Eva Yojimbo wrote:What do you expect when you're watching shows whose primary target audience are mothers? Just start watching Matlock to aim for the even-older maternal figures!
What's sad is I've thought about watching Matlock before.
Off the top of my head the only one I might like better is Grant and Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, but that one has a lot of nostalgia for me too. Gable and Colbert in It Happened One Night is up there too.
Both fantastic pairings of course.
I'm guessing it probably wasn't the first either, but I can't immediately think of any before it.
There might be a weird gangster movie or something that did it earlier, but I can't think of anything else myself right now.
I wouldn't expect them to be very gamey since I know the general premise. As for literature I usually try not to cross-compare mediums anyway, and if anything I'd think a visual novel would be closer to graphic novels/comic books.
Hmm, I was going to say they're not quite like a comic since average "shot" in a visual novel isn't exactly composed in the way even a panel of a comic is, since those individual panels are still usually little mini-painting in their own right that work as a piece of a whole that is an an individual comic book page, which itself is a part of a single issue, and issues have larger context of overall volume or comic series etc., but in thinking about I suppose there is an element of that to it still.
In visual novels you typically get your paragraphs of text and narration and such on-screen, static background art, stock character sprites that cycle through different sprites as characters "react" to what other characters or doing or are speaking themselves or doing something else etc., and background music accompanying all of this. Occasionally you will get "CG's" (Standing for something like "Computer Graphics") that are composed drawings in their own right and these are probably most comparable to comic books. VN's typically don't have a lot of them (And usually once seeing them in-game you "unlock" ability to revisit CG's from the main menu of whatever game you're playing), and usually use them for particularly emotional or dramatic moments, or maybe an action scene or something, or a sex scenes if its a pornographic game.
None of this is a fast and hard rule of course, and now that I'm trying to "theorize" about the medium I guess what I'm really saying is that different artists and projects emphasize different aspects about the medium. Some games will have more CG's than others, some will put more emphasis on having a lot of character sprites, some put of more emphasis on "choices" than others and make finding the "True Ending" something of a puzzle in its own right (
Kagetsu Tohya being a particularly nasty example of this, though there's the Zero Escape trilogy and such as well), and hell the guy who wrote Higurashi and Umineko says what he creates are "Sound Novels" more than "Visual Novels" since the music and sound effects tends to be what sets the mood for his stuff more than anything and barely has choices and such (I think Umineko doesn't even get one until like literally 70 hours in).
Thing is I dunno that medium has produced any particularly unassailable masterpiece really (Some might say this is because of how much of the genre is rooted in pornography and not "art" but well whatever), but its hard to tell how much of that is just me being a bit insecure about a super nerdy thing I like.
Don't know why Four Nights and a Dreamer has never made it to DVD/blu-ray.
Hmm seems it may have been on Prime Video at some point, but not currently in my region.
Visconti's version was Ossessione, one of his first (maybe his first?) films and very much in his early neo-realist style. Maybe part of the disconnect is that the story was more shocking for the time than it is now?
Well we might be swinging back into such a thing being "shocking" if the people I see claiming younger generations are becoming more puritanical are correct, but I can't tell how much of that is pearl clutching about annoying "kids these days" on Twitter or whatever, or if its an actual upcoming shift in societal attitudes among post-Millenial generations.
Pretty sure I never said Boogiepop was bad on EGF. Sure you're not thinking of Elfen Lied? Or I may have been talking about one of the LA Boogiepop adaptations as to those were pretty bad. It's not a perfect series by any means, but I remember liking it for the most part. It just doesn't stick out for being as good as something like Paranoia Agent or as bad as Elfen Lied.
Hmm looking it up again, I think I was confusing it for something you said about Ergo Proxy. That's another show I never watched lol.
Yeah, I think we fundamentally agree on this. I do vaguely remember finding those parts of the novel quite dull.
Yeah but isn't great that we agree on this? How wonderful and angelic you are for agreeing with me. You are the best. Let's spend three or four pages now talking about how awesome it is we agree. Now lets repeat this ad infinitum, because that's the Bram Stoker way.
Yeah, I'm not buying it either. The article even mentions that Keel Lorentz is (partly) named after a Nazi doctor, so why do that if you're trying to make him a Jew? The "big, pointy noses" thing was a common trope in anime around that time, probably most notoriously in Escaflowne, which started a year before NGE IIRC, and I'm sure neither were the first to do that style.
Escaflowne started in 1996 but at any rate it was a contemporary of NGE.
The kabbalahistic elements are quite muddled and hardly solely associated with SEELE either, and we know the series' religious elements are a mixture of "cool-looking/sounding" stuff and symbols for the series' underlying themes, which have nothing to do with religion.
Yup. Whole argument seems like weird evolution of "Evangelion is about Christianity" nonsense from back in the day, really.
Hard to say because it's been too long ago. Could've just been the general style/quality was very different than most other anime I'd seen.
Honestly the style of Honnemaise in particular might be something of a throwback at the time even to 70's style character designs that were always a little goofy. Not to say the 80's didn't produce some goofballs either, but there does seem to be a gradual shift in "otaku" media to pretty boys and pretty girls more than anything (I'm not complaining, personally).
Yeah, it would be nice if there was more critical analysis out there of Lisbon. I remember after I first saw it looking for something to read and couldn't find much. What little I read just suggested most people were as baffled as we were, lol.
I'd just settle for plot summaries at this point. As much as I usually make fun of hacks like Alan Sepinwall for creating "recap" culture, Lisbon could actually use that!
Jet Alone is one of those eps. I think is better for what it represents thematically than for anything else. The actual battle/drama surrounding JA is one of the weaker "big monster battles" in the series, but what it says about the political forces and their role in the big picture is pretty important. I'd say something similar about Magma Diver and how crucial it is for developing a lot of the series' symbolic motifs, but as an ep. is pretty blah.
I dunno, this time I ended up really enjoying those episodes, maybe because they felt slightly "newer" to me than more famous episodes I had put way more time into thinking about and analyzing over the years.
And frankly I have better appreciation for them now still feeling fairly unique after watching shit loads of other mecha anime that don't even come close to the variety of "monsters of the week" that Eva has. After so many Tomino shows and such that have the same types of battles over and over, Eva having so much variety is astounding.
Seems like Shinji was always pretty depressed. If anything, his boost of confidence later in the series was more of a contrast to his usual state of depression. I mean, ep. 4 is a pretty brutal depiction of his state of mind.
True. I just didn't remember Misato's promotion being the catalyst to really start bringing him back down again before the more horrifying Angels and such start attacking.
BTW, kuribo asked me this the other day and I didn't quite have an answer, but do you think the long train station shot at the end of episode 4 is "earned"?
^This one, I mean. From the end of the episode.
I had somehow completely forgot about it, but really its close to much later elevator scene in length (Which ended feeling shorter than I remembered anyways).
I'm forgetting what test/image you're referring to, but the Phantom Rei I generally just take to be one of the series' intentionally unresolved mysteries, and it's not hard to imagine why it would be haunting Shinji since that's kinda the idea.
It's episode 13 or 14, after the "recap" and Rei's soliloquoy, where they have Shinji trying syncing with Unit 00 and it starts going berserk and flooding him with images of Rei.
This has been weird pet thing for me, but I've never been able to tell if Shinji ever retroactively recognize "Phantom Rei" in episode 1 as well, Rei. And this episode didn't really make it clear to me.
I don't know if Anno is a Japanese nationalist, but NGE's depiction of Japan isn't very flattering. Anno did call it a "nation of children" afterall.
I just bring it up because I remember similar accusations being made against him in wake of Shin Godzilla.
Azuma's "Anime or Something Like It" was one of the first pieces of writing I read on NGE and hugely influenced my perception of the series. Didn't know he had a whole (translated?) book out.
Yup:
https://www.amazon.com/Otaku-Database-A ... 0816653526
I remember that "Anime or Something Like It" article being pretty good, but in O:JDA he tries to use Critical Theory to analyze anime as a way to analyze "otaku culture" and uh yeah. He cites people like Zizek and just makes a bunch of weird claims throughout the book.
Still its a short book and seems to get referenced a lot, so it might still be worth reading if you're interested (I'm not quite done myself though). Maybe pirate a PDF or something, and then read it in jail because piracy is a crime. You wouldn't download an Evangelion after all.
EDIT: To expand on this, he complains that postmodernism, the loss of a unifying "grand narrative" in Japanese culture is why there is a loss of plot in in anime series, and Evangelion ruined anime and turned into a plot-less "database" of characteristics. I.e. shows aren't watched because of plot or story or theme and basically just flatout stopped having those in favor of a "database" of "characteristics" i.e. including a character based on Rei Ayanami but with cute verbal tic or maid uniform or whatever the fuck to appeal to "moe" audience, and that all anime after Evangelion are just reorganized tropes in some similar fashion.
I just think that the argument is not only nonsensical on the surface to me, it just kind of reeks of a general ignorance of art and broader art history from Azuma outside of the otaku stuff he's talking about (I'd argue you could say there's a "database" for any narrative art movement. Like you could make similar claims about Classical Hollywood. Hell we just kind of did with talk of "couple on the run" films. Is that really any different than talking about anime with "Rei clones"?)- to say nothing about how much fantastic stuff was coming out in the era he was writing in. Between Evangelion and the year 2001, you're getting stuff like Escaflowne, Cowboy Bebop, Big O, Satoshi Kon's rise, Miyazaki's most acclaimed films, Kare Kano, FLCL, Serial Experiments Lain etc., and I think you'd have a hard time arguing any of those have less of a "plot" than any of the formulaic 70's/80's stuff like Gundam he's contrasting the contemporary state of anime with.
This is to say nothing about how its just kind of a given that a shift from "plot" to "characters" is this terrible thing.
EDIT 2: I'm continuing with the book and almost done with it, and now Azuma is complaining about how prostitution is ruining society as much as male otaku liking porn does. Man I do not have the energy to unpack this, but this just reinforces my belief that legitimate belief in the nonsense of psychoanalysis leads you to some dumb dumb dumb points of view.
Never heard of the idea that Anno was setting up/anticipating derivative works. No idea what that scene was supposedly parodying either, but probably something that was only seen in Japan. I think what it's saying is that the scene is both a parody of an existing (perhaps unauthorized?) derivative of the work, but also meant to anticipate a different derivative of the work. As to what either is, no idea.
Yeah I don't doubt there was a ton of a fan works based on Eva as the show was coming out in Japan, since fan culture and doujins and
Comiket and such is so big there, but the lack of specific citations and weird argumentation here bugs the wannabe academic in me.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris