Index III Episode 10

Nothing about this episode makes any sense. This is total shit.

  • Touma sees blood and gets pinned down by… a FLIGHT ATTENDANT?
  • Then he gets shoved into the bloody, gory room??
  • Captain says “I need to protect the passengers” and then goes back to doing not a goddamn thing while a terrorist is strangling a girl RIGHT NEXT TO WHERE HE STABBED A CREW MEMBER???
  • Terrorist manages to get away and HIDE ON A FUCKING PLANE??? How the fuck do you hide on a plane?
  • Terrorist threatens to kill EVERY PASSENGER, ONE BY ONE!!! And all he has is a bone knife?
  • Normal high school student defeats terrorist with one punch…

I don’t usually get angry after watching anime, but this was atrocious. At least it wasn’t as bad as episode 6, though…

Also, they forgot to draw the rest of Stiyl Magnus’s cigarette.

This series is sitting at 3/10 right now. I have to finish it, though, or I’ll be betraying Mikotoism forever.


On physics in Bunny Girl Senpai

I’m at episode 5 of Bunny Girl Senpai, and it has been the distillation of everything I liked about the Monogatari series. The conversations between the characters in Bunny Girl Senpai aren’t just filler phrases like in your standard rom-com. I wouldn’t call the conversations clever, but they’re interesting, and often unpredictable. At the same time, there isn’t any of the artistic bullshit that SHAFT likes to pull with Monogatari. I thought I liked that stuff, but now that I’ve seen it removed, it feels so distracting and detracts from the actual content.

wrong show kiddo

I can’t give the series full points, though, because the science-y explanations for the supernatural stuff are so long and boring.

As someone who works in physics, hearing an explanation of Schrodinger’s cat is like hearing grandpa’s favorite war story for the hundredth time. I don’t want to sit through a poorly translated version of what an anime character has to say about this thing I know far too well. But what’s worse is how it appeals to the (dumb) view of science as this strange, esoteric thing that could almost be supernatural. When Futaba talks, I get that the point is to lend an air of mystery and intrigue, not credibility. But when I listen to this stuff, it carries none of that connotation because it’s simply not exotic to me.

On the flip side, I have to give the series props for drawing inspiration from physics concepts. Even though they muck up the explanations, at the core there’s definitely a connection. For example, Schrodinger’s cat and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics say that nothing is determined or “real” (there’s a double meaning here, I think) until it is measured. I think it’s cool how they translated that into Mai disappearing unless people remember her. It’s very sci-fi, and more interesting to me than the more symbolic stuff from Monogatari.

The problem is that despite their own disclaimers, they use the physics stuff as a straight-up explanation of the plot points, which is totally wrong. It feels a little demeaning to be told that a basic concept that I’ve learned explains some mumbo jumbo in an anime.


Thoughts on Darling in the FranXX after episode 18

The best part of this show is how the ending song always starts just a bit ahead of the credits.

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South Pole Shoujos 13

I was going to write a “Winter 2017/18 wrapup” post, but then I realized that it would be almost entirely about Sora Yori mo Tooi Basho. This show has been unexpectedly good, refining the “genre” of cute-girls-do-cute-things to focus solely on the characters, making it seem a hell of a lot more meaningful than all of its otaku-pandering peers. Its depiction of a growing friendship was very heavy-handed at times, but never pointless. From the girls running in Shibuya to overcoming their past regrets in Antarctica, every moment felt like a tangible increase in their friendship levels.

At the start of this episode, I was planning on giving the show a 9/10. I kept thinking about the quick resolution to Shirase’s plot in the last episode, and it just felt so jarring compared to the incredible amount of time they spent saying goodbye in this one. Yet I felt emotions welling up as the episode went on, and I realized that I would be missing this show dearly. I’m not going to remember the plot of A Place Further Than The Universe (in true CGDCT spirit, there wasn’t much), but the characters are going to stick around in my memory for years to come.


Antarctica 10-12

Last time, I said Antarctic Girls was obviously going downhill, and with good reason! The episodes of the trip to Antarctica (Ep 6-9) were a lot weaker than the first third of the series introducing the girls (Ep 1-5). The conflicts either felt petty and small or were getting resolved too quickly.

In contrast, episodes 10 and 11 were the best we’ve seen so far.

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