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Comments
The whole finale really addressed what is probably now the unpopular idea in consumer fiction, that remakes can indeed make everything better. It was Kyouko remaking her dad's play whereas his dresses had been remade by Shou and Yun-su.
At first, I personally didn't approve of her decision to try and fix such a broken, frankly terrifying thing that had a lot of negative energy attached to it. Least of all on the back of young, impressionable Prism Stars.
Thinking back on it I realize that the feeling of happiness she had attached to her father, and her childhood memories of what he said Greatful Symphonia could be, she wanted to make something beautiful. Not just out of this one play, but of the slight he'd made against her and the whole world of Prism Shows by not only fixing her first Prism Queen Cup in her favor, but then later on when he uses it to smear them all with shame.
Myeong Ja even explains that everything that was meant to go into Greatful Symphonia needed remaking, first of all when she explained to Yun-su that designing is knowing what to add and knowing what to remove. Because Kintarou had completely lost his objectivity, first to his myopia/various criminal activities, and then to his despair, that he would never actually know how to figure it out.
Then later in her letter to Kei where she explains that the both of them and Kintarou failed to make Greatful Symphonia a reality whilst the new generation actually managed to do it without accidentally taking anyone's soul (or slightly crippling them re:whatever actually happened to Myeong Ja before the Pure Symphonia Stone she later gave to Yun-su broke).
Also I guess Kintarou's original version of Greatful Symphonia was never actually performed since he could never get the Acts to evolve (he barely got Road to Symphonia to work and that was thanks to literally mind-controlling Aira). So it's only slightly a remake.
Time to yell at more stuff for being one-cour-only.
On an unrelated sidenote, Circlet Princess's Yuka is reminding me of Four Rhythm's Asuka.
Do you feel that anime and "anime influences" are often used as a scapegoat in other works?
I'm asking cuz I often find it unwarranted, such as blaming it for MtG's shortcomings ever since Kamigawa (which is based on (AFAICT non-anime) Japanese folklore) and WoW's Mists of Pandaria (which is based on another country's culture (China's, esp. kung-fu movies).
I think if people feel a work moves away from it's original structure/whatever, which is usually associated with trying to get a new audience via changes in aesthetics or influences, people will blame all the changes wholesale. However, the aesthetic and influential changes will get the brunt of it because it's what people see.
Take Aikatsu Friends! for example. In the original Aikatsu! series, over three and a half years, there were two Cool characters whose influences are Gothic, and only one brand that is Gothic.
In Aikatsu Stars!, over two years, there was one character who was Cool whose main influence is Gothic, and one brand that is Gothic (though Spice Chord did play around with Gothic influences sometimes).
In Aikatsu Friends!, over one and a half years, there were three characters who were Cool and influenced by Gothic themes, and (somehow) four Gothic brands. There was even a whole Gothic themed event that brought together all the previous Gothic idols. That meant, for about an early quarter of the first year, Aikatsu Friends! was constantly pushing Gothic styles.
Aikatsu Friends! is also when the franchise's popularity cratered so badly that they had to paper a whole new game over the Friends! system.
It'd be easy for somebody to complain that it was definitely the Gothic fashion's fault. Obviously kids probably aren't as into it as Aikatsu! Onii-sans, and in the grand scheme of things/as much as I hate admitting it introducing new Cute brands works much better for kids (y'know, the pink) so they weren't really drawn into playing when they were pushing Sakuya or Kaguya or Alicia.
But, there are many, many actual issues with the Friends! system; most prominent being that it doubled the number of cards you needed to use when aiming for a decent score, which takes time and money and luck and then even more time when in the Dressing Room.
I see this opinion every so often on Steam, manifesting most frequently in "why are there so many anime games" threads (whose domain also kinda overlaps with "why are there so many indie games" threads) and occasional random anime threads where they'll walk in just to crap on the thread.
Of course you basically get this sort of generalized low-level antipathy to a variety of things, not just anime -- bronies and furries are two other popular targets, and to a lesser extent larpers.
This one features Illyasviel as a more literal Red Saber, it seems.
I feel like of all the Fate/ series, this one will somehow last the longest.
I'd really like to watch Prisma Illya, but I'm sure the level of fanservice is distateful at best and actually concerning at worst. I've watched the PV for the one OVA and that seemed leagues and bounds above whatever Ro-Kyu-Bu! has been accused of.
Also, it is strange to see them not understanding basic human things like conversation, especially coming from Azur Lane where those are the kind of things KANSEN just inherently know, considering what they are.
Actually, I mainly wish there was a version of Azur Lane that really ran with how they're manifestations of emotion and made them more ridiculous and magicky. The anime only tried to do that for aircraft carriers.
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Nina, the wallflower for five episodes, is suddenly my favorite character after episode 6 of Circlet Princess.
Like, technically whatever is created to mimic something else is definitely A.I., but the Fog isn't a bunch of scientists or whatever, it's an... unknowable sort of thing.
I know that Dai Sato's most successful work to date is Eureka Seven but LISTENERS following every other plot point from Eureka Seven is a lot to ignore.
Oh by the way GMH, Bushiroad's Weiss Schwartz is doing cards based on series like Akashic Records and Chaika, which I think you liked.
They're also doing Adventure Time, but nobody likes that.
Yeah I get that. It just seems intentional that Azur Lane's girls are specifically made of the stuff that the Fog ships have trouble with.
I think the Azur Lane anime makes this inversion look even more intentional since the humanoid forms are their actual bodies while the ships are things they can magically summon or compress into accessories. Also, there's flight powers instead of submerging.
I am going to guess "LISTENERS" is the name of something.
Weiss Schwartz seems like a kind of game I might have gotten into if I were (1) hanging out with a bunch of anime geeks in meatspace, and (2) had more disposable income.
I will fix the repetition (fantastic/fantasy, etc) eventually.
I should have expected this. It's a music show where the main point was basically how cool it was and how many references it could pull off per episode. Basically all musical vanity projects end up going like this so it's fine.
I mean, I still really enjoy it visually and the actual storytelling is quite great from scene to scene.
Also, the show keeps doing that thing when they show off the new cool mecha but all the designs are equally underwhelming so it's always just like "Oh".
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Shadowverse is funny. Apparently, Swordcraft is supposed to be the most OP class there is in the game. At the very least, it's one everybody plays at some point.
Watching Kazuki's first real battle, I saw why, they're practically always summoning followers onto the field either by effect or Last Words.
However, Kazuki himself is the least capable of all three protagonists in a way, having the lowest rank! I guess it was to make sure it didn't seem even more unfair than normal that Hiro was winning everything.
I really thought Last Words would be a trait left to the undead classes (undead and vampires), but it's okay either way, you could say a soldier calls upon a new comrade when they fall or something like that.
I don't remember at all...
Well, you should. It's a wild (if predictable, at times) ride.
It got interesting as the second half hit.
I would ask you to guess my favorite character if not for the fact that I already named her.
I'd totally watch a season 2 though.
I like that it went out on the note it came in.
In this world, there are Players, humans with holes somewhere on their bodies and if an amp is plugged into these, they become mecha known as Equipment. The Players fight off the forces of CGI terror known as Earless. Earless, like Players, are formerly human. I actually am not sure if Players are still human after they become players...
It's actually never confirmed if there are original Earless who have never been human but I always got that feeling. They also never confirm if every Player was once a normal human, or if this is always symptom of that thing Echo almost got by hanging around Mu.
Ten years prior, the many forces of Liverchester, Paisley Park, Kevin Valentine's Failed Scottish Kingdom (Tremol?), Londinium, Freak Scene Academy, and (begrudgingly) the Gnomes, came together for a big Gig called the Project Freedom Festival.
At this Fes, a young Player named Jimi Stonefree was set to be the Headliner. He and the Gnomes had come together, and so at this point he'd already had a sympathy towards the Earless.
Not much is known about Jimi's past, but what is clear that he once lived with his little sister Janice, and then he encountered the metaphysical space that the Origin occupies (lets say the Cross Roads). This was possibly after Janice had died? There, he became a Player.
Anyways, Jimi then attended Freak Scene Academy, before departing for Gnome country. The other factions reached out to the Gnomes, and so Jimi went to Paisley Park with them where he met Denka (ie not Prince). Denka then fell in love with him, which isn't important but it's all he talks about. Also Denka has no heart (that's where his amp plug is instead) so where does love even come from?
So, the other factions told the Gnomes that the Players were going to try and bring more understanding to the Earless, but they actually intended to just destroy all the Earless. They didn't inform Jimi or the people of Gnome of this until Planet Freedom started. Jimi refused their plan, and so he attempted... something. Whatever it was, it was working with the Earless versus working against them.
This created Mu, or to be more frank; Listeners. This was an existence that many, including the Noise Sisters, mistook for Jimi's younger sister. Listeners is an existence that was created, obviously, because a Player reached out to the Earless and so the Earless tried to reach out too by creating their own approximation of a Player.
Somehow, this also led to all of the people of Gnome/The Wall except Roz turning into Earless.
In a way, Listeners is more Jimi's offspring than his sister, but that's irrelevant to the wider picture.
Listeners met a boy from Liverchester called Echo, and these two set off on an adventure under two flawed premises; that Jimi was alive in the world (though he might be?) and that Mu was Jimi's sister.
A lot of things happened, and eventually when they came to the totalitarian Londinium. Mu's obvious similarities to Jimi and her aptitude with Equipment made her a prime asset to retry project freedom. Leadership in Londinium had changed over time, and the heartless Tommy who didn't have the pleasure of learning firsthand how terrible the first Project Freedom turned out (ie with all the death and the part where Liverchester turned into a deindustrialized zone overnight) decided it was his time to shine.
Instead, all he got for messing with Mu's mind was awakening Listeners from her deep slumber inside Mu's psyche. This sent all the Earless in every known area of the story (including Gnome country/The Wall) to go mad. Listeners also rewarded Tommy by turning him into an Earless and declaring war on humanity.
As a side note; a trial run of Listeners operating on Teen Spirit (the drug Londinium soldiers take to pilot Equipment better -child soldiers mind you-) seemingly killed a recently Player-ified Lyde (and a still normal Richie) which enraged Nir. Actually though it seems they just became Earless.
Watching Mu suffer and experience a severe identity crisis sent Echo down a spiral of despair which led him to believe he wasn't meant to be messing with the big aspects of life. He was just a rando from Liverchester after all.
At his lowest, the metaphysical space known as the Cross Roads appeared to him. Here he met Jimi's sister Janice, probably based on Jimi's memories of her. Like with Jimi, this place appeared to him as the outskirts of a blues town known as Clarksdale that does not appear in any other context (yet?). In Jimi's variation of it, Robert does appear, but Janice doesn't, so it's possible that yet another player left their memories of Robert in this place.
In this place, Echo gains the ability to become a Player from the Origin, albeit temporarily.
In the meantime, the various factions come together to defeat Listeners and save the world, betting entirely on Denka's giant love cannon (it's an actual cannon I swear). They fail, really badly, but that's when Echo shows up.
What changes the world, in the end, is an earnest shift in perception, which is where I think all the originality in LISTENERS ending comes from. When Echo is able to see Mu as an Earless but accept her as the person he already knew, all of humanity is granted the ability to see the Earless as something else. As humanoid entities with mountain goat ears (these might be the Earless that used to be human) and other silhouetted, shadowy yet human-shaped creatures (these might be Earless that were never human).
Obviously this doesn't explain in any way why Earless were attacking humans unprovoked or why they coveted players so much. It's known that humans and Earless can live in harmony like beyond The Wall, but it's not really explained why humans have to completely abandon their fear (whilst the Earless do nothing) to work with them. Earless are scary giant monsters, man.
Plus, there's the fact that despite turning Lyde and Ritchie back to normal, Mu totally killed real life people in Listeners mode with her giant pink laser cannons that shot all across the known regions like thunder and she's more than instantly forgiven for this.
Even at the Londinium event, there's no way she didn't kill at least some of the Players fighting alongside Lyde and Ritchie.
Also, everybody who organized Project Freedom was always beating themselves up about trying to annihilate the Earless but there's really no evidence that if they didn't freak Jimi out so much Listeners would have been created (clearly whatever religious balloon nonsense the Gnomes were doing was not working) so basically everything in the world only worked out because of Project Freedom, and then later Echo.
Anywaaaaaaays, that's it.
yes. very yes.
*wipes glasses*
Hentatsu & Hentatsu (TV)
TV series:
Z/X Code Reunion (1 cour)
The Price of Smiles (1 cour)
Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle (1 cour)
Circlet Princess (1 cour)
movies:
Fate/Grand Order: First Order
Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha: The Movie 1st
My anime watching this year so far is pretty slow.
Me too but since you posted your list it makes mine look intense;
TV Anime:
Kabukichou Sherlock (2 cours, one this year)
Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story: Magia Record (1 cour)
ARP Backstage Pass (1 cour)
LISTENERS (1 cour)
Shadowverse (1 cour so far)
Pretty Rhythm: Dear My Future (4 cours)
I haven't watched any movies this year.