July 24, 2016
Wait! They LIED to us!
I'm not complaining...I just didn't expect....this.
Wait for it...
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July 04, 2016
High School Fleet Ends
Pinch me, so I know it's not a dream!
I wasn't the only one pleased to finally reach this last episode...though for different reasons than the Harekaze's torpedo officer.
Actually, the final episode was not terrible and the series as a whole would have been significantly better if episode 11 had not existed. The few good moments of that debacle could have easily been incorporated into this story.
The whole 'Captain has a nervous breakdown' plot point from episode 11 was chucked into the scuppers and the climax revolves around a fairly satisfying battle with Captain Akeno handling her ship with great verve as it is is gradually shot out from under her. Some old friends arrive to provide support at a crucial moment...
...and Akeno uses the opportunity to get her stricken vessel (and the only available stock of the anti-zombie vaccine) alongside Musashi for a desperate boarding action in an attempt to save the day.
Afterwards, the crippled Harekaze is towed into port...
... where she sinks at her moorings as the sun sets.
Note: They are explicitly in Yokusuka, which is surrounded by mountains and cliffs, except to seaward, ie: to the east-southeast. Yes, the sun is setting in the east.
However, we never do get an explanation for why this senior officer (who, I note, is outside without her combo cover) has cat ears.
"Is it over?...Is it finally over?"
All in all, High School Fleet had some neat moments but required way too much suspension of disbelief to be taken seriously, I confess, I liked its tendency towards didactic solutions to the problems the girls faced but the show devolved rapidly into a largely inchoate mess.
The one sane person on the ship...screaming internally.
I think it was Pixy who hypothesized a process whereby writers put a bunch of current tropes on a dartboard, throw three darts and build a show based upon where those darts landed, in this case 'Cute Girls in HighSchool Doing Club Stuff' 'Naval Otakuism'...'Zombies'. Sometimes it would probably be a good idea to ponder ones options...and go back to the dartboard.
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June 26, 2016
Oh Look...Miku-Miku Overwatch
Note though, that if you are not utterly appalled by the very existance of Overwatch, then you are probably a terrible terrible person for reasons that I don't quite get due to us terrible people not being self aware. However, some clue to the reason for our awfulness can possibly be gleaned from the following video that lays out the reason some are offended rather better than the people who say they are offended...which isn't saying much.
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June 21, 2016
The Learning Never Ends
I confess I'd been under the impression that Papi was just a comic book character and wasn't real at all.
Still looking for source.
Now I know better.
I won't be eating any crow over this though...out of respect.
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June 19, 2016
I Have Concluded That Bikes are Better than Boats
Art by ã¾ã‚Šã‚‚æ°
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June 18, 2016
Pinch Me When This is Over
In the latest episode of High School Fleet, our intrepid Captain Akeno has a complete nervous breakdown.
"SECURE THE STRAWBERRIES!"
What follows is not the XO relieving her and taking command, but some nonsense about everyone coming together to support the CO because she's the CO and that's what you do...and stuff...
OK that was a mess.
On to more important things....
With Sena Ingenoh having left the show, I think that Wonderduck is right, the stoic lookout is the secret star of this story.
To maintain modesty while doing this in a skirt requires great skill indeed.
She regularly sees ships well before they are noticed on that silly thing called radar, she does her job without drama and a few episodes ago she waltzed in and saved the day when....well...there were zombies and she had a couple of supersoakers filled with Zom-B-Gone. She certainly is the brightest flame in this dumpster fire of a series.
Meanwhile, Captain Catgirl returns. Actually, we find out that the catgirl is a commodore and is named Hiraga. There is still absolutely no explanation for why she has cat ears.
She leads an abortive attack on Musashi using a scratch force of fast but lightly armed vessels which she handles with considerable verve, despite being completely outgunned. If one took away the whiny whininess of Akeno's neurosis in this episode, there would be a very solid 7 minute or so episode revolving around Hiraga's hopeless action and the desperate efforts
Alas, we had to sit through the other 23 minutes of Akeno sucking her toes.
Captain Akeno's funk is abruptly resolved via condiments and the episode ends with the crew gearing up for the climactic battle which will be next week...rather than this week, presumably because they contracted for 12 episodes and had put this weeks utter non-sequiter into the show to pad out the story.
One more episode and then I'm free.
.WEBMs via danbooru
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May 30, 2016
My Credulity is Being Pinched
Sadly, I think they are talking ABOUT the plot, rather than anything occurring IN the plot.
High School Fleet is an absolutely amazing mess.
Something has been nagging me about this for several episodes and I couldn't put my finger on it until now: This series has very good animation, an overarching plot and some very Japanese moments...but the generally PC feel of the world, the didactic resolutions to the various pinches the girls find themselves in, and spectacular catastrophes with body counts of zero all result in an overarching tone that actually reminds me of a Hanna Barberra adventure cartoon from the '70s or perhaps a Rankin Bass show from the '80s.
There are some neat bits, the tactical use of tide-tables being a particularly good moment, and the overarching threat is a global one that the girls thus far have been able to stave off via their wits (and the Deus Ex Machina of having their corpsman in training be a prodigy). However High School Fleet continues to steer erratically through the strait separating naval otakuism from the great derp reef. So far the show has run aground on both shores multiple times.
But enough forced metaphors, I cannot in good conscience recommend this show to my readers, though I will continue watching this train wreck because it amuses me for some reason (most likely a deep-seated character flaw on my part).
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May 22, 2016
Though it Pinches my Patience, I Persevere
In my review of episode one of this show I mentioned that, while I was unsure about it, I thought it had considerable potential. Now, 5 episodes in...I find my position unchanged.
You see, High School Fleet, is one of the most bi-polar shows I've seen in years.
Watching this can be rough, since like the waves upon which it is set, it alternates between crests of utter win and troughs that bottom out and threaten to break the very keel of the plot.
Part of this is due to the fact that Crunchyroll's subtitle job on this looks to be a bit off, at least in the early episodes. The background regarding the world setting and even the year (is it set in the future or an alternate present /past?) is sufficiently self-contradicted that I think the confusion is actually a translation issue.
Furthermore, the translator seems simply not aware of many nautical terms and of course there are (presumably) many (understandably) unfamiliar Japanese nautical terms adding to the general perplexity.
The show starts out as "Cute girls doing cute things...on warships" an obvious attempt to cash in on the Girls und Panzer phenomenon from a few years ago. However whereas that was essentially a sports anime with tank fighting being the sport, the tension in this series comes from rather higher stakes than loosing a sporting event. There is something quite sinister afoot and the girls unexpectedly find themselves fighting...for their lives. The show, however retains, most of the time the feel of an ensemble 'cute girls in high school' show with the training destroyer's departments serving the same function as school clubs or the individual tank crews in Girls und Panzer.
This leads to a highly schizophrenic alternation between "cute" and "thriller" that was beginning to give me a headache.
Just when I was about to pick up the towel and throw it in however....
Sena from Haganai showed up!
OK, canonically her name is Wilhelmina Braunschweig Ingenoh, but come ON! It's Sena without the butterfly pin. Sena Miss. Ingenoh was the student XO of a German school ship, the Graff Spee, which was built to look exactly like it's World War 2 antecedent right down to the plaque on the bridge.
Our heroine's encounter with the German school ship is not as congenial as they might have hoped, but through an unlikely set of circumstances Ingenoh ends up stuck on the Harekaze. This is fortuitous, as their newfound Teutonic shipmate apparently has a genetic affinity for submarines and talks the crew through a nicely portrayed ASW evolution using World War ONE techniques (all they have is a set of paravanes and a single depth charge).
Thanks to Frau Ingenoh's timely intervention our heroines survive long enough to learn a valuable lesson about conserving toilet paper...and to develop a mouse problem.
This show seems almost to be a satire of several different genres. It's a bizarre mess at times but is making me smile in spite of myself.
In any event, Sena's in it, so sacred honor dictates I should watch a few more episodes at least, if only to figure out what the HELL this completely gratuitous catgirl is doing here.
Admit it. You did not expect that sentence to end that way. The individual appears to not even a main character. All the students seem to be baseline human, but during an interrogation of one of our heroines, a naval investigative officer with all of three lines of dialog just happens to have unremarked upon cat ears poking out the top of her head. This comes out of the blue and if one blinked it would have been missed.
I think this show may just be trolling us...but I'm curious enough that I've got to watch more.
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May 08, 2016
Coral
There should be coral, barnacles and sea squirts all over the submerged portions of Tokyo Tower and the surrounding edifices.
From episode 1 of High School Fleet, which is exceedingly odd. It's set in a future where the sea level has risen dramatically. The fact that society has adjusted quite well is a nice departure from the norm, and probably a more accurate prediction than most. Likewise their portrayal of the survivability of an LCS is quite astute but there are issues besides the growth rate of barnacles that do give one pause.
You see, our heroines are on a school ship that is built to broadly resemble a WW2 Japanese destroyer....
Despite the vessel's high pressure steam plant, Harekaze is highly automated and is crewed by a mere 36 high school students who are unsupervised except indirectly from an instructor's flagship.
The student CO, one Misake Akeno, is quite astonished at her assignment given that she just barely made it into the school academically.
The crew's first training cruise hits a snag, partly due to human error and partly due to the ship's finicky steam plant. While the crew does get these matters battened down, things nevertheless turn pear shaped quite suddenly, and not in a way anyone would expect.
I'm not sure what to think at this point. It looks like Girls Und Panzer with destroyers rather than tanks, but with a completely incongruous bit of...edginess.
Anyway, though it appears to be a collection of current anime fads this show has a certain potential.
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May 05, 2016
Meanwhile, in Gensokyo...
...Rossini appears unexpectedly.
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April 28, 2016
Commas and Such
This is an important programing note to the subset of our moviegoing readers that are weeks behind on their new release viewing.
At 04:09 this morning, we posted a Batman VS Superman review that, upon reflection, needed some further editing.
To wit.
...does a character study of Batman in the midst of an ethical dilemma that has driven him to distraction and an appreciation of Alfred, the butler...who is portrayed so very right.
...was probably meant to be...
...does a character study of Batman in the midst of an ethical dilemma that has driven him to distraction, and provides an appreciation of Alfred, the butler...who is portrayed so very right.
Note that while a single comma and the word "provides" were technically all that was required to salvage the post from the slash bin, I ultimately decided to do a slightly more comprehensive tweak of the paragraph.
Apologies to those who were initially offended or who rushed off to see the film based on false pretenses.
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All the World is A Lie
The Batman Versus Superman film has gotten execrable reviews, and, in any event, exams, term papers and various other adult responsibilities have precluded anything that took time or misallocated my already limited creativity reserves until this week.
My friend BOB!1! claimed to have enjoyed the film, but he had really liked Wing Commander too and so is an unreliable gauge of such matters. Nevertheless, with some trepidation, I accompanied him when he went to see it again this week.
A southern gentleman is expected to comport himself with a degree of stoicism and gentility that makes adequate description of what I sat through difficult to express.
Fortunately, this blog employs some imaginary cartoon debutantes who are not so constrained.
more...
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April 20, 2016
Umm...What?
Seriously. What?
This was announced on April first,which allowed us to blissfully ignore the warning, However, it keeps getting talked about by Rooster Teeth and reportedly has a release date of sometime in May. There is supposed to be a clip released on April 27th, so we'll know in a week if this is just a ponderous leg-pull...or perhaps something even more cruel.
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April 17, 2016
Phantom World Ends
Myriad Colors Phantom World wrapped up with episode 13. Despite having to cram about half a dozen episodes worth of material into 23 minutes, this whirlwind episode manages to have quiet, even touching moments of introspection and character development interspersed with all sorts of delightfully escalating violence. The writers do resort to expediting the plot with a somewhat unlikely hacking montage...
"Somewhat!?"
...and don't quite clear up every single plot thread, but this episode is brilliantly paced and serves as a thoroughly satisfying climax. I never would have guessed that they were going pull this off so well.
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April 02, 2016
A Reliable Substitute for Thoughtful Content
...is pandering to the audience, so here is a rendering of Hephaestus by Shima Shima.
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March 28, 2016
Zombjas in Snowflake Village!
If you understand this message, it is meant for you.
Kurumi Ebisuzawa Crossing sign by Maboroshi Dandy
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So Very True...
(Some of her typings not subject to the 'Trust and Safety Council are here)
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March 27, 2016
It's Spring
...so watch out for snakes.
Milia cosplay by Shiro Ang
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What the HELL Did I Just Watch!?
Please Tell Me Galko-Chan! has been getting some positive buzz, so I decided to give it a whirl.
The series is a slice of life show revolving around three young ladies, who, in their own way, are...different. From left to right: We have Galko the EPONYMOUS ringleader of our group of misfits. She suffers from acute Steatopygia, Macromastia, and blonde hair. These tragic deformities have resulted in her having a completely unearned reputation as a...party girl. She is quite good at reading prose. To the right of her is Oujo, a young lady from a rich family with pitch perfect etiquette and an immaculate uniform, who suffers from the tragic handicap of being an airhead. Finally there is Outo, whose disabilities include myopia, frumpiness and being a smart ass.
Over the course of the first 7 and a half minute episode they discuss such deep philosophical topics as nipples, pubic hair and poop...both spicy and sweetened.
So it's kind of like Katawa Shoujo meets Beavis and Butthead..but without the angst or the music videos.
What the hell Japan?!
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March 26, 2016
All You Had to Do Was Say That They Were Cosplayers
Because Frankly, this picture does not look at all incongruous.
Yes, Gate is over. It will be missed.
The series was overall, quite entertaining despite having had an uneven run, which suffered additionally from being a bit rushed, especially towards the end.
However, when one's biggest complaint about a show is that one wished one could have seen more, it could be a clue that he show's not bad. Overall GATE, was, most of the time, a thoroughly entertaining show and most importantly, it ended on a quite satisfying note.
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