of work has been put into making the characters look attractive. Having said that, the actual designs are pretty generic and unimaginative. Furthermore, the series often makes some bizarre choices in terms of color hue. The color palette just looks weird at times. Regardless, all in all, it's a good looking show, but I would argue it's below J.C.Staff's average. ... The animation is really stiff and it relies heavily on CG. That being said, it was fairly good CG. It did not bother me as much as I would've expected. Still, I would have expected better from the studio that brought us Bakuman, Toradora, Sakurasou, Toaru, and many more. Anyway, if this sounds like something you'd like, then go ahead and kill some time.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Feb 29, 2024 Mixed Feelings
This standalone movie takes some ideas from Wolf Children, some ideas from The Boy and the Beast, and puts them together into a coming-of-age love story type deal. The result is nowhere near as good as either, but it's also not too shabby. It's a pretty mundane story about prejudice and love's power to transcend societal barriers. It wasn't the worst hour and a half of my life, but certainly not the best, either. You might want to give this a try. Then again, you might not.
It was produced by TMS Entertainment, the same studio behind Megalo Box, D.Gray-man, Baki, Dr. Stone, ReLIFE, Rent-a-Girlfriend, and ... many others. The technical production value, while not awe-inspiring, at the very least leaves little to be desired.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Feb 29, 2024 Recommended
I... was not ready for this. I don't know what I expected. I'm not even sure how I found this movie. I seem to remember randomly seeing the thumbnail on a streaming website and thinking it was pretty. Safe to say, it was easily one of the best spontaneous decisions I've ever made.
This movie is what you would get if you could put beauty in a bottle. The Iorphs are elf-like humanoids, pale, blonde, living isolated from the rest of the world, and their average life span is probably in the thousands of years. All they're missing are the pointy ears. Throughout history, they've come ... to be known as the Clan of Partings. Maquia, our protagonist (voiced by Kana Hanazawa), is merely 15 years old. She's an orphan and, as such, there are many things she doesn't understand. She wants to see the outside world and can't grasp why their village elder would advise against it. The reason why they're called the Clan of Partings is, as of yet, still mysterious to her. Unfortunately, fate is not kind enough to allow her to wallow in ignorance. When tragedy strikes and their isolated, peaceful society is destroyed, she is forced to face the world, face the reality of being a nigh-eternal being in a garden full of ephemeral flowers. Gradually, the meaning behind her people's name becomes painfully transparent to her. The sheer amount of unfair plight suffered by her and her people in this picture will break your heart, however, if there's a silver lining, then it's the technical mastery behind this project. It's not the sadness, but the beauty of the film that keeps it all together. At any given moment, you'll be at a loss between feeling heartbroken because of the story or being in awe of the background art. The film's animation is great, but it's nothing you haven't seen before. The background artwork, though, would give Makoto Shinkai a run for his money, and in fact, I enjoyed it here more than in any Shinkai film, because it was actually meaningful here. My only warning is this; in case it hasn't already dawned on you, there is a lot of drama in this film. Maybe don't watch this if you're low on tissues. Otherwise, by all means, treat yourself to this marvel.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Feb 29, 2024
Nanatsu no Bitoku
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings
This kept popping up when I was browsing for Nanatsu no Taizai. The artwork looked pretty. I don't know what I expected, but this is softcore porn. It's got 12 episodes, all 3-4 minutes long, so it doesn't demand a huge amount of time investment. Credit where credit it due, all of the girls are extremely pretty and the show is not at all shy when it comes to top nudity. Yeah, I don't know what else to say. Like I said, it's just softcore porn.
Will this be enough for you to make the bald man cry? Probably. Would you be better off just watching ... actual hentai instead? Definitely.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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