Aggretsuko: satire of reality

I love Japan. The food is great, the cities are marvelous, arcades a plenty, the people leave you alone and they have the best public transportation I’ve ever seen. Being from New York makes it all the more frustrating when I hear that the downtown 6 train is running 30 minutes behind schedule and it makes me froth up anger and spite, where as in Japan the train is on a schedule as tight as a latex catsuit and are always on time. One of the stations even played the Astro Boy theme when a train arrived for fucks sake (I’m dead serious about that). I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s a wonderful country and I can’t remember a time where I felt more at ease. Which is why it’s painful to admit that I don’t think I could live there and it has nothing to do with a language/culture barrier or the fact that I fucking despise The Good Dinosuar and think Frozen is mediocre at best which would undoubtedly lead to my public execution. It’s because unless I actually become a well paid writer (fuck you a man can dream) I’d have to get an actual job and I lack what I like to refer to as “the Japanese work ethic.” Meaning working 16-18 hour days at a job that robs you of your mind, body and soul and just as you walk through your door and fantasize about getting some sleep, you have to spin on your heels and run out the door to catch the only train that’ll get you to work on time. And the result of this level of conditioning stress will have one of three effects on me, 1) I become a single function robot without a single trace of humanity left, 2) I die from exhaustion or 3) decide that the best way for me to catch up on sleep is to hurl myself off the Tokyo tower. Which brings me to Aggretsuko, a satirical look at the life of a Tokyo office worker brought to us by Sanrio of all people, the Hello Kitty company. However instead of a delightful romp with cutesy characters, Sanrio shows us cutesy characters with an edge I didn’t even know it had. It’s like if Cinderella had ordered her step family killed after she became royalty and fed their remains to the mice as payment for the dress they fucked up. Ok Aggretsuko isn’t morbid, but I doubt Hello Kitty ever dealt with being so low on food money she had to eat bread crust and mayo for lunch.

In a depiction of Tokyo just a few species short of being fucking Zootopia, we follow the life of Retsuko, a cutesy red panda as she goes through the motion of getting through a day of work without smashing her boss and/or co-worker’s head/s through a computer monitor. To make sure she doesn’t go berserk, Retsuko vents her anger by channeling the spirit of Nathan Explosion and sings death metal. To each their own, I watch tv, write, collect comics and habitually wank to vent my own frustrations and I like how Retsuko has to remind herself to switch between rage death metal mode to normal worker mode to keep her love of metal a secret since metal is her only light in an otherwise bleak and unforgiving world that wants nothing more than to swallow her whole and revel in her suffering as she tries claws her way up from the maw only for it to drag her back down into the dirt where she belongs.

Fuck sorry, I keep going to the depressing side of things when Aggretsuko itself is a comedy that’s brightly colored and lively and has fun and quirky characters who are stereotypes of people you’d actually see in an office environment, the big-mouthed gossip, the suck up, the bitter coworker who really just needs a hug, the sexist boss depicted as a literal pig, etc. basically characters that make the audience roll their eyes and say “oh yeah, I know that guy” and it’s nice to see how Retsuko interacts with them, either being friendly, brushing them aside or just waiting for the day they die. That being said the series really doesn’t sugar coat how Retsuko is nothing more but an expendable cog in this office work environment, getting bitched by her boss and senior staff, doing other’s work, all the while bottling up her rage and dreaming of a day when she can quit her job and knee her boss in the fucking bollocks all the while drifting from task to task with a smile on her face while slowly dying on the inside.

It may be a cruel thing to say, but it really seems like Retsuko brings a lot of this anguish on herself, like the scene where she’s stopped on the street to be asked about her boss and she goes off about him. Yeah her face was obscured but it’s not too hard to figure out who she is, it’s like Superman and a simple pair of glasses. And of course it bites her square in her ass, because why wouldn’t it? And while it was nice to see Retsuko stand up for herself when a new job opportunity presented itself she really should’ve waited to make sure it didn’t fall through and get even further on her boss’s shit list. But I can’t exactly blame her, in fact I commend her for not offing herself and contributing to Japan’s ever-growing suicide statistic and instead tries new things to help her get through the day, like taking up yoga to land herself a man and become a housewife, oh Retsuko you scamp. She even makes friends with the higher-ups in the company, namely Director Gori and Washimi, the company president’s secretary.

And if I may digress for a hot second, I actually prefer the Japanese dialogue over the English, not because the English dub is bad it’s actually quite good and not because I’m a bottom feeding, parasitic, taint worm who says “ONLY THE JAPANESE DUBS ARE GOOD,” but because Washimi and Gori have a bit more depth to them in the Japanese dub. See in the Japanese dub Washimi and Gori admire Retsuko despite their status for being able to keep coming into work with her head held high despite the shit storm she’s subjected to and it’s because of that they both think that Retsuko’s the bee’s knees and want to hang out with her but are a little too scared to do so. While in the English dub it seems more like the only reason they admire her is because they have a girl crush on Retsuko, at least Gori does. Which is not to say there isn’t implied girl crushes in the Japanese dub, but it’s not the reason they like Retsuko. It only takes a yoga class and a karaoke hang out to become friends and it’s much more believable that they became fast friends because both parties thought the other was just so fucking cool that they’d never want to be friends with them/her but find common ground a bond over it and thus a new squad is born instead of it being something out of infatuation. They even give Retsuko advice on her life, Washimi flat-out saying that Retsuko’s plan to just get married and quit her job is a bad idea because it wouldn’t be fair to her or the guy she marries if it’s for a selfish reason and using her sway with the president to get Retsuko’s boss to start treating his staff with more respect. It’s the little victories like this that keep you rooting for Retsuko to make it through the next day.

The writing? uh, it’s… ok I guess. Which may cause some of you to raise a brow or two because I have a tendency to fire shows out of cannons if their story is less than satisfactory, but it’s the truth. Nothing really grips my heart like Mola Ram in the Temple of Doom or takes me on a fucking awesome rollercoaster like Megalo Box because the scenarios Retsuko’s in have been done and seen before and it’s not hard to predict what’ll happen next. Retsuko goes to a wedding, Retsuko now has no food budget because of the money gift to the couple, Retsuko is offered a job with an old friend, falls through because friend doesn’t really know what the fuck she’s doing and this is only episode 2, it’s not exactly “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” And the show only has one joke, sure there are a few moments that are funny but the only joke that gets told is “cute red panda goes death metal angry” and while it is amusing, stops being funny after a while. But what the show does do well and allows me to spare it from cannon fire is how they develop their characters. And I’m not talking about our protagonist, because I like to think I explained enough about how great Retsuko is without spoiling anything major I’m talking about the supporting cast. A good example is Tsunoda the deer girl who I like very much. I recall watching this with a buddy of mine and when they first saw her the response I got was “Wow she’s such a bitch!” But I don’t get that from her, in fact she might just be one of the smartest characters in the show. See Tsunoda on the surface is a bubbly, cutesy, pretty girl who acts dumb and sucks up to the boss so hard she might as well be called the Cervinae vacuum to get out of doing any actual work. But when Retsuko wants advice on how to get on the boss’s good side, Tsunoda basically acknowledges the fact that no one in the office likes her and that she acts the way she does so she doesn’t wind up like Retsuko, getting kicked around like the office soccer ball. It’s her survival tactic and while you could argue that Retsuko’s way of dealing with work is the more honest therefore the better way, I can’t say what Tsunoda does is wrong or that she’s a bitch, she’s found a way to get in and out at work while still clinging to her sanity and I have to applaud her for that.

So I guess another good question is, if this show beats down a cutesy animal girl and constantly reminds me of my least favorite topic the “real world” and has writing that’s slightly average then why do I like it so much? Well because life is a lesson in duality and one can only experience pleasure if there’s been pain to be put into context, I like to think this applies to a story and characters as well. Seeing Retsuko get knocked down only for her to get back up and eye the unfeeling monster that is office work with determination and drive is rather endearing and we celebrate her highs because we’ve seen her at her low. This is probably why I really, really love “M.A.S.H” as much as I do. From the opening credits the tone is established saying “take the war and the casualties seriously because the doctors and nurses of the 4077th will” and you can feel the crushing weight on their shoulders from the war and their duties to save as many soldiers as they can only for them to go back to the front and either die or get sent back to a M.A.S.H unit and start the process all over again until God willing they get sent back home and the toll it takes on the characters is painfully evident in some cases, but the show doesn’t take itself so seriously that we can’t enjoy Hawkeye’s wise cracks at Frank’s expense or Klinger’s latest attempt at a section 8.

The other reason is probably because this was done by Sanrio and allow me to elaborate with a quick hypothetical. Let’s say Aggretsuko wasn’t done by Sanrio and instead of cutesy animals the characters were just regular humans, would people still watch it? Maybe some but I’m sure it wouldn’t have as much of an audience as it does now and I for one wouldn’t even fucking bother watching it because it wouldn’t look appealing or very interesting. But that’s the Aggretsuko difference, its unique style of brightly colored animals makes it stand out amongst the other slice of life animes that exist and the level of separation between us and the characters is just right for us to enjoy the story without it bumming us out despite how real it can get which I think would lose its charm if it were a person getting dragged around on a choke chain through yet another degrading day.

You may have noticed this review is considerably shorter than my last one, well what did you expect? Each episode is 15 minutes long, it was the 1st season and there’s really not much else to say about it. But over all I enjoyed my romp with Sanrio’s risk, it doesn’t do anything ground breaking but it’s unique, has charm and is a lot of fun if you got time on your commute and want to bang out an episode or two and want a reminder of no matter how much you struggle you’ll only be met with a cold grip of loneliness and death as you punch the clock and count down the hours like you’re waiting for your own execution and you’re not sure if it’s better to wait for the executioner or take matters into your own hands then Aggretsuko’s got you covered. Wait what was I talking about?

My Little Pony: Sunshine, lollipops, rainbows and twee.

My Little Pony I feel like a wedge has been driven between us. It’s not you it’s me; actually that’s a complete lie, it’s entirely you. Nothing personal, it’s just whenever I walked past your house you’d run up to the fence like an excited dog greeting the mailman and with great enthusiasm  invited me to your tea party where I can make some new friends and enjoy the lovely cakes and build long-lasting friendships while singing songs about our feelings.  But having social anxiety I responded to you in the usual manner I do when someone enthusiastically tries to get me out of my comfort zone while being suspiciously nice which was to smash a bottle over your head and run away. But lord knows you didn’t keep trying. For the next several years we repeated this process, you run up all bright-eyed and filled with love and I always had a bottle on hand to help with my escape. It was nice of you to not press charges, but the city finally caught me on littering your sidewalk with broken glass for seven seasons so consider this review as an apology and court appointed community service.

I think I should clarify a bit more in saying that I’m reviewing the “Friendship is Magic” series of MLP, since any earlier interpretations of the show are so bad that they’re used by the government for torturing suspected terrorists. But the Friendship is Magic series lasted for seven seasons and just started their eighth so they must be doing something right. But I’ve always kept my distance since being engrossed in nerd culture the last thing I wanted to do was to make myself even more of an outcast and get into a show that’s aimed at young or pre-teen girls. My goodness how shiny my glass house is today and the weather is perfect for me to throw on my gender bend Star Butterfly cosplay and practice my stone juggling. But to be fair I think me giving MLP an honest chance came about when Star Vs. The Forces of Evil came into my life, blew my mind and showed me that shows intended for girls can be enjoyable for all audiences if it’s executed properly with good characters, writing, art direction, etc. So will MLP surprise me like Star did? Will it climb the runs like Star and become one of the most important aspects of my life? Well I guess you’ll have to read to find out everybody, after all this isn’t my first review rodeo.

In the magical land of Equestria, the population is mostly made up of earth ponies who are fantastic farmers, unicorns who are magicians to a frankly Merlin/Dumbledor degree and pegasi who can fly and manage weather. All sporting pastel colors and “cutie marks” on their flanks to show their calling in life. Equestria being the only civilization I can think of where it’s culturally appropriate to stare at someone’s ass.  Our protagonist is a unicorn named Twilight Sparkle, anti-social book-worm nerd bitch and star student at Canterlot’s magic school who discovers the legend of the elements of harmony and a prophecy about a great impending evil that will return after a thousand years, the dreaded Nightmare Moon. So Twilight begins to prepare for this great evil’s return and find a way to save the world. Or she would if she wasn’t put on party planning duty for the upcoming Summer Sun Celebration. So her mentor Queen Celestia; yes I’m well aware that her canon title is Princess, but seeing as how Equestria is a matriarchal country and no one out ranks her, that makes her a fucking queen, yes the writers said that the title of “Princess” is the highest position in all of Equestria but I’d love for them to say that to my face when Hasbro isn’t withholding food from them; decides that Twilight should go to Ponyville to get out of the house, make some friends that don’t have a glossary other than her dragon Spike and make sure the citizens are ready for the festival.

You may be wondering why I called Twilight a bitch earlier, well that’s because in the beginning of the series she’s a fucking bitch. Not even five minutes into the series she blows off a few ponies that invite her to a party, views the friendly and kindhearted ponies of Ponyville as “crazy” and when she starts to meet the other five ponies in the main cast she gets a look of disgust on her face whenever they mention the prospect of being friends mostly because it cuts into her studying and every time it looks like she’s about to say, “what the fuck is this thing you call “friends?” I don’t think I’ve ever read that book before.” So after a few more anti-social Twilight moments the Summer Sun Celebration begins only to be halted with the prophecy coming true of Nightmare Moon returning and Queen Celestia’s disappearance. Maybe she was kidnapped by Nightmare Moon but the show doesn’t tell us so maybe she was just getting out of her late night pottery class or she’s caught in a fire fight with some pie thieves or she’s playing Cuphead and stuck on that fucking queen bee cause she’s a double-decker bitch sandwich who can get fucked on a hard roll. Aren’t imaginations just the greatest?

So Twilight goes on a quest to find the elements of harmony, save Celestia and defeat Nightmare Moon with the help of the other main characters. Fluttershy, a timid and gentle Pegasus that can talk to animals who represents kindness. Pinkie Pie, a rambunctious goof ball earth pony who represents laughter. Applejack, a strong apple farming earth pony who represents honesty. Rainbow Dash, a brave and athletic Pegasus and the poster girl for gay pony pride who represents loyalty. And last but not least there’s Rarity, a posh fashionista drama queen unicorn who represents generosity and what a coincidence that these five ponies share the qualities of five out of the six elements of harmony. So they travel to the old castle of the two sisters to find the elements and along the way they come across obstacles that reveal what element of harmony they represent.

“Quick question” I ask to MLP, “why didn’t Applejack just tell Twilight that if she let go Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy would catch her?”

MLP giggled “Well so we can see that AppleJack represents the element of honesty, silly.”

“Yeah, but she’d still be telling the truth, the whole “just let go trust me” thing is just dramatic for like no reason. Also why have these big reveals to show what the five ponies represent whatever element? We already know what elements they represent when Twilight reads off the list in her history book and the ponies couldn’t be more center stage if they had the fucking lime light in their eyes for each of their corresponding elements, you basically revealed it to us twice.” And I’ve said the word “element” so many times it’s gone all weird on me.

So they go to the castle find out that Twilight is the missing sixth element of magic, defeat Nightmare Moon, Celestia shows up, Twilight discovers how powerful your magic can be when you have friends because friendship is magic (sometimes this shit writes itself) and then we meet Princess Luna, Celestia’s little sister, actual princess and former Nightmare Moon. Yeah not a bad way to start the series off, Nightmare Moon was a pretty cool antagonist despite being as threatening as a washing machine with an unbalanced load. I did have a sense of dread around the climax though “Oh Christ, this fucking friendship twee thing is gonna be beaten to death isn’t it?” I thought gripping my insulin needle. Well yes it is, but it’s not as unbearable as I once thought it being, it’s mostly around the resolution of the story of each episode when Twilight or whoever writes to Queen Celestia about the lessons they learned in the magic of friendship (hurk!) which after a while starts to try my patience and not in the sugary overload sense (though that too starts to grate at a certain point) but in the “Hey here’s this week’s lesson! Now let’s write to Queen Celestia and go over it again just in case you missed it!” We already learned the lesson today in the resolution of the plot ,why the fuck are we going over it again? Just for good measure? Because the cast likes to hear themselves talk? MLP do you really think your audience is that stupid that they have to be told the episode’s lesson twice? Then again people didn’t willingly eat detergent  back then so maybe they were just hoping for the best and preparing for the worst when writing the earlier episodes.

The story in each episode is mostly slice of life based. A problem comes up, one or more of the “mane six” get involved, solve the problem, learn a lesson, have tea and cake. To the show’s credit this isn’t the case in every episode. Some episodes follow this formula, others have other characters in the spotlight like the Cutie Mark Crusaders and then there are the villain plots which are handled about as well as a bar of soap in the bath but more on that later. Also to the show’s credit it was nice to see it evolve from writing to Queen Celestia about lessons learned, to keeping a journal of their adventures to just having the lesson play out organically by the resolution of the plot, makes the whole lesson seem a lot less fucking tedious and more enjoyable because we’re not hearing the same thing over and over again like a skipping record. I know I’m making it sound like the episodes are a chore to get through, but honestly only a small selection of episodes are a chore (whenever Spike has a song being one of the worst fucking chores on earth) the rest are rather fun and have jokes in it that are actually funny and play off the characters in the scene really well and excuse me while I find my socks because the realization of me having fun and actual comedy that legitimately makes me laugh in any version of MLP just blew them to the stratosphere. Part of the fun comes from characters that aren’t super annoying and the other part is timing. This series actually has great timing with the line delivery of the characters that just add a bit more weight to the punchline.

Now since I brought up the characters I might as well talk about them. None of the characters are particularly deep but then again they don’t need to be, they’re all interesting enough for us to want to be invested in their lives and passions and just enjoy what’s going on in the episode. Twilight Sparkle is well read in magic, super neat and organized, does her best to be a good student to Celestia and always makes time to help her friends and any other pony in trouble and eventually becomes the princess of friendship (I’ll grant her the princess title since Twilight doesn’t so much have a castle and a kingdom, as much as a glorified club house in Ponyville. Mayor Mare still calls the shots in town which I personally find hilarious). Applejack is a hard-working farmer with a large and tightly knit family who always does what she thinks is right. Pinkie Pie is a kooky and energetic party girl who gets the most out of life when she makes others smile. Rainbow Dash is athletic and arrogant but will always have your back in times of need who dreams of flying with the Wonderbolts (Equestrian air force). Fluttershy is a sweet little cinnamon roll filled with kindness for others who takes care of any animal in need. And lastly there’s Rarity, fashionista and entrepreneur a.k.a my favorite character a.k.a best character. Even before I started watching the show certain people have compared me to her. But I get it now, we’re both artists with high standards, we both dress for success, we’re both one part greedy and one part generous (she can be greedy despite her element thing but that’s fine, it just makes her more believable as a character), we both have a thing about cleanliness, and we both have a flair for the dramatic. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to fall on a fancy couch completely distraught every time my toast landed  butter side down.

in fact, a lot of the side characters in the show have little quirks and traits that make them fun and interesting. My favorite of which are the Cutie Mark Crusaders who might as well be main characters seeing how many episodes focus on them. The CMC is made up of three fillies, Apple Bloom, who’s Applejack’s little sister, Sweetie Belle, Rarity’s little sister and Scootaloo who’s Rainbow Dash’s honorary little sister. Their episodes mostly deal with them trying to figure out what their calling in life is so they can finally attain their cutie marks. They’re actually some of the best episodes because all their episodes are their own contained story, the mane six have their adventures solving friendship problems and whatnot while the CMC deal with self discovery, helping ponies with their own cutie mark problems, and dealing with being bullied for having “blank flanks” which is basically calling them talentless losers. but they keep their heads held high and keep trying different things and helping others which leads up to one of the best episodes in the series “Crusaders of the Lost Mark,” where the CMC learn that their long time bully Diamond Tiara is the way she is because of the way she’s treated by her mother, distant, cold and the attitude of “your either a winner or a loser and no daughter of mine is a loser.” So they actually help Diamond Tiara learn that her cutie mark means that she’s a good leader, not a bully and when the CMC realize how great it feels to help others with their cutie mark problems they ironically get their cutie marks in the one field that’s been right under their noses since they began the CMC. You might have noticed a lack of sarcasm and swears but that’s because I can’t really think of anything negative about the CMC, they’re genuinely sweet episodes that show that it’s ok to try different things and that you’ll find your calling in life when you can and that there’s no need to worry about it.

So aside from the CMC the background is filled with fun quirky characters who are interesting. Except for Queen Celestia of course, who might be one of the most boring characters in the entire series. “What? How can you say Princess Celestia is boring?” MLP cries out, “She’s not boring, she’s just mysterious.” To which I respond; No she’s not mysterious, Queen Celestia is boring. Eclipsa Butterfly is mysterious. The Diamond Authority is mysterious. Bill Cypher is mysterious. Marceline the Vampire Queen is mysterious. Princess fucking Luna is more mysterious and interesting than her sister is with revealing something as simple as us learning what her job is; governing the dream realm, working in the darkness with only herself as company, helping ponies have sweet dreams and in one reveal it turns out that Luna’s role as dream keeper is completely and utterly invaluable to the mental health of all of Equestria in that if she wasn’t there to dispose of nightmares, most of the inhabitants of Equestria could have serious damage done to their psyche. But Celestia is just the perfect ruler, with perfect leadership skills and is so perfect in so many ways she seems just as lifeless as the shitty toys Hasbro makes of her. See what makes a character mysterious is something like the nature of their work (like Luna) or a character that raises more questions about them when one question is answered. We’re given a little knowledge of who they are and subtle clues or hints sets your imagination off like fireworks at a rave. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Celestia. In fact she’s a focus in one of the best episodes in the entire series, “Royal Problems,” where she and Luna switch roles for a day to see how the other sister lives. This episode is great because we see the royal sisters acting like real sisters, but most importantly we see Celestia acting like a character with faults. She’s sarcastic, passive aggressive, condescending, thinks Luna’s job is child’s play, and even starts talking to herself when she learns how lonely Luna’s job really is, even going so far as to beg for Luna’s help when she realizes how difficult battling nightmares is. It’s a fantastic episode and really gives Celestia much-needed depth; granted it took them seven fucking seasons to do so, but better late than never I suppose. What I’d love to see is an episode where Celestia miraculously has nothing to do. No royal business or problems to solve every one is doing well and she actually has a day off but she discovers that she doesn’t know what to do with herself when she’s not working. Maybe she can try hanging out with the other royals but they’ll be too busy or maybe she’ll try to discover a hobby, play video games with Luna, hang out with the Cutie Mark Crusaders, ask Twilight for advice. You know something that shows that even horse Gods get bored when they realize they got nothing going on. Or better yet, have an episode or two that focuses on Celestia after she banished Luna to the moon. Showing that Celestia was filled with guilt for what she was forced to do and shame for letting Luna fall so far into darkness for the thousand years she was banished. Maybe showing that Celestia was always filled with regret and sadness at every Summer Sun Festival and was left alone to grieve  before she actually raises the sun. Come the fuck on, she banished her sister! That’s not an easy thing to do even if it was an “it was either her or me” scenario, can’t we see her morn? You know some depth?

So about those villains, while we’re still on the subject of characters. Like the protagonists, the villains aren’t particularly deep but at least they have their reasons for doing what they did. Nightmare Moon wanted to cast the world in eternal night and banish Celestia, Discord wanted to turn the world into his own chaotic playground, Queen Chrysalis wanted to feed off the love ponies had for Queen Cadence (yeah I said she’s a queen too, she has her own empire. what? You think she’d still be a princess? It doesn’t fucking work that way!) and then come back to kidnap all of the royals and the mane six and replace them with changelings, Tirac wanted revenge against Celestia and Luna for sending him to Tartarus and used Discord to further his plan of being a magic god, the Pony of Shadows wanted revenge against Star Swirl and his mates aka the “original” mane six for treating him like used dishwater, Starlight Glimmer wanted every pony to be equal and then became a revenge driven stalker when Twilight ruins her cult racket and King Sombra wanted to…uh; come to think of it, what the fuck did King Sombra want to do exactly? Take over the Crystal Empire again? I guess? I don’t know cause the show doesn’t tell us and not a single one of his lines tells us what his motives were. Just Celestia saying “Hey we banished this dude name Sombra a thousand years ago and his empire just reappeared, make sure that guy doesn’t show up cause he’s evil and stuff. Cadence will help you out she already set up shop in her new castle.” For all we know he might have wanted to come back to open up a bakery or a used record store. Sure the crystal ponies have some major PTSD when Sombra comes up and Sombra does address them as his “crystal slaves,” but what if that’s just how ponies addressed each other back then and he hasn’t caught up with the times, which is why I don’t talk about minorities in front of the elderly.  incidentally I can only imagine and laugh at what Cadence told the crystal empire ponies when they came out of their thousand-year cryo sleep, “Hey crystal ponies! Welcome back to the real world, boy have you missed a lot and I’ll be sure to bring you up to speed but first a quick question; You guys don’t have a ruler do you? No? Sweet, I’ll just move into this wicked cool castle and set up shop. Maybe a barrier to keep Sombra out. Oh and if you all could call me your ruler that would be grand.”

So Sombra aside, the rest of the villains are pretty cool both motive and design wise. I could understand why’d they’d be pissed, Luna banished to the moon by Celestia a thousand years ago, Celestia and Luna turning Discord into a stone statue a thousand years ago, Celestia and Luna throwing Tirac in jail a thousand years ago. Hang on; Celestia banished/imprisoned Luna, Discord, Sombra and Tirac a thousand years ago? She must have very good time management skills. Maybe she was working through her lunch breaks or something. So out of all of them I think the strongest and most interesting character wise are Discord, Queen Chrysalis and Starlight Glimmer. Discord is one of the most enjoyable villains I’ve seen in cartoons mainly because world conquest is really more of a side venture, he’d much rather fuck with the cast and really get under their skin. His chaos magic is broken to shit but he chooses instead to just ruin some pony’s day, laugh at their expense and make a nice little playground for him to wreak havoc in. I also find it rather endearing that when Discord reforms the only pony he doesn’t mess with is Fluttershy, even going so far as to declare a personal vendetta against the changelings when he learns she was kidnapped and threw a bit of a hissy fit when she didn’t invite him to a huge party. Plus I love his design of a bunch of animals jammed together into a serpent like creature, it fits his chaos god motif really well.

Next is Queen Chrysalis, the head of the changeling horde. A race of insect looking ponies whom can take the form of any creature and feed off of love. Her appearance is one of the best designs in the series in my opinion, she’s basically an alacorn but black with sharp edges and insect wings. The first time Chrysalis took Cadence’s form and leached off the love of her husband to be Shining Armor to make her strong enough to beat Celestia in a duel (Only villain to beat Celestia while she was at full power by the way) and unleash changelings in Canterlot. She was defeated by the real Cadence reuniting with Shining Armor and was blasted Team Rocket style with the overwhelming power of their love for each other. Which was dumb and kind of paradoxical at the same time. Don’t changelings feed off of love? I’d think a love blast like that would be like a buffet to Chrysalis or trying to put out a grease fire with kerosene, but what the fuck do I know? Chrysalis’ second attempt at conquest was basically the same as her first attempt to replace Cadence, but on a grander scale. This time she kidnapped the royal sisters, Cadence and her family, Spike and the mane six. Basically the only forces that could screw over her plans and at the same time feed off of the love their subjects would shower the real ones with. This is honestly one of my favorite episodes in the series because the hero’s of this arc are Starlight Glimmer (now reformed), her best friend Trixi; a stage magician unicorn, Thorax; a changeling Spike befriended and Discord who was totally fine with changelings taking over until he heard Fluttershy was taken and was like “fuck this! Pack up your crap, let’s go!” At first I was like “I mean it’s cool that we see Discord, but chaos magic is more broken than Equestria magic so this’ll be over soon.” Then we find out that the changeling hive has an artifact that cancels out all non-changeling magic. It may sound like one of those situations where the phrase “well that’s fucking convenient”pops up, but it actually makes sense here. It’s a home defense system for the hive, it’s not portable and it makes the rescue mission way more exciting because we get to see three well-known magic users become totally powerless and are forced to think of ways to outsmart the changelings in the hive instead of blasting their way in. I should also mention that when Chrysalis makes her appearance in the hive it’s one of the scariest fucking things I’ve seen in the show. She appears from behind the cocooned prisoners in like a backwards crab walk and exorcists her head 180 degrees. Now that’s how you make a fucking awesome reveal MLP keep up the good work. Eventually when she’s defeated and her changelings rebel against her, Starlight gives her a chance to turn over a new leaf and become a better leader to the changelings. I was like “Oh please don’t Chrysalis! You’re the only villain we have left!” which is why I was overjoyed when Chrysalis smacked Starlight away and basically said “Fuck you I’m a queen! I’ll just make more changelings and come back to kill you all later!” I for one salute you bug horse, looking forward to when you show up again and how MLP completely fucking ruins your resolution.

Which leads me to Starlight Glimmer, who is one of my favorite characters, my favorite villain and my biggest disappointment. How can she be all three you ask? Well how can “wank” be fun to say, fun to do, but neither are socially appropriate at an office Christmas party? Allow me to explain. At the start of season five Twilight and co. find a magic map in Twilight’s castle that tells them to go to a remote part of Equestria for some reason. They come across a town of identical houses in perfect rows in the middle of a dessert. The ponies there all have identical cutie marks of an “equal” sign with dulled colored bodies, all sporting two to three different hair styles with big smiles shown through wide eyes and clenched teeth that would make a Stepford wife blush. Their leader and town founder is Starlight Glimmer, a unicorn with an overly cheery demeanor that preaches the glories of equality and how damaging special talents and cutie marks are. It got all the more weirder and creepy when they sing and the townsfolk start marching in perfect synch (even the fucking Pegasi flap their wings in synch), in perfect lines with forced smiles singing about how great their town is, how differences are bad and how great being equal is with lyrics like “…You can’t have a nightmare, if you never dream” that actually made me reel back a second in shock, because I haven’t seen a cult in children’s media since the Happy Happiests in Earthbound (Yeah Earthbound got a T rating now but that’s not how it was originally) and it was set up in a similar way too, we’re all used to this cheery and bright world only for us to wind up in what appears to be a completely foreign land with such a shift in tone it’s rather jarring. So here’s a character who’s established a pony pseudo communist cult whose residence seem more like wind-up toys than actually living creatures (There’s a bit of irony there somewhere) who are all totally fine with being a rubber stamp of each other and the damnedest thing is, I can actually kind of sympathize with what Starlight’s trying to do here. Since the beginning of the series we see cutie marks being a topic of bullying, superiority and being trapped in a box, doing this one thing and not really doing anything else because it’s not what your cutie mark is telling you to do. Then here’s a character who says “Wouldn’t it be great if we could all live equally? No bullying, no differences, just ponies living in harmony with no pony being better than the other?” Need I remind the readers of the Cutie Mark Crusaders’ struggles to become accepted by finding their cutie marks? Something like Starlight’s town would sound very, very appealing to ponies like the CMC.

So Twilight and co. get their cutie marks stolen by Starlight and get thrown into a rehabilitation room to brain wash them to be like the towns people (it’s really creepy since we see them slowly lose their individuality), eventually they escape and expose Starlight’s real cutie mark thus causing her town to rebel against her. Though I was kind of hoping Starlight would try to save her skin by saying “Look cutie marks are bad, but since my magic is the only kind that can make every pony equal I’ll keep mine till every other cutie mark has been replaced then get rid of mine.” She runs off and swears revenge against Twilight for fucking up her whole cult town like Snidely Whiplash, then spends the rest of the season stalking Twilight plotting her next move. I’m serious about the stalking thing, you find Starlight in the background in certain episodes gathering information. A friend of mine told me this and I thought she was just messing with me, “No really, Starlight is in the background of the cafe”” she said. I watched that episode a few times, mainly because I like it and I never noticed Starlight before. And here we venture into one of the greatest strings to Starlight’s villain character bow which is the fact that she’s not some chaos god, magic absorbing centaur, shape shifter queen, or horse god, she’s just a regular unicorn. Sure she’s a magic prodigy who can rival or even surpass Twilight, but for all we know Starlight could very well have been Twilight’s neighbor and the fact that she can just blend into the background with the rest of the pony populace is actually rather intriguing and scary as far as villains in this show are concerned. She learned two very important plot points, one was that the legendary wizard Star Swirl the Bearded had a spell that allowed him to travel one week back in time and two was the fact that each member of the mane six got their cutie marks at the same time from the same event of Rainbow Dash performing a sonic rainboom.

With that in mind Starlight steals Star Swirl’s spell, infiltrates Twilight’s castle and uses the magic map to go back several years to where it all began with Rainbow Dash’s race. Starlight fucks up the race to prevent any of the mane six from getting their cutie marks which causes major problems in the future. Twilight gets sucked through the time warp again and again each time Starlight messes with the past which shows different futures where the villains win. King Sombra declaring war on Equstria (guess he didn’t want to open up a bakery after all), the changelings re-creating Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Nightmare Moon returning and banishing Celstia, my personal favorite is the future where Discord wins and he makes Celestia and Luna his court jesters because of course he fucking would. So since the mane six don’t get together, Equestria is doomed to destruction which sounds pretty ridiculous, but it makes sense in regards to the story. The mane six has been the ones to save the day since season one so with them gone who’s left to save the day? Apparently not Celestia, so much for being an immortal horse god, but I digress. I just want to point out that I think this is one of the best villain battles in the series and it’s not a battle like the Tirac vs. Twilight fight, this is more like a game of wits and cleverness. No matter what Twilight tries to do to stop Starlight from fucking up the past, Starlight knows that as long as she’s in the past the future will change. it doesn’t matter if Twilight appears a few seconds before Starlight in the past or tries to fight her, just them being there ruins the time line so Starlight barely has to put in any effort in fighting Twilight because the results will be the same, she’s always one step ahead of her and I fucking love it. Twilight then decides to drag Starlight back to the future to show her how her actions essentially destroy the world and then Starlight reveals her reason why she went evil. “Oh boy!” I said excitedly, “We’re about to find out the motivation behind the best villain in the series! Wait, let me guess. Starlight had a friend who she was very close too when they were little, who got their cutie mark before she did and was showered with praise. Soon the rest of the kids in her town were getting cutie marks but Starlight was the only one without one, which caused her to be bullied and feel like a complete outcast, maybe her friend thought that he/she was better than her and told Starlight to get lost. Then years later after a bitter and jaded Starlight gets her cutie mark for her talent in magic she sees a filly without a cutie mark getting bullied. She sees a lot of herself in this filly and decides to finally do something about it and this is what drives her to create the spell which makes ponies equal and founded her Jones Town to make her dream come true. Tell me I’m right MLP. MLP? Why do you look like you’re gonna start crying?”

So it turns out she did have a childhood friend, who did get his cutie mark before her and the reason why she went evil was because! His parents sent him off to magic school and she never saw him again which caused her to totally abandon the concept of friendship… I threw my head back in a laugh, “Hahaha! No seriously, what was the reason MLP? What? That’s really it? Something she and her friend had no control over was the reason why she went evil? What the fuck?! Are you seriously telling me that the best villain in the series went evil over something so fucking petty?! Dude, just write him a fucking letter every so often! It’s not like Equestria doesn’t have a mail service, they literally have a pony express to get letters and parcels from here to there.” But nope, evil because the concept of pen pals never crossed her mind. So Twilight realizing she can’t beat her in a magic fight convinces Starlight to give friendship another chance and to stop fucking with the timeline then Twilight convenes with her friends to discuss what they’re going to do with Starlight; for you know, destroying Equestria over and over again. “Ok.” I said with concern, “I’m going to guess that instead of banishing her or throwing her in Tartarus or whatever, Twilight will be like, “Starlight Glimmer. You have committed a heinous crime of altering the timelines and putting Equestria at great risk. After much thought I will now administer your punishment. As the Princess of Friendship I hereby sentence you to…  community service. You will live here at the castle and become my pupil to learn the importance of friendship and to use these skills to help other ponies. Lert’s start with our first lesson, making a friend. Hi, my name is Twilight Sparkle, what’s yours?” You know a punishment that’ll help her make a difference in the world and help her on the path of friendship? MLP it looks like you’re gonna start crying again…” So Starlight does become Twilight’s pupil, but the rest of the fucked up puppet master, time traveling things she did is completely and totally forgiven instantly, not once is the word “punishment” or any words like it in the resolution of the plot, which is fucking insane.

Look I love Starlight, not as much as I love Rarity but she’s pretty far up there and I’m actually pissed that everyone is so forgiving of a character that not only manipulated free will, but destroyed the world while she was at it. I’m not expecting an execution or anything but some kind of punishment is preferred over everyone having tea and cake at the end. Even the village Starlight controlled seemed totally cool with forgiving her. Fuck you’d think they of all ponies would hold a grudge of being controlled. Nope every pony is just cool with accepting Starlight and they’re all friends now. No MLP I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed in you. Very, very dissappointed. Here I foolishly thought that you finally grasped the concept of a great antagonist with depth, but you made Starlight a petty moustache twirling villain just a few steps above Dick Dastardly. I’ve heard that Starlight is/was hated amongst the MLP community and I think this was the reason why, a major villain doing terrible things only to be totally forgiven is frustrating and stupid. But I think the one thing people need to understand is that Starlight isn’t a bad character, she was just handled terribly. Again I love Starlight and it’s mostly because of her personality, she’s got a bit of social anxiety because interacting with others and trying to make new friends makes her nervous and stressed but still does what she can to follow Twilight’s example in friendship and even becomes a voice of reason when Twilight is in distress, but often falls back on bad habits and sometimes uses magic as an easy way to finish friendship lessons. Another reason I like her is the way she uses magic, while Twilight is very “by the book” when it comes to magic, Starlight usually combines spells to make something new and more powerful, like combining spells to mind control Twilights friends.

I know what you’re thinking, “Slade you hypocritical sack of gorilla spunk, how can you like a character like Starlight so much when you said you kind of hated Mabel Pines for manipulating free will?” And to be honest I was really baffled by this realization as well, but I think I can explain why. See when Starlight first fucks with free will it’s to establish her as the season’s villain and to show a taste of how powerful her magic is, the second time in “Every little thing she does” it’s used as a point of humor. Starlight doesn’t want to disappoint Twilight so she tries to use magic to cram five friendship lessons into a single afternoon and in a panic and having no idea what she was getting herself into mixes spells to make five of the mane six follow every one of Starlight’s commands to a literal degree. But the key reason why I still love Starlight despite the free will manipulation, is that Starlight actually feels bad for what she did. She feels shame for doing that to her friends and when she apologizes you can really get a sense that she means it. Mabel however has no remorse for what she did. She didn’t care about the consequences, all she cared about was being the best matchmaker and when it all blew up in her face she didn’t even apologize, the writers basically gave her a free pass to do something terrible with no fallout.

The animation? Yeah it’s pretty good. It’s colorful and lively and I can forgive the animation fuck ups like established earth ponies sprouting wings and extra or dislocating body parts because I’m sure the animation process can’t be easy with the Hasbro slave masters cracking whips every other second. At first it was kind of creepy how all the characters looked like living plastic, but that wears off after a while and you just accept that this is how the MLP universe rolls with its characters, except for babies who look like pop vinyls come to life and will never not be creepy. But character designs are pretty solid over all, MLP understands animation basics and have big lovely eyes to portray emotions which I personally adore (I have a thing for eyes). I have to hand it to Lauren Faust for making sure that the ponies in this series are actually appealing to the eyes and staying clear of the uncanny valley. Fun fact, realistic looking ponies in pastel colors is fucking creepy. everything looks nice from manes to colors to cutie marks (despite most of the populace having an hourglass, cherries, scrolls and a desert island as a cutie mark) and the occasional references in the background which are sprinkled in for fun. Like ponies who look like the The Dude, Walter and Donny from “The Big Labowski” (the Dude’s cutie mark is a rug and when I saw that I thought I was gonna laugh up my lungs and I laughed harder when I found out he fucking sells rugs!), the 10th Doctor and Rose, “Pretty Woman” ponies, the twins from “The Shining,” There’s even a reference to fucking Bioshock infinite which blew my mind, basically what I’m saying is it’s fun to play “I spy” while watching the show.

To be honest I thought the singing was gonna be the lynch pin for me not liking this series but the songs in it are like 95% good and listenable, songs like “In Our Town,” “The Art of the Dress,” “Luna’s Future” are all really good and then there’s “You’re in My Head Like a Catchy Song”a.k.a the best song in the series from the best episode in the entire series a.k.a “The Perfect Pear.” The episode dealt with the Apple siblings (Applejack, Apple Bloom and Big Macintosh) learning about their parent’s history and the song was perfectly crafted to show the love between them grow and flourish into a believable relationship where you can actually see and feel the care they have for each other.

So after talking about the lovely things in the show I like and the annoying things in the show that annoy me I feel it’s time to dish out a few gut punches to the show. Normally I enjoy a show with subtlety in its writing, Star, Gravity Falls, Over The Garden Wall, Last Airbender, all have subtlety and intrigue sprinkled with out that keep me thinking. MLP unfortunately is not very subtle, it’s about as subtle as a clown with its cock out. Oh look there’s a zebra! What are the chances of her being some kind of African voodoo shaman? Pretty fucking high apparently! Oh look buffalos, and they have feather headdresses because of course they’re supposed to be Native Americans and Yaks couldn’t be more Russian if their arch nemesis’ were a fucking flying squirrel and a moose.

I feel like I have to give a special shout out to Tirac, a villain who had everything going for him until Hasbro had to sell another shitty toy to the dumb masses. See when a toy is a byproduct of a series/movie its charming and makes sense, but Hasbro is a toy company first and a content creator second which would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that they’re too fucking cheap to get new molds made for the FIM series so all their toys look like hot vomit streaming through the uncanny valley. But I digress; Tirac was a pretty cool villain who had all of Equestria in the palm of his hands but he went out in a more humiliating way then Starlight because the only reason he was defeated was because Hasbro wanted to sell the super sayian ponies that the writers came up with when Hasbro was holding their loved ones at gun point and since no one else is saying it I will, super sayian ponies are dumb. They are literally the dumbest fucking thing about the show and I hate it more than life itself, it’s even worse than Sombra because the only reason that arc existed was to go “Hey kids! you saw your favorite mane six member turn into crystal ponies for like three seconds, now buy our toys! Buy harder!”

Then there’s the rather insulting things they do with the characters, which basically boils down into two categories. One, the writers don’t seem know who the fuck Pinkie Pie is and two, certain episodes give characters a severe case of the stupids. Here’s the thing, I like Pinkie Pie, she’s funny and a rather charming character, but the writers can’t write her consistently. See I think Pinkie’s at her best when the stoplight isn’t shown directly on her and she’s more of a deuteragonist or the comic relief, but very rarely does a Pinkie centric episode capture what makes Pinkie good and fun In most cases she’s a walking contradiction or just straight mean. One minute she’ll be singing about how her purpose in life is to make others smile and laugh the next she’s harassing a donkey who wants to be left alone and giving Fluttershy such a bad panic attack that she starts crying. Pinkie I know for a fact that you can see how horrible you’re making Fluttershy feel, you’re looking right into her eyes! It can’t be that hard to keep a character consistent since Rarity is more or less the same since episode one but I guess they lost the notebook that says “Pinkie Pie does not harass of make others cry.”

Now who has a bad case of the stupids? I can think of one grating episode “Applejack’s Day Off,” where we see Applejack go through tons of metaphorical rings of fire to get chores done on the farm only for Twilight to go “Hey, there has to be an easier way of doing this.” and Aj basically says “Holy shit, why didn’t I think of that?” I thought AJ would be one of the few lucky ones to avoid a case of the stupids but sadly I was wrong. While we’re on the subject, I hate it when the writers make AJ really mean and insensitive because she’s too honest. Look I get that that’s her thing, but she should know when to keep her mouth shut so she doesn’t intentionally hurt other pony’s feelings, like in “Honest Apple” where AJ almost ruins Rarity’s fashion show because of how blunt she was. Spike unfortunately comes down with a bad case of the stupids more often than any other character, which is a shame because I really like Spike. He reminds me of the dweeby kid who wants to get with the popular pretty girl (being Rarity) and I for one support this ship. You get your pretty girl Spike and never let go. But the two moments that come to mind are “Spike At Your Service” and “Triple Threat.” Spike at Your Service has Aj saving Spike’s life and he basically becomes her servant. The thing is AJ saved him from timber wolves and the “timber” part is quite literal. Spike’s a fire-breathing dragon! There’s no reason why he couldn’t set them ablaze and be totally ok, maybe he didn’t want to burn down the forest, but his life was in jeopardy I’m sure the fire dept would forgive him but what would I know? Triple Threat is where Spike accidentally double books a meeting with Thorax the new leader of the changelings and dragon lord Ember and does everything he can to keep them apart and spreads himself thin trying to please both of them instead of you know just saying “Hey sorry I double booked you guys, but I think I can make this work. Thorax this is Ember, Ember this is Thorax now why don’t we get started on this meeting?” See! Not so hard MLP!

But I think the most serious sin of all are episodes where Spike sings, more specifically when he has solos. The writer really, really, really need to understand that Spike. Can’t. Sing. At all. All of his songs are so excruciating that it makes me want to slice my ears off with a paper guillotine. Have we learned nothing from “Total Drama World Tour?” The show where characters who can’t sing, sang every. Single. Fucking. Episode! Have we not learned that people will hate it when characters sing as if they’re just reading it off of a cue card? Clearly not, which is why I say as soon as Spike opens his mouth to sing just go right  to the next episode, don’t look back and never regret it, cause you will regret watching it.

So in summary, do I like the show? Yes. Yes, ok? I like the show, I like it a lot. Like I really, really like it. I don’t care if it hurts my man’s man cool guy facade, because I like it and if you like something you should have the courage to defend it. It’s not like I said I like Equestria Girls, that’s actually embarrassing. MLP is colorful, it’s lively, it’s charming, it’s funny and most importantly I have fun watching it, which is something that’s becoming more and more important as time goes on and I become more bitter and jaded. I’ll say that people should give it an honest chance because it is really good, ignore the stigma of past generations because Friendship is Magic is good, apart from the annoying and the bad because the good and the fun outshine it.

Gravity Falls: A Retrospective

What’s up everyone, long time no see! Bet you missed me and my Godly critiquing skills, because I sure as shit missed you. Apologies on going on hiatus for so long but nothing sucks creative fulfilment out of me faster than school. Fuck school, I’ve been going to school for so long I’d be a doctor if my major was in “snarkology,”  to quote Rick Sanchez “school is stupid,” but I digress. So as a nice little warm up of getting back into the swing of things I decided to do a retrospective review of Gravity Falls aka “Disney tv’s Saving Grace.” Now I know what you must be thinking, “Slade you neglectful iron striker, what’s the point of doing a review on Gravity Falls? Everyone knows it’s good, it’s been good since 2012 so what’s the bloody point of doing a review for something that’s as amazing as Gravity Falls?” Well to be perfectly honest I knew Gravity Falls was good but I didn’t see the series to its completion until about a month and a half ago.

See every time I tried to get into it I always got sidetracked by something, whether it was soul crushing personal drama, school, natural disaster, (That last one is way more true than you realize) so I knew it was good, but after a certain point I just kinda pushed it to the wayside and called it a day. Then after “The Battle for Mewni” event I learned that the continuation for season three of Star Vs. The Forces of Evil was being pushed back to November. So after a few weeks of crying and staring at the calendar in some vain hope of time travel by sheer force of will I said to myself “You know, I never did get to finish Gravity Falls and it would be remiss of me to not talk about the main show that made Disney’s TV stations fucking relevant again.” So I decided to grind through to the end and It’s true, Gravity Falls is fucking awesome. It’s funny without derailing itself, it has characters who are more than just background noise for the main characters to pass by, a complex story with a lovely mystery element and has animation as beautiful and fluid as a rainbow-colored river.Of course that’s not to say that this series doesn’t have flaws that drag it down like a ballsack stuffed with horseshoes but more on the later.

Created by Alex Hirsch, Gravity Falls is a tale based on the creator’s childhood. Our protagonists are Dipper and Mabel Pines, twin siblings who are spending their Summer at their Great Uncle Stan’s tourist trap in Gravity Falls Oregon. The Pines twins soon find out that not everything is as it seems in this seemingly quiet town and when Dipper discovers a strange journal, the mystery of Gravity Falls begins to unfold. Along the way the Pines twins encounter gnomes, minotaurs, sentient wax statues, paper clones, ghosts, a psychotic clingy cyber girlfriend, Lil Gideon; a girly boy charlatan and Bill Cipher; a chaos god from another dimension, christ knows how a couple of twelve-year olds can best a god but if Final Fantasy can do it then damn it so can Gravity Falls. I have to say that this is one of the greatest strengths to the show, the constant air of mystery and never really knowing what’s coming next. It follows the rules of us the viewer knowing as much about the mystery as the protagonist from early “Who Done It?” mystery stories, we learn alongside the hero and aren’t given any disadvantages because whenever Dipper opens his journal to find a way to counter the monster of the week we see his thought process and what he’ll do next. It’s like watching Joseph Joestar outsmart his opponent and we share in his glory cause he let us in on his secret techniques.

I say that Dipper and Mabel are the protagonists but I think a more accurate description would be Dipper’s the protagonist and Mabel is the deuteragonist, seeing as how Dipper’s the intellectual that solves the mysteries and puzzles, fights the monsters and saves the day, while Mabel is more or less Dipper’s silly sidekick and occasionally instigate the problems Dipper and the rest of the cast face. I’m not saying Mabel isn’t useful or interesting as a character, she was the key to unlocking the truth to the founding of the town and has saved both herself and Dipper from Lil Gideon and is established as a very artsy, colorful and creative person being able to make a wax statue of Grunkle Stan, throwing together a sock puppet rock opera and was a factor in defeating Gideon and Bill, but ultimately it’s still Dipper cleaning up the messes caused by both monsters and Mabel.

Let’s take some time to explain another strength that Gravity Falls has going for it, the characters. Not including Dipper and Mabel, Gravity Falls has a plethora of side and secondary characters that have personality and actual character to the point that I still remember even the most obscure people, like Toby Determined the answer to the question “what if a muppet was made of flesh and blood?” and Mermondo, Mabel’s mermaid boy crush. But I think the most important out of this batch of side characters would be the supporting cast. Stan Pines, Dipper and Mabel’s great-uncle, con man and greed driven guardian who spends most of his time ripping off gullible tourists and making his grant niece and nephew attractions at his mystery shack. Soos the slow-witted but lovable handy man who has the deepest respect for the Pines family and Wendy the laid back cool girl who works at the Mystery Shack and Dipper’s crush. These three (well Stan and Soos mostly) pull the Pines twins out of danger more often than not like when Soos stopped a rampaging dating sim from reenacting Five Nights at Freddy’s, or when Stan fought off zombies with nothing but brass knuckles, a bat and a grandfather clock and Wendy helping to find a hidden base and defeating a shape shifter.

Did I mention how fucking funny this show is? Well this show is so fucking funny I thought I was going to choke on my own lungs. Only three children’s shows in recent memory have been able to accomplish this task namely Star Vs. The Forces of Evil (duh), Regular Show and Gravity Falls. What makes the humor so amazing in Gravity Falls is that it plays off the characters and not so much the “adult” humor. Don’t get me wrong there are still adult humor jokes like when Stan tells Mabel in Dipper’s body where babies come from but more often than not the jokes’ punchline comes from who they are as a character. For example, Stan’s a jerk so when he gets locked up in a stockade and people throw tomatoes at him we’re laughing at him, not because we hate Stan (God no, he’s like my favorite character) but it’s satisfying to see Stan get a slap on the wrist or when Stan was on a game show and he started undressing to take a cash shower, the fact that he did that and it played off Stan’s greedy nature so fucking well I thought I was going to laugh myself to an early grave.

Now some say that flaws is what makes a series shine like a diamond in the rough, but I’d argue that the three major flaws in Gravity Falls; the mortal sins as it were, is actually what knocks it down from the peak of nirvana where Avatar the Last Airbender and Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood dwell. Let’s start with Mabel, I know she’s the fan favorite of the series but I actually find her to be a terrible person driven only by her selfishness with no repercussions for her actions. Maybe I’d have more respect for her if her actions had consequences for her but they don’t. Notice how I chose the words “for her” that’s because it’s other people who suffer backlash from Mabel’s actions. It’s seen more in season two then in season one, mainly because in season one it’s mostly Dipper that fucks up, but he apologizes and makes up for his actions so he redeems himself in my eyes, Mabel doesn’t ever really do that. Instead she costs Dipper a part-time job, alienates her friends over a boy band, brings about the end of the world and forces two people who’d normally hate each other to fall in love to name a few of her fuck ups. That last one is a particular thorn in my catheter because she manipulated their free will to make herself feel better, see Mabel was sad because someone in Wendy’s friend circle was sad so she decides to play matchmaker for him and pairs him up with Tambry, the quiet goth girl and Wendy’s best friend, steals love a potion from a god and forces the two of them to fall in love thus proving to herself that she’s the best matchmaker and has made everyone happy despite Dipper, Wendy AND the God of love telling her “yeah maybe you shouldn’t be fucking around with people’s emotions” and causing a fallout amongst Wendy’s friends. Literally the only reason things resolve is because the writers deemed it so. However this does lead to a hilarious moment when Mabel tries to prove to a unicorn that she’s pure of heart. Bitch you fucked with people’s free will! That’s one of the most evil things you can do to a person aside from cunt punting their grandma or making chili out of their dog, if you’re pure of heart then I’m the Dalai fucking Lama.

As much as I was talking up the show’s characters this is also ironically another sin I have to bring up seeing as that there are two characters in particular that didn’t get nearly as much time in the spot light as I thought they were going to have, namely Wendy and Pacifica Northwest. Starting in season two I thought Wendy was going to be on more adventures, and it’s true that she does do more, but she’s treated more like a character in an RPG that you bring along because she needs to gain EXP and has the one skill to progress you through the game and isn’t really utilized until the finale. Pacifica on the other hand got the shortest end of the stick. When she was first introduced she was a spoiled rich brat who took pleasure in ruining Mabel’s day. But in season two we learn that Pacifica’s home life is actually rather tragic. Her parents view her more like a show dog than a daughter and whenever Pacifica speaks out of turn her father rings a bell to silence her but in one of my top three favorite episodes in the series Pacifica asks Dipper to get rid of a ghost that’s haunting her mansion and in the process we learn that Dipper and Pacifica actually have great chemistry together. Whether its romantic chemistry or not isn’t really important because we see that with Dipper’s help Pacifica can actually break out of her shell and stand up to her parents and be a good team together. I really thought that after this episode Pacifica was going to appear in more episodes, maybe Dipper invites her on an adventure and she starts to pick up on Dipper’s rough and tumble personality. But that dream never came to pass and she stayed on the back burner till the finale, where she was made relevent and obsolete in the same fucking scene.

Now while Mabel is the most egregious sin and Wendy and Pacifica are more of a missed opportunity this sin I’d say is one born out of sheer disappointment. I’m of course referring to the character of Bill Cipher; the illuminati mascot and big baddie of the series. Which is a shame because Bill’s one of the coolest characters in the series and has a special place in my heart for favorite villains. See I get why he was revealed in the end of season one, Gideon was the primary antagonist after all and Dipper only just began his journey into the weirdness of Gravity Falls. So when Bill first appears he’s doing Gideon’s dirty work but only because Bill can gain access to Stanford Pines’ brain (later discovered to be the wrong “Stanford” Pines) and after Dipper, Mabel and Soos best Bill he disappears to plan his next move and keeps an eye on Dipper. By all definitions I’d call Bill a Lovecraftian horror. An all-powerful God of chaos that has untold knowledge of the forbidden secrets of the universe, a being of pure energy that is always looming overhead but isn’t always there. But unfortunately the “isn’t always there” part is more prominent than anything else. Not counting the flash back where Ford (Stan’s twin brother and author of the journals) made a deal with him, Bill doesn’t really do anything in the main storyline. He appears in the season one finale, appears to steal Dippers body and then he just sort of fucks off until the series finale, granted he probably had a few hundred crossword puzzles to get through before he could be bothered to do anything truely sinister, but it would’ve been nice to see him cause some form of havoc in the town, he says he’s “been making deals” but we never see them and as far as we know he’s just pulling words out of his ass. It would’ve been nice to see these “deals” being made and the outcomes they have on the town. Like someone makes a deal and starts causing an uproar and when Dipper fixes things we learn that this person made a deal with Bill that caused him to go crazy, that would make Bill a more credible threat. Now I’m not going to compare Bill and Gravity Falls to Star Vs. The Forces of Evil. I’m not going to say how Toffee, Ms. Heinous and Eclipsa Queen of Darkness all appear and play a central role in the plot, all of which are credible threats, especially Toffee who’s been pulling strings for years and is a looming dread and saboteur from season one to three. Instead I’ll talk about the villain in another series with a mystery element I like quite a lot, The Beast from Over the Garden Wall. While not nearly as long as Gravity Falls, Over the Garden Wall does more work with The Beast in its allotted time than what I saw being done with Bill Cipher. From the beginning our protagonists Wert and Greg are warned of The Beast, the creature that waits for you to lose all hope of ever returning home and turns you into a tree of oil to fuel his lantern. Much like his name, The Beast is a predator, his presence is felt all throughout the series like a wolf stalking a lamb separated from the herd. It’s quite spooky and builds up anticipation to the final confrontation a sort of payoff that I never really felt at the end of Gravity Falls.

But all my complaints aside Gravity Falls is still one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen in my life and if you can forgive the fuck ups you’ll find a show like no other. Do I like it more than Star? HAHAHAHAHA!! No, but it’s still more worthy of your time than most other shows today and is one of those things where if you haven’t seen it yet the question of “why the fuck not?” is completely appropriate. Watch it for fucks sake.

Keijo!!!!!!!!: …What more could be said other than “ass?”

Well it’s finally happened. I finally broke down and decided to review an anime from the Fall 2016 season that was about as hyped up as Attack On Titan and looked about as bad as a 3rd degree burn. Keep in mind I wanted to avoid this like the plague because it suffered from the Sword Art Online Stigma and it looked like weeb trash with all the things that come with it; flimsy story, piss-poor plot, annoying fan service and uninteresting characters. I wanted to do a piece on romance as a genre in anime and all the most irritating things about it compared to the few love stories that are actually good, but I recently got an internship and my schedule for watching got crunched. So I decided to review something using my “5 episode” rule on a series that looked absolutely brain-dead and utter fucking stupid. With that in mind I sat down with my chewing bricks to deal with the frustrations of my life and watched the first five episodes of Keijo. But as I kept watching I decided to remove the chewing brick from my mouth because I wasn’t filled with utter disgust as I watched. I’m not saying I liked it, in fact it stinks as much as the characters do after forcibly tossing the salad, but like most of the pieces in the MOMA I just couldn’t bring myself to get worked up about something so lacking in creativity. I suppose the best way to approach this series about a sport where barely legal girls slam their tits and ass together to assert their dominance is to go through what makes it weeb trash and call it a fucking day.

Let me start by saying that I absolutely adore female protagonists. Like Ryuko Matoi, Star Butterfly, Princess Sapphire, Sophie Hatter, Panty and Stocking, Maka Albarn, Akko Kagari, Dollface and Gwen Stacy to name a few. Ladies with strong wills and hearts that are able to overcome obstacles and accomplish their goals. It actually excites me to see female leads take charge of their life and destiny without losing their identity as female. But the protagonist of Keijo, Nozomi Kaminashi kind of rubs me the wrong way, maybe it has to do with her being so excited to ram her tits and ass into other girls that makes me think that it’s setting up the weirdest lesbian porn parody on the planet. But I give credit where credit is due when I say that I at least respect Nozomi’s reasons for wanting to do this. She and her family are dirt poor and this is a way for her to make some serious bank. My one question is why she went with this over back alley hand jobs, you don’t have to do ridiculous exercises and all you need is a gallon of hand sanitizer and some knee pads.

Nozomi is joined by her roommates Sayaka Miyata, an ex Judo star with small tits, Non Toyoguchi, a klutz with huge tits, and Kazane Aoba, quiet girl with the powers of having psychic ass powers or something. I was annoyed right off the bat when it’s revealed that three of the four girls have a Kansai accent, which may not sound like much but when I have to re-read a word in the sub cause I couldn’t follow what the fuck they were trying to say it kind of throws me out of the immersion process like someone stopping a song after the first few bars. Make one of them have the obnoxious to read accent and move one please. Also you may have noticed that I didn’t bother to give much detail into their characters, well that’s because these are their characters. By episode five these descriptions I just listed are what makes up these characters, so that’s a check in the “uninteresting characters”box  if I’ve ever seen one. Well whatever, at least Nozomi is full of energy and enthusiasm for the constant scenes of ridiculous ass exercises that fill out the “annoying fan service” box on the weeb trash bingo card. Three more and I can say fuck off to this series for good. Look I know that fan service is just a part of the anime industry and it’s here to stay, but when an ass is literally and/or metaphorically being shoved in your face every seven seconds. I know what some of you must be thinking “oh Slade you prude, do you find fan service so unpleasant that you want to attack Keijo out of sheer pettiness?” Hey I’m no “harumphing” prude, as far as any of you know I might be masturbating as you read this to images and videos of fantastic booty. But the main problem with the fan service in Keijo compared to the fan service in say, Kill la Kill or One Piece is that in Keijo it’s all fan service and nothing else. For example in Kill la Kill I enjoy the fan service because while it is in every episode it’s spread out so when it does happen it’s a nice little treat for the audience not to mention there’s a certain level of irony with the Goku Uniforms and Kamuis that makes the fan service all the more pleasant. But in Keijo it never fucking lets up, every scene is fan service with a ridiculous zoom in of asses, tits, girls fondling their asses, girls fondling their tits, girls fondling other girls tits and ass, so much of this happens in so little time that it actually becomes boring. At least Kill la Kill knew that too much of a good thing is bad and that subtlety is key, something Keijo can’t seem to fucking grasp.

You know it’s not really in a comedy anime’s favor that by episode two I said to myself “holy orange scented taint wipes! I really want to watch an episode of Star Vs. The Forces Of Evil just so I can remind myself what it means to genuinely laugh!” I know that Keijo isn’t technically a comedy, but a lot of fans had praised it for being so funny so I’m going to judge it on the grounds of it being a comedy or having elements of comedy. It’s also not in a comedy anime’s favor that I never laughed. Once. Which for any comedy is a bit of a stumble into the shark tank. She what makes shows like Star Vs. The Forces Of Evil (Yes maybe I will marry SVTFOE, shut up!) is that while some of the jokes revolve around Star screwing up or her adventures as a fish out of water it never gets stale because the material changes and there are other jokes with other characters that add a bit of diversity in the humor and is what makes me genuinely laugh in every single episode. Seriously, I’ve laughed about something in every single episode of Star. I think they say that Keijo is funny because it’s being “ironic” in the same way hipsters address their own lives, but it’s not ironic. The entire joke of the series is told in the first 30 seconds of the anime “girls compete in tits and ass sumo in swimsuits and they get all wet when they lose” and continues later with classes teaching the history of asses and teachers bouncing chalk off their ass to hit day dreaming students and use oh so elegant techniques like “butt gatling” and “vacuum butt canon.”This is what counts as a story for Keijo so I’ll take another check on my bingo card for “flimsy story” thank you very much.

Why haven’t I talked much about what happened in these episodes? Because nothing really happens. The entirety of the first five episodes are ass training and some kind of competition that I didn’t stick around for cause I felt I had better things to do with my time and I hoped the world did too. Now some of you might be saying “oh Slade you sexist Adonis, have you ever thought that Keijo is just a series trying to promoting female empowerment through sexuality?” Yes obviously I considered that tumblr vulture, but the thing Keijo lacks over series like Panty and Stocking and Kill la Kill (again) is that those series deal with female characters exploring carnal desires and being comfortable in your own skin respectively. I’ll tell you this right now if Ryuko was in pitched combat with Satsuki and they fought by ramming their asses together like they were drawn by electro magnets I’d have probably started watching something else after a little more of my faith in humanity drained out.   The main plot of the first five is the main four and their three months or so of training which is filled with, you guessed, ass, ass and more ass. Nothing but asses from frame to frame. And with that I have filled out my bingo card, but before I leave I want to say that Keijo is in fact bad, not the worst I’ve ever seen but still pretty fucking garbage. Yes this review is shorter than usual but I refuse to put more effort into my review than Daichi Sorayomi put into his manga. I’m left wondering a very important question though, was this what anime was building up to? When Osamu Tezuka created the first televised anime; Astro Boy, did he in vision a future where anime would show girls stupid? But all one can say about Keijo is that it’s just another boring anime to throw on the ever-growing landfill of mediocrity. A part of me wishes that it was so bad that I could tear it a few new assholes, but to be perfectly honest I was more bored than anything. So in conclusion, Keijo is total ass.

Fairy Tail: Where did the magic go?

I imagine the conversation went something like this.

Editor: Hi there Hiro Mashima the creator of Fairy Tail!

Mashima: Hi there Mr. Editor!

Editor: Boy I tell you, your readers absolutely love your Tenrou Island arc. Every character including Erza and Gildarts are being pushed beyond the breaking point and their struggles to survive the onslaught of such powerful enemies makes for some exciting reading. So tell me, what do you have in store for us next?

Mashima: Well I was planning on a time skip between Tenrou Island and the rest of the series.

Editor: Oh that makes sense. Give our heroes time to train after barely scraping by. So are we going for the One Piece two-year time skip or the Naruto two and a half/three-year time skip?

Mashima: Ha! Those kind of time skips are for pussies! I’m doing a seven-year time skip!

Editor: Uh o-ok. I thought something like seven years was more of an epilogue kind of thing, but you’re the creator not me. What do you plan to do with the characters? Are we still going to have our “can do” wizards go on quests and discover new and interesting lands while learning about themselves and each other along the way?

Mashima: Nope! Actually I was thinking about making Erza an unbeatable God, making Lucy mostly useless, Natsu will never shut up about the power of friendship and turn Gray into an almost emotionless robot. Oh and I’ll be focusing WAY more on fan service than actual character development.

Editor after a long awkward pause: So Fairy Tail is going to become insultingly generic and utterly fucking pointless then?

Mashima: Yep! incidentally have you tried these “Loco Donkey” brand crazy pills? My favorite flavor is “led based paint!”

It’s funny you know, after my Star vs. The Forces Of Evil review I was planning on reviewing another series but then realised that I should let it continue just a bit more before I write about it. So I was scratching my brain trying to figure out what to write on, but then it hit me. It was staring at me right in the face, the Fairy Tail manga just ended and far be it from me to avoid that particular elephant in the room. I mean Fairy Tail was once a very promising series, loaded with adventure and interesting characters with depth, not a ton of depth mind you but enough depth to make you like someone. But at a certain point Fairy Tail ran out of  the make up that made it look pretty and vibrant and we realized just how much it started looking like an over ripe avocado. I remember when I first got into Fairy Tail, it drew me in because it was basically One Piece but with wizards, Mashima even going so far as to draw his early chapters entirely in One Piece’s style. I’m serious, if you read the first chapters and don’t draw some kind of line between Lucy, Natsu and Gray with Nami, Luffy and Ace respectively than I’m sorry that you still refuse to get your eyes examined. Even Gildarts is a magical version of Shanks but at that point it was more homage than actually ripping off since Mashima had his own style for his characters at this point. Which I don’t really blame him for, when you’re trying to etch out your own artistic style it’s a good place to base it off work you like or admire as long as you develop your own style at some point. But if anything I would’ve loved for Mashima to bite off a bit more from the One Piece style of storytelling because at least then I wouldn’t have such a sour attitude for about an entire half of a series.

Fairy Tail is like the ex who started out with good intentions but after a bump in the road started to lack a purpose in life. We stayed  in hopes that things would get better and that someday it’ll go back to the way things used to be, but the final chapter came and went and didn’t go out with a bang so much as went out with an annoyed sigh and now it’s safe to say that we’re all back on the dating market. It’s a very bitter-sweet feeling to have for a series that you loved for years only to be torn apart by the very creator, a similar feeling that most Star Wars fans have I suppose. Especially since I was quite the fan back in the day, but the series became so bogged down with predictable outcomes, tired clichés and just all around lazy writing that I stopped being a fan and only kept reading cause I was pot committed and just wanted to see some fucking payoff. So the question is, what made Fairy Tail spiral down into oblivion and when did it all start? Keep in mind that I’m only going to discuss what was wrong with the canon cause just about all the filler episodes were a load of bollocks and the person who decided to have that fucking “jiggle butt gang” in there should be hung, drawn and quartered and fed to the jackals! Well I think the latter is easier to answer, it happened with the now infamous words “seven years have passed.” First off, what the fuck? Why did it skip ahead so far? So much can happen in seven years that we’re left out of. In all that time a person can graduate from college, buy that house that they’ve been scraping pennies for, or bear witness to a fucking horrid presidential election. What I’m trying to say is seven years is way to long to bridge the narrative of the main story. Seven years is an epilogue or a second series. Shit I’d be interested as hell in a second Fairy Tail series, showing the next generation of wizards being trained by their now familiar parents. But instead we get rushed through an arc of the Fairy Tail cast that got locked in the time bubble catching up on the events that happened since their departure. As I said when I took a tour of the Heinz ketchup factory “That’s fucking weak sauce.”

Now to move on to the question of “how did this happen?” To answer that I’ll have to remind people what was actually good about the series. In the beginning Fairy Tail followed Lucy Heartfillia and her adventures with the wizard guild Fairy Tail. Her first friend Natsu is the one who scouts her and we start to see a nice familial bond between the two begin to blossom and throughout their adventures they begin to learn more about each other and support each other, not in a romantic way but as actual friends. Fairy Tail the guild was introduced as a rough and tumble joint but filled with people with good hearts and vibrant energy. Our heroes would go on quests that took us to interesting places and required more than just brute force to complete them, their was a certain mystery about them that kept us hooked. Erza was tough but fair, when she showed up you were like “Oh shit Erza showed up, things just got fuckin’ real!” she wasn’t an unstoppable force that never loses ever. It’ like when Batman shows up you’re like “Oh shit Batman showed up, things got fuckin’ real!”compared to when Superman shows up and you’re more like “Aw shit, Superman showed up. Well this will be over soon by the next bloody page with little to no fuckin’ effort…” Most of the characters weren’t just background fodder either; well except Lisana. Natsu makes a big deal about her, the series makes a big song and dance about her and then she’s kind of chucked to the wayside to be used as fan-service every once in a while, every character in the guild had something bout them that made them unique and made you want to root for them. At some point Mashima just went and said “fuck it I’m tired of trying to make these characters relevant here’s some boob and panty shots.” Cause by the end any moment that should have a deeper meaning or some sentimental value is reduced to utter redundant fan-service that sucks all the emotion from my already barren heart like a vacuum or a rather affectionate leech. But what I think what made the first half better is that it’s more memorable. I remember all the good times I had with the Phantom Lord arc, the Battle for Fairy Tail arc, Tower of Paradise and of course my favorite arc Tenrou Island where the fights had some weight behind them because they well fighting for their lives and it’s also the first time Natsu has a significant arc in his character. What started out as a headstrong, shoot first ask questions later battle hungry hot head was humbled by the overwhelming power of Fairy Tail’s strongest member and he realized that he still has a long way to go before he could get to that level. It was this fun and adventurous spirit that I admired about the series and looked forward to like a once a week hand job.

So what made it go from good to bad to fucking gut wrenching? Where to start? I’ve already covered the fucking awfulness of a seven-year time skip, Erza being more broken than Gary’s Mod, and the unnecessary fan-service so I won’t dwell on that too much. So I’ll just talk about how convenient everything is and how there was no such thing as tension or excitement until the dragon slayers faced off with Acnologia which was the single only bad ass thing to ever come out of the second half of the series. See when the main mages break out of their little time bubble they want to enter a big magic tournament (my least favorite arc that lasted about two fucking, agonizing years!) so they have to train for three months straight in order to get back into fighting shape. Lucy’s celestial spirits invite them to a party in the spirit world but afterwards they find out that time spent in the celestial world moves slower so they spent the entirety of three months partying over the course of a few hours. They seem kind of fucked right? Well you’d be wrong! Because plot convenience shows up and tell them that there’s a special procedure to unlock their hidden magic potential to make up for the three months they missed. Well gee wiz, isn’t that nice. Here I thought we’d get some cool training montages but nope just a magic MacGuffin that absolves all consequence and gives them all time to kick back and go out for lemonade or something before the tournament. Also Mashima has no guts. By that I mean he can’t ever seem to kill off a character, even when their death seemed un-avoidable or even expected to drive the plot. In the final battle between Fairy Tail and some prick country led by a prick immortal named Zeraf; the Master, Makaróv used Fairy Law, an all-powerful spell that can wipe out entire armies at the cost of their life force. He decided that in order to turn the tide of battle and save the guild and the people he loved that’d he’d sacrifice his life to use the fullest extent of Fairy Law. Now I’ll admit when Makaróv “died” I was heartbroken. Here’s a character that has been with us since the beginning. A warm father figure that was always gentle and stern when needed and was a good and honorable man. I almost teared up when his body was held lifeless in his grandson’s arms but I felt it was the right thing to do. His sacrifice was necessary for Fairy Tail’s victory. But then a few chapters later, poof, alive, no heart breaking sacrifice, no tear jerking funeral scene, where’s the meaning of “self-sacrifice” if you’re just gonna be revived like you’re a character from the fucking DC universe?

But then the biggest question of all and the only reason I stuck around as long as I did. What was the fucking pay off? The answer is there fucking wasn’t one. Spoiler warning because I hate this last chapter and I need to go into depth why. See I was waiting for the characters to have learned something or accomplished a long-awaited goal or see what I’ve always wanted to see and that’s Gray and Juvia fucking and making beautiful babies, after all this rubbish I felt I’ve earned my favorite character getting together with her love interest. But none of that happened, in fact let’s go through some of the characters in the end. But if I may digress for a moment, let’s take a look at the payoff from another magic series Little Witch Academia. In the beginning Akko knew nothing about magic and had delusions of grandeur but she never gave up on her dream of becoming a great witch who could bring a smile to people’s faces. What did she gain of the course of the series and at the end? Her hard work paid off in that she’s skilled in transformation magic, she helped save an entire country, revived the very essence of magic and was able to bring smiles to the people of the world and just as an added bonus she was finally able to fly something she was unable to do the entire series. What did Lucy learn or gain from the series? She got a book published. What did Natsu learn or gain? Nothing he’s just the guy who beat Acnologia but that fight was fucking boss so I’ll let him slide. Nothing happens with Erza other than her learning that her bizarre love interest has been pardoned and she has a better chance of fucking him. Gray realizes his feelings for Juvia, kinda, sorta, not really but sure. Gajeel and Levy are expecting a baby so that’s something at least. Makaróv is wheel chair bound like fucking Guy-Sensei in Naruto and we’re shown some of the romance with characters we never really fucking cared about and was about as annoying as that guy who never shuts up about his new girlfriend and of course the most patronizing thing of all is that Zeraf and Mavis are still alive and was basically given a Mulligan after the actual touching scene of them being finally able to die in each other’s arms only to find themselves at a party with new memories or some shit. If the events following directly after the time skip was fucking weak sauce this is no longer sauce but distilled water. What bothers me the most about this chapter is that this was the first time in years that I felt Fairy Tail going back to its roots. A scrappy group of wizards celebrating life and treating the world like it’s their oyster and just having fun which to be totally honest was rather bloody insulting. It was like being bullied by someone who used to be a friend and then tries to patch things up with you with a half eaten candy bar and a straight to video Disney film.

But overall I think I’m more disappointed at Fairy Tail than angry. Remember Fairy Tail Zero? The story of how Mavis founded Fairy Tail? How she went from the only inhabitant on an island to traveling with treasure hunters who’d later be the first members of her guild? How her talent for magic got them out of tight spots? How she met Zeraf in his only tolerable appearance fell in love and learned forbidden magic? How she saved the city of Magnolia from a disaster? The sadness she felt when she realizes that her best friend died years ago and the person she was always talking to was just an illusion she created subconsciously and the scene that actually made me cry, when Makaróv was born and Mavis was so happy and full of love for this new life that was brought into the world in her guild only to have her curse steal the life of his mother shortly after giving birth and the horror of her realization that his mother’s death was entirely her fault. This proved to me that Mashima has talent as a writer, he just didn’t seem to care about the main story enough. I recall some reviewers saying something along the lines of “I was crying as I was reading through the last chapter.” What for? Every single person got their cakes and ate them too to the point of them developing diabetes and cancer and nobody learned a fucking thing and no one sacrificed anything to get to this point! I suppose they would’ve been tears of joy but I highly doubt it, fans will cut off their own arm before they admit something is bad as if it’ll hurt their chances of getting to sleep with the creator. All and all the series ended like a drive to Nebraska, a whole lot of effort to end up fucking nowhere.

 

Star Vs. The Forces of Evil: The Battle for Mewni review

I know what some of you are thinking, “What’s this? Slade the wise and handsome anime connoisseur is doing a review on a cartoon? What kind of world am I living in? Is this the end of days? Do I have to stock up on canned goods, clean water and learn the proper way to roast a cronenburg for when society collapses?” To which I say “of course not you silly overly dramatic reader.” While it’s true that all of my previous reviews have been on anime, I’m not one of those people who feel the need to bow and pray in the direction of the land of the rising sun. I love Japan, it’s a lovely place with lovely people, lovely arcades and lovely animation, but every once in a while when the stars align and the rays of the sun point to where the Ark of the Covenant is, something happens over in America that catches my attention and I become quite the fan of. Which brings us to Star vs. The Forces of Evil a series about a magical princess and her adventures through magic, monsters and teen angst. Now I know what some of you are thinking, “What’s this? Slade the charismatic stallion and prime example of all things masculine not only watched a magical girl series but actually likes it? Aren’t you 26? Shouldn’t you be doing something better and more manly with your time like watch car shows, play beer pong or count how many girls you can screw in a single night instead of watching something so girly?” To which I say “well you smarmy cunt I’m secure enough in my masculinity to admit that I don’t like Star Vs. The Forces of Evil, I fucking love it. I love it so much; the characters are fun and fleshed out, the animation style is endearing and whimsical, and the story is actually pretty fucking solid, which is becoming more and more rare in television much to my chagrin.” and to answer the question of “Shouldn’t I be doing something better with my time?” I say “fuck you.” Star is great and anyone who tries to drag it down on such flimsy merits is gutter trash who shouldn’t have opinions in the first place.

But I digress, this is about the Battle for Mewni movie event. So at this point you’ve seen Star season one and two and already have a grasp of what’s going on so let’s get on with the review. Be warned there is a fuck ton of spoilers so you hav’t seen it yet beware. After the events of the season two finale our heroine and all around cutie pie Star Butterfly is traveling through Mewni with her mother, Queen Moon to a magical sanctuary to revive the Magic High Commission and come up with a plan to stop Toffee, the malevolent monster who single-handedly defeated Moon and the High Commission with about as much effort as nail filing, but because the very existence of magic is being corrupted the sanctuary offers no help in reviving the High Commission. Instead of waiting and hiding Star wants to find Toffee, kill him and just be done with this whole thing. Sorry sweet heart but you still got another hour and fifty or so minutes to go in this two-hour movie so that ain’t happening. I say movie but it’s structured the same way normal episodes are. Part one happens, commercial break, part two happens, commercial break, rinse and repeat till you get to like part eight. I’m not judging but calling this a movie is already testing my suspension of disbelief. It’s at this point however we get to learn a little more about Queen Moon. We learn that she used to be like Star, a carefree, happy-go-lucky teenager but when Toffee killed her mother she became overwhelmed with the responsiblity of being a monarch. Being expected to decide on whether to go to war with the monsters or trying to negotiate peace between them is a tremendous amount of responsibility to place on someone so young.

With no other options she makes arrangements to speak with Queen Eclipsa the only person who can help her. From early on in the series we’ve heard the name Eclipsa. Her chapter in the Butterfly book of spells is forbidden, filled with black magic and locked behind a skull, she’s known as the Queen of Darkness who ran off with her monster lover and was one of if not the most powerful magic users in the history of the Butterfly family. But when we finally meet Eclipsa she’s not some kind of master of evil like Toffee, she actually just seems like a normal person  in a crystal prison. Being encased in crystal for 300 years didn’t seem to bother Eclipsa too much either since the first thing she asks Moon is to bring her candy from a vending machine. I guess when you’re a prisoner for eternity it’s the simple things that you look forward to the most like chocolate, twinkies or crystal meth. Moon asks Eclipsa to teach her a spell that can destroy something that’s immortal but the spell she wants requires a magical contract. Once Toffee is killed Moon must repay Eclipsa with her freedom from the crystal prison, left with no other options Moon agrees to the terms of the contract and learns the spell. She then confronts Toffee in the monster army camp and uses the spell to blast off his finger. Not gonna lie Moon if your intention was to scare off and not kill you could’ve taken a better shot, an arm or a leg might have been a better call. Yeah the army panics and Toffee leaves but the most this is going to do to him in the long run is make it significantly harder for him to flip people off. But with Toffee defeated Moon assumes her right to the throne and vows to scatter the remains of the monster army and leave them without country or leadership, which is pretty fucking harsh. She’s basically saying she’ll make it he life’s work to make sure the soldiers in the monster army have no home to return to and no real haven for them. We’ve seen in season one that monsters have always been given the short end of the stick. Mewmans basically showed up to the monsters country, kicked them off their land and claimed it as their own. But with this flashback we see how Moon became so jaded towards monsters, which honestly I don’t blame her for. Monsters killed her mother and threatened her country, I’d actually be shocked if she held an ice cream party in their honor.

In the next part we go to the temple where Ludo is hiding out after the battle between Toffee, Moon and the High Commission. During the time Toffee was controlling Ludo, he became the new owner of the book of spells and Ludo now has a “wand hand.” Ludo doesn’t know how his hand got that way or why he’s no longer the owner of the book, all he knows is that his wand wants him to storm Butterfly castle and he can’t write in the book and goes through hell and high water do it. But Ludo gets frustrated after many failed attempts and when Glossaryck teases him and in a blind fury tosses the book of spells into a fire that destroys the book and causes Glossaryck to disappear. With the book destroyed Ludo does what his wand wants and heads for Butterfly Castle. Next we see how Star’s father King River is doing leading his people in Moon’s absence. His idea of raising moral is to throw parties at the castle for days. Marco appears to bring Star a gift of her favorite cereal and shows River that the people are panicking, his kingdom is in chaos and he accidentally taunts a monster into coming to the town. After a pep talk from Marco, River rallies the people into confronting the monster and driving it away and after winning the people over Ludo begins his attack. Yeah these parts are really just to set up for the climax of the movie so the events of what happen aren’t necessarily deep or complex.

but what is complex is the next part. After the sanctuary is compromised by a greenish black ooze Star comes to the idea of asking her best monster friend Buffrog to let her and her mother crash for the night. Moon is obviously uncomfortable with the idea of staying with a monster and with Buffrog’s home. After learning about the fall of Butterfly castle Star asks Buffrog to distract Moon while she goes to confront Toffee and save her dad. Now this is when things go deep, Buffrog plays a board game with Moon where evil Mewmans try to eat monster babies. This is one of my favorite parts in the movie because this scene shows the hypocrisy of her prejudice towards monsters, citing a game she played where monsters try to eat Mewman babies and not taking into account that the game was biased towards the Mewmans with anti-monster propaganda. The scene is played out very well too each of them say a line of dialogue and then move their piece on the board, as the argument gets more heated they move the pieces faster and with more aggression causing Buffrog to flip the game over and exclaiming that his children are his life and would do anything for their safety just like Moon’s doing for Star. Buffrog then makes it so Star can’t leave for her own safety and he and Moon come to an understanding. Next we see Ludo using his position as king to throw out all traces of the Butterfly family and make the citizens of Mewni like him. During this time Marco and River are being held in the dungeon and Ludo comes to tell King River to either make the citizens of Mewni like him or be sent into the sky with Ludo’s “levitatoe” spell. But Marco breaks free and tries to get help. He comes across a group of artist who’ve been living in the air ducts and help Marco get the key to River’s chains by distracting Ludo with an ad-libbed song about him. River refuses to abandon his people and Marco and the artists watch as River is flown into the sky in front of his people.

Then we come to the climax of the movie and my favorite part over all. Star breaks into the castle and attacks Ludo and tells him that Toffee is possessing the wand and him. She gets thrown into the dungeon. Marco breaks her out of her chains but when Ludo arrives he locks up Marco and the artists and takes Star somewhere they can talk and confides in her that he doesn’t want his wand anymore, it drives him crazy with it always talking to him and giving him orders. Star agrees to use the whispering spell to free the magic and hopefully release Toffee from the wand. Instead Star is transported to inside the wand where Toffee has contaminated the source of magic. He makes a deal with Moon to give him his missing finger in exchange for Star. And here is most likely my most favorite scene in the movie. Moon returns his finger and Toffee reforms business suit and all leaving Star in magical purgatory. When asked where Star is Toffee crushes the remains of the wand and says coldly “She’s gone.”

The way he says this sent a slight shiver down my spine. He didn’t say it in a sinister way or even with any evil, he said it in a way that meant “I won” and left it at that. Moon stands still completely dumbstruck then dark marks like Eclipsa’s appear on her arms and the diamond marks on her cheek change to a dark purple and rushes towards Toffee and tries to fight him. Then something painful happens. Even with all magic gone in an act of desperation and tears filling her eyes, Moon holds the wand up to an unflinching Toffee’s chest where his heart would be and says the immortal killer spell. Needless to say it doesn’t work and Moon looks totally defeated, so much so that we actually feel her pain. Marco even tries to kill him by punching trough his heart to no avail. And can we just pause for a moment to let that sink in, Marco tried to legit kill Toffee. He was so angry about his best friend being left for dead that he tried to kill an immortal monster. It was one of the most shocking moments in all of Star and I honestly didn’t see it coming like the bus with cut breaks. Marco is one of the bravest people in the show at this point and I doubt that’ll change anytime soon. One of the main reasons I like this scene the most and watch it over and over is that Toffee is everything I like in a villain. He’s sinister and dangerously intelligent but what I like most is that he actually achieved his goals, he won. He eliminated magic so he’d be totally invincible, got his body back and got his revenge on Queen Moon the one person who defeated him by dooming her daughter to an eventual death. The other reason is that we see how destroyed Moon is at the loss of Star. we see her struggling against Toffee and trying everything she can to destroy him, even falling deeper into dark magic. We even see her try to put the pieces of the wand back together in hopes of that being the key to save Star. It’s filled with a lot of heavy emotion and we can feel Moon’s pain through out it. Then we see Star trying to bring the magic back to her wand in a last-ditch effort to defeat Toffee and meets with Glossaryck who (kinda sorta) gives Star a hint into saving magic. Star then finds the last speck of magic and returns from the magic purgatory in what I like to call “Super Sailor Senshi Star” form. A magic blast from her wand melts Toffee and the battle is won. the last thing we see is Moon checking in on Eclipsa’s crystal and right before the credits the crystal begins to crack.

One of the things I heard people complain about the most is that they were hoping that the climax would be some big Lord of the Rings style battle between Star and friends and Toffee leading a monster army, but I would argue that the climax we got is just as good if not better. See I knew from the start that this wasn’t going to happen because for one reason how the hell would Toffee amass an army while trapped in Ludo’s body? I doubt any Monster would want to follow Ludo, he’s small, dumb and not very good at being evil. Second, Toffee himself is a one man army. With the power of immortality and the elimination of his only weakness Toffee was far more intimidating than any army could be. Third, This movie was more or less a set up for the rest of season three, which by the looks of it will focus more on Eclipsa being the main antagonist. With Toffee dead Moon has to hold up her end of the bargain and free Eclipsa thus giving us our season’s villain. Of course I haven’t even brough up my biggest problem yet and that’s Toffee’s plan. I love Toffee I truly do but his plan was so complex and specific that if even one thing screwed up he’d be left with nothing. What do I mean by that? Well in order for this plan to have worked he’d have to have banked on Star finding his finger, Ludo stealing the book for himself and actually opening the forbidden chapter of the book giving Toffee control, following his orders on taking over Mewni, have Star figure out that she needed to use the whispering spell and not die, get Star as a bargaining chip, and assumed Moon had his finger on her to make the trade. Christ this plan is so fucking precise I might have to call it a Rube Goldberg plot. Imagine the look on his face if Moon just tossed his finger in a ditch somewhere or burned it, he’d be pretty red with embarrassment if you ask me. And the pay off at the end was a tad weak. I don’t want to spoil this part but the way Toffee dies is a bit dumb and anti-climatic like the films of M. Knight Shamalan (not counting the Sixth Sense of course). But all and all I loved the Battle For Mewni movie, can’t wait for the rest of the season which will begin in…NOVEMBER?! Fucking hell first Castlevania and now Star? My balls are so blue they look like a choking Smurf and I once again am left wanting. Guess I’m just gonna have grab a fistful of ice and bash my bollocks into submission in the meantime.

 

Castlevania: Bloody fun, but…

Quick disclosure, I’ve never actually played Castlevania and all I know about it is that Dracula’s being a dick to people, the Belmont’s are the only people who can kill demons/Dracula and that I really want to play Symphony of the Night. So when I caught wind of this new Castlevania anime I was intrigued, then people started going nuts about it and I became wary. See when something get’s really popular in an instant it makes me more cautious than excited. Because normally when something new comes out and gains a massive popularity spike and is so popular that every man, woman, child, old lady, small dog and cadaver is either a fan of the show, dressed up as one of the characters en mass, or act like a disciple that has to spread the holy word of this series only to later find out that the story is shit, the protagonist is a prat and the plot is strung together about as gracefully as a noose around my neck I start to question if there’s been an outbreak of the stupid virus. I realized that this phenomenon would occur more often than not so naturally I decided to call this the “Sword Art Online Stigma” or “SAO Stigma” for short, to remind me that just because a bunch of people like something, doesn’t mean it’s good. But I should clarify that I actually enjoyed Castlevania and that it shook off the SAO Stigma faster than I can shake off rose-tinted glasses. Of course Castlevania has a few problems, one of them a major problem but I’m in far too good a mood to dwell on that for now so let’s get invested about bloody sweet animation and revenge.

Our story opens up in the European country of Wallachia. I heard that they were originally  going to have it be in Transylvania but then the development team realised that’d a hair too obvious. A young woman named Lisa finds her way to Dracula’s castle and asks to learn  the sciences to be a doctor that can save lives. In return of Dracula letting her use his knowledge she’ll help Dracula learn that humans aren’t that bad and are good-by nature. Soon Lisa and Dracula fall in love, get married, have a quaint little cottage in the woods and Lisa is burned at the stake by the church on suspicions of being a witch. So much for that whole “humans are good” thing she tries to get across. When Dracula learns of his wife’s demise he gives the people who roasted her one year to pack up and leave the country or else he’d release an army from Hell to kill them all. One year past and not only are the inhabitants still there but they’re throwing a festival in celebration of burning Dracula’s wife, at this point these people and the church are just fucking asking for it. So of course Dracula releases his night hoard to kill all humans and frankly I don’t blame him. Normally if you want to have Dracula do something evil in a story you don’t have to give him a ton of motivation to do what he does, he’s fucking Dracula. He could kill a whole country just because he was bored and I really wouldn’t be too critical of his character. But they actually humanized Dracula and the fact that he blames himself first for being unable to save his wife because he was traveling like a human; on foot and very slowly, is actually pretty sad and Dracula going back to being a prince of darkness out of rage towards the humans that killed the only “good one” is not only believable, it’s expected. I recall quite a few people going crazy with glee that the series has blood and gore in it, the way they were describing it made it seem like this was a porno specifically made for Jeffery Dahmer and yes there is plenty of blood and guts. I mean the skies start raining blood before Dracula’s monsters rip people to shreds, but Castlevania knows the age-old saying of “too much of a good thing is bad” because the gore part of “blood and gore” is used sparingly, with gore only showing up when demons are fucking people up, which makes it all the more special to see.

After the slaughtering we transition to a tavern where we overhear the most charming story involving a man shagging a goat we’re then introduced to our protagonist Trevor Belmont, the last son of the house Belmont, a family that has a history of hunting demons and vampires for generations who may very well be the winner for anime protagonist who gives the least amount of fucks yet is still a great character. Now some of you who read my review of Ajin may remember how much I hate the main character Nagai. Seriously, I honestly can’t say how much I hate Nagai, there isn’t a word in the english language that comes close to describing the seething  hatred I have for him. I wish Dracula’s army would tear him asunder for all eternity that’s how much I hate him but I digress, because Nagai is also a character that gives zero fucks about anything. So what sets Trevor Belmont aside from and above Nagai? Well it’s actually rather simple, one of the reasons is that Trevor is actually likable. When we first meet Trevor he gets caught up in a bar fight because the people at the tavern blame the Belmonts for the country going to shit and Trevor keeps trying to slyly slip out until he gets kicked in the bollocks and then he switches on the ass kicking, sarcastic and cocky aristocrat that sticks with us throughout the series. I think the quote that sums up Trevor’s badass-ness is when he says “I’m Trevor fucking Belmont. and I’ve never lost a fight to man, nor fucking beast!” I don’t know about you but I loved Trevor from that point forward. You know in a way Trevor reminds me a lot of Joseph Joestar from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure part two. Because Joseph is also an ass kicking, sarcastic and cocky person with an aristocratic heritage and a family history of fighting the supernatural. But while Joseph relies on quick thinking and a shit ton of luck, Trevor relies on his experience and skill. We see Trevor show us that he’s a completely competent fighter who can stay cool under pressure and doesn’t rely on much or any luck at all.

After a night in the woods he comes across the city of Gresit and catches Dracula’s monsters leaving the city after a night of slaughtering and  baby eating. I’m not kidding, literal baby eating. I’m actually a little shocked that they chose to show that to the audience, I mean I get that it makes sense that demons would eat babies but it’s pretty bold to show us that. He learns that the church and  the townsfolk blame a group of wandering magic users called Speakers for Dracula’s attack on their city. In another one of Trevor’s awesome-ness scenes he saves the Speakers’ elder from two corrupt priests and does so by whipping a stave out of the priest’s hand and cutting off a finger in the process and apologizing that he just meant to snatch the stave out of his hand and asks him “how’s your finger?” Not gonna lie, I had to pause the episode I was laughing so fucking hard. After Trevor warns the priests to just walk away before it gets nasty and then effortlessly taking the eye of the priest that wouldn’t listen to his warning, the elder insists that Trevor meets his fellow Speakers. Trevor tries to convince the Speakers to leave but the Elder refuses because his grandchild went missing under the city and he won’t leave her behind, Trevor makes a deal that if he finds his Grandchild they would leave the city. Another reason Trevor is superior to Nagai is because he’s redeemable. He comes off at first as a cold bastard with little to no compassion, but he helps the Elder from being beaten by the priests and even makes a deal to save on of their own so they can leave the city and get to safety.

In the Catacombs of the city Trevor encounters the grandchild turned to stone by a cyclops and after a pretty sweet display of Trevor’s monster hunting skill he meets Sypha Belnades, grandchild of the elder and magic lady who ventered into the catacombs in search of the “sleeping solider,” I great warrior said to aid the people of Greist in their darkest time. After returning the girl to the Speakers Trevor is summoned by the bishop of the city, who just so happens to be the same bishop who ordered Dracula’s wife killed and tells Trevor to leave the city by sundown and be spared from the mob he’s sending to kill the Speakers and Trevor basically tells him to go fuck himself. Trevor hides the Speakers in the catacombs and confronts the priests leading the mob. after escaping into the city Sypha appears and reveals to be a very powerful magic user and aides Trevor in his fight. He then reveals to the town that the clergy, not the Speaker’s are responsible for Dracula’s assault on the town. Don’t worry demons kill the bishop in such delicious irony as Dracula’s army attack the town. We then see Trevor’s experience and expertise in demon hunting. He organizes the town to fight off the demons with Sypha’s help. This is another similarity Trevor shares with Joseph Joestar. When Joseph fights we see his thought process, we see how he plans to make an attack on his enemy, Trevor does the same and gives us an action scene that we feel apart of. Then the ground collapses under Trevor and Sypha and they’re sent down into the deep submerged catacombs of Dracula’s castle. How did they fall into Dracula’s castle? Don’t know, not really revealed either. I suppose the hole they fell down was what they call a “plot-hole.” traveling deeper and deeper they discover the sleep solider; Dracula and Lisa’s son Alucard who was recovering for a whole year after his last encounter with Dracula. After a brief fight Alucard realize Trevor and Sypha’s potential and agrees to help them defeat Dracula. Wait a moment. A main character that’s similar to Joseph Joestar, a mysterious lady with great skill and ancient knowledge like Lisa Lisa, and a blond pretty boy who butts heads with the hero like Ceasar Zepoli? And the title “Castlevania,” if you re-arrange the letters, take some out and add some more in it spells “We based this off Jojo part two.” Don’t get me wrong if you wanna base your characters off Jojo part two then go right ahead I fucking love part two but this might be a little on the nose. But I don’t really care about that cause at this point I was so pumped. I remember saying “Oh fuck yeah! Good going KONAMI you finally did something useful with your life! Bring on the next episode!” then Castlevania made an awkward cough and shuffled towards the door. Then I read the first four words of  episode four’s description “In the season finale…” What?! Season finale? The entire first season is only four episodes? Fuck me running, what the hell kind of season ends after four episodes? Even FLCL had a whopping six episodes for its’ first season. So after a fun rollercoaster ride stopping abruptly I’m left with blue balls the size of hippity hops and wondering who I should be pissed off at the most. Netflix? KONAMI? Both? I’m leaning more towards KONAMI because they love to dick their fan base over for Pachinko machines, but that’s neither here nor there. In short yes I liked Castlevania and yes I recommend. But don’t get too attached because again, hippity hops.

My Hero Academia: Go beyond!

Well I’m a man of my word, I said that I’d review My Hero Academia this week and that’s what you’re getting. I considered this a special case because I had a weird attitude towards the anime at first. See, back when the Assassination Classroom manga ended I felt a hole in my heart that wasn’t filled till I started reading My Hero. It was a very interesting take on American comic book heroes and it drew me in almost instantly, but when the anime came out I wasn’t particularly stoked about it, more like lukewarm and blasé. I didn’t really know why so I decided to watch both seasons to get to the bottom of this and I’m happy to report that I finally know why, but more on that later. For now I’ll say that My Hero Academia is one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had with an anime this year (not counting Little Witch Academia of course). And my goodness what amazing timing I have that this review is coming out with the second half of season two so very close to airing, you’d think I’d have planned this out or something.

Our setting is modern-day Japan at a time where 80% of the world’s population have some kind of special powers and/or abilities called quirks. Our protagonist is Izuku Midoriya, a plain-looking freckle faced kid who dreams of following in the footsteps of his idol All Might, the number one hero in the world. Only problem is he was born without a quirk. Yes fate deals Midoriya a rather shitty hand in that he dreams of becoming the greatest hero, yet gives him no potential. It’s actually a soul crusher to be introduced to a four-year old Midoriya who watches the video of All Might recusing 100 people in ten minutes over and over again, playing with his All Might action figure with All Might posters on his wall, exclaiming how when he gets his quirk he’ll become a great hero like All Might. Only to have his heart-broken when he’s told by a doctor that he should give up on waiting for his quirk to develop and goes the extra step with Midoriya’s mother breaking down and crying when he asks her through tear-filled eyes  “Can I still be a hero?” Yeah, the series kicks you in the balls before the first commercial break and your balls will be feeling that pain for quite a while.

We than flash forward to Midoriya’s last year of junior high with his eyes still set on being a hero. But since he lacks a quirk his best course of action is to study heroes, villains and their quirks and keep all his findings in a series of notebooks. Honestly it was relieving to see that Midoriya hasn’t given up hope after all these years. Sure he’s the protagonist and anyone with an IQ that matches their shoe size knows that Midoriya will become a hero, but the fact that he still has hope and a spring in his step is what makes him as a protagonist likable, and we can’t help but root for him. On his way to school Midoriya is attacked by a villain with a sludge quirk and tries to possess his body. Rule of thumb boys and girls, if you want some excitement in your life just go to school in Japan. Cause chances are that on your way you’ll either become a magical girl, a robot pilot, the love interest, an exorcist, die and come back as a ghost/ghost detective/android/robot, etc. But in Midoriya’s case he ends up being saved by his idol All Might and accidentally discovers his secret that after a serious injury the world’s symbol of peace and justice is really a frail and emaciated man, who can only be a hero for three hours a day. Midoriya asks him if he can be a hero even if he doesn’t have a quirk and All Might tells him that he should set more realistic goals and give up on being a hero. Ouch, not only did he not get any support from his mom but now even his idol, the hero he dreamed of becoming told him that he should give up. Starting to think Midoriya didn’t roll a double six in the game of life, but that’s just my intuition.

So a disheartened Midoriya goes to his class and is once again reminded about how worthless he is for not having a quirk by the entire class and his childhood “friend” and current bully, Katsuki Bakugō, an elitist and egotistical kid whose quirk allows his palms to create explosions and deems everyone as a stepping stone towards greatness. I hate this character more than any other in the entire series and that includes the pervy kid that throws sticky balls from his head and only thinks with his dick. While it’s true that his character design is good and his quirk is powerful and cool, the actual character is just a giant angry twat and that’s the way he is for like, ever. He goes out of his way to belittle, threaten and humiliate Midoriya for wanting to attend  UA High School, the most elite hero academy in the world because he’s quirkless, and refuses to have someone like Midoriya compete on the same field as him. So after Bakugō goes the extra mile and damages Midoriya’s hero notebook and chucks it in a pond he gets attacked by the same sludge villain that attacked Midoriya and causes a huge panic. both Midoriya and All Might arrive at the scene and watch how the pro heroes can’t handle the explosions caused by Bakugō’s struggle and can’t attack the sludge villain because of his hostage. Even All Might is unsure of what to do, since his time limit for being super powered is up. But Midoriya rushes head-long into the danger and confronts the villain saying that Bakugō looked like he was begging for help. All Might is surprised at Midoriya’s bravery and is inspired to intervene and take out the villain once and for all. Later All Might confronts Midoriya and not only tells him that he admired his courage and saying that he can become a hero, but offers him the chance to inherit his quirk that has been passed down from person to person and become a hero like him.

This is just the first two episodes but it did an amazing job in drawing me in. The almost tragic life Midoriya led all seemed to pay off with the offer of being given the opportunity he wanted his whole life and he takes it without hesitation and goes through the strict training All Might puts him trough for the ten months leading to the UA entrance exam. We see his struggle and progress as his body is honed to accept All Might’s quirk as well as his studies in school. and when the day of the exam arrives we see a totally transformed Midoriya, ready to take on the world and reach his goal. But we see that Midoriya has a long way to go in making All Might’s quirk; One for All his own. In the practical exam Midoriya saves a girl who was trapped under rubble by jumping as high as he could and destroying a robot with one punch the only problem is that his arm and legs couldn’t handle the enormous amount of force  he was using and broke said limbs in one fell swoop. Regardless Midoriya is accepted into UA and his adventure as an aspiring hero has reached the next chapter.

One thing I’d like to point out is that the practical exam isn’t very thorough. You primarily have to destroy robots for points or in Midoriya’s case earn rescue points. But I can’t see some of the quirks in Midoriya’s class being all that useful in both bot destroying or rescue. A guy who can talk to animals, an invisible girl, and the pervy kid with sticky balls on his head are the first that come to mind. The only plausible way for the Dr. Doolittle guy to pass the practical is if he had swallows drop coconuts on the robots or had moles dig people out of rubble, either way both of those are really the only things I can think of. What can the invisible girl do? Well she’s invisible, no super strength, speed, durability or anything. How the hell did she crack open a robot? Did she happen to have Wonder Woman’s invisible jet on hand for an air strike? As for the pervy kid I honestly can’t think of a single way that he passed. Cause early on we see that he’s a defeatist who can’t seem to figure out the usefulness of his own fucking quirk so how the hell did he pass? I bring up these three up because we later find out that a kid in general studies can fucking brainwash people into doing things for him. He would’ve had the most destroying points if he just mind controlled a few people and bust up bots while he answered a few texts and ordered a celebratory pizza. How the hell does a guy with a quirk that strong get placed in general studies when gender-bend Eliza Thornberry, discount Susan Storm and Welches grape juice gets into the hero course? Work on your shit UA you turned down a golden boy.

So let’s talk about our characters and their characters. Midoriya is a solid character as we all know by this point despite the fact that he still buckles like a belt whenever he’s dealing with Bakugō. The rest of his class are an interesting bunch; interesting enough for me to actually want to get to know them, ranging from Tokoyami an edge lord with a shadow beast, Tsuyu a frog girl who speaks her mind and doesn’t put up with other people’s shit, Iida an overly dramatic more fair version of the Flash and Uraraka a spunky and cheery girl with gravity powers who becomes Midoriya’s first real friend in the series. You could say that All Might is Midoriya’s friend and that may be true, but I’d argue that All Might is more of a father figure and mentor to him then a friend. He’s always there to guide Midoriya and teach him the ways of One for All and looks out for his safety and development. But Uraraka is the one who cheers Midoriya on and helps him feel better about himself and helps him through dealing with some of the mistakes he makes and he returns the favor.

Now I have to be fair here and mention that Bakugō does in fact grow as a character. After years and years of people praising him and building up Bakugō to think his quirk was invincible, he got his reality check. In a hero exercise in the first season he loses to Midoriya and Uraraka and then realises that there are other people in the same class with very powerful quirks, some even stronger than his own and again in the school sports festival when he was backed into the wall at every event and winning because his opponent held back. He tones down the level of being a complete and utter dick head and gains some (but not really a whole lot) of humility. Although during the award ceremony at the sports festival he’s gone so berserk that he had to be restrained and was sporting more chains than Jacob fucking Marley. Ok we get it, he’s angry like all the time. You were doing pretty well in making him come across like he actually gained some wisdom in keeping cool but this kind of undoes all of that in this single scene. I’m honestly surprised every teacher at UA isn’t equipped with a tranquilizer gun in the event of Bakugō going completely ape shit.

I will say that while the animation is very good and the action scenes are masterfully done; not surprised since this is a studio Bones production and with series like Fullmetal Alchemist under their belt great animation and action is their bread and butter, there are times in the anime where the lighting drops a bit and the scene grows dim. Unless it’s the stream having a quick slip up I’m not sure why exactly they felt the need to do this cause it kind of sucks all the energy out of a scene for that brief moment and I’m left scratching my head and asking the “why” question as the action continues. Oh yes and I should probably circle back and explain why I didn’t really care for My Hero at first, and is now one of my new favorite series. The reason is! Ready? are you sure you’re ready? Ok, here it is! The reason I wasn’t crazy about the My Hero anime before was because the english dub is kind of bollocks. See when the anime was first introduced to me it was shown to me in english by my friends and I’m not one of those people who only watch in japanese, but now was one of those times. Don’t get me wrong I’ve heard worse english dubs before; the first Fairy Tail dub comes to mind. But I like to think that english dubs fall under a few different categories. By that I mean that there’s the good dubbing like Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, the Godly dubbing like Cowboy Bebop, the bad dubbing like the first dubbing of Fairy Tail, the bad yet charming dubbing like Speed Racer and the annoying dubbing like My Hero Academia.

There are a few good voices in english, Midoriya’s is all right and sickly All Might is pretty good, hero All Might sounds like a turn of the century circus strongman which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not really what I had in mind when I was reading. Can’t be helped though since the voice of hero All Might is Christopher Sabat, the voice of Alex Louis Armstrong from Fullmetal Alchemist who coincidentally looks like a circus strongman and it was the turn of the century so it fits the fucking bill. But while Armstrong was a great character and was able to balance endearing, funny and serious just like All Might, they’re not the same person. I kind of wish either Sabat decided to give All Might a more unique voice to set it apart from Armstrong but still have that “strong” sound or Funimation took a risk and got someone else to do it. Speaking of, Funimation really, really, really needs to stop putting Todd Haberkorn in roles that don’t suite him. See Haberkorn’s strength as a voice actor is being side characters, he’s very good at making side characters that are funny but also serious (Death the Kid of Soul Eater and Ling Yao from Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood) side characters with a dark edge or secret agenda (Judal from Magi) or just a fun silly character (Jaco from Dragon Ball Super) he was even good in Oran Host Club and his character was a twin with heavy implications of incestuous bum fucking. But he struggles with lead roles (Natsu from Fairy Tail and Keroro from Sgt. Frog) or roles where he plays a cynical character. the cynical character in My Hero is Shigaraki a villain and the head of the League of Villains. Shigaraki is a very temperamental, sinister and cruel person who wants nothing more than to kill All Might and establish himself as the villain who destroyed the symbol of peace. Haberkorn just can’t seem to get the job done, I’m not sensing or feeling any malice from his character I can only hear a tired voice saying evil things.

But the worst of it, the absolute worst of it was the english voices of Tsuyu the frog girl and Mineta the pervy grape kid. Every time I heard them open their fucking mouth I wanted to slice my own ears off with a paper guillotine, cause while Japanese Tsuyu sounds nasally it’s actually fitting to the character and Japanese Mineta sounds normal, like a person is talking and he sounds the way I thought he would. English Mineta  sounds like his mouth is constantly full of maple syrup and english Tsuyu’s voice sounds like she’s plugging her nose while deep throating a donkey and they both have a decent amount of speaking lines so when you have one character who I really like sounding awful and another character whose actions are annoying but now has a voice that’s ten times worse than his actions, then something has fucked up royally. And I don’t care if her tongue can extend to the length of an average skyscraper her english voice is bad. And justifying it saying that “well it makes sense because of her tongue” is only perpetuating the problem of poor casting and bad direction. But aside from a few short comings the series is very good and honestly I can’t wait for the next half of the second season cause much like Luffy becoming the Pirate King we all want to see Midoriya become the greatest hero of all time and we’re excited to see it unfold.

Little Witch Academia: A truly magical journey.

I was intending to review My Hero Academia this week but decided against it because the final episode of Little Witch Academia aired recently and I seem to be the one psychotic on the planet that’d rather talk about Little Witch over My Hero, so school for hero’s is on break till next week while school for witches is now in session. Before we begin I just want say that I absolutely adore studio TRIGGER. Everything they do from the story, the plot, the characters and the art style are absolutely stellar and is some of the finest work I’ve ever seen in the anime industry and I’ve yet to be disappointed by them. That might make you think that I might be a tad biased in this review and you know what? You’d be right, just call me Bobby Blue Bias Balls, but I have no shame in being biased towards things that are actually good because it’s rare to find actually good anime nowadays.

Which brings us to Little Witch Academia, studio TRIGGER’s latest series about witches in the modern-day, like a no boys allowed  Harry Potter if it had a shit ton of uses out of the word “desu.”Some may recall that Little Witch had two animated shorts back when TRIGGER was still new with a lot to prove. Well the series isn’t so much a continuation of those shorts as it is a soft reboot to re-tell the story since banking on an audience to remember an anime short from 2013 and 2015 respectively is a pretty tall fucking order. Our heroin is Akko Kagari, a plucky and charismatic girl who traveled from Japan to Europe to attend the Luna Nova Magical Academy. Inspired by a magical performance of the witch Shiny Chariot, Akko is excited to study at the same school that Chariot did and is determined to be a witch that can make people smile. On her way to her first day of school she runs into her future friends and roommates; thus completing anime troupe 56 gamma, “fateful encounter on the way to school.” Lotte Jansson, a mousy and soft-spoken girl who specializes in fairy magic and Sucy Manbavaran, a mischievous and cynical girl who specializes in poisons, potions and human experimentation. Due to a fuck up on Akko’s part all three wind up in a forbidden forest where Akko finds the legendary Shiny Rod, the same staff that belonged to Chariot and after a quick teleport to school Akko’s days at Luna Nova and finding the seven sacred words so the shiny rod can save the world of magic can finally begin.

One of the things that TRIGGER does really well in Little Witch is their depiction of magic. See I fucking hate it when a story treats magic like calculus class, you can only access spells if you’ve crunched enough numbers and preformed the formula exactly to the specifics on page 155 through 480 in your textbook to reach the answer “X= fire” and then divide that by “Y=ball.”It makes way more sense to say that magic comes from your emotions and feelings. Magic is illogical, just like emotions. When you try to pair up the illogical force that is magic with the logic of mathematics, the aspects of reality ruin the fantasy like a guy going to Disney World and taking off Micky’s head to reveal a sweaty intern. When Shiny Chariot tells her audience “Remember, a believing heart is your magic” it’s letting us know that the magic they’re going with is illogical i.e. tied to emotions i.e. the way magic is supposed to fucking be. If Chariot stood on stage and started reciting numbers and formulas the audience (both the audience in the episode and we the viewer) would be as bored as an illiterate five-year old in a library.

And it’s something that TRIGGER does quite well, one of my absolute favorite episodes is where Sucy drinks a potion that causes her to go into a magic coma and it’s up to Akko to go into Sucy’s dream and wake her up. While she’s in there she meets many layers of Sucy’s personality and what makes up her character. There’s even a drive in movie cinema that plays all of Sucy’s memories in a whimsical retro cartoon style. Diving into another persons dream is once again illogical and we as an audience are entertained by the very idea of entering dreams. Almost like we’re enjoying the creative use of magic.

But I think Little Witch’s greatest strength is the characters, more specifically Akko’s character. She has a well-developed arc going from starry-eyed naive dreamer to an actual competent witch. At first she doesn’t like school, she’s teased by the other students for looking up to Shiny Chariot, has to learn the history of magic, potions, philosophy, is the first witch in the history of Luna Nova who can’t fly a broom and most irritating to Akko, not learning flashy magic like the kind she saw as a child. But she soon realizes that Chariot wasn’t always good at magic and that she won’t be like Chariot unless she studies, practices, gets extra help from her professor and tries everyday to improve herself and the best part is, we’re there every step of the way. Every episode we see Akko getting a little better in her magic and we’re happy for her because we’re invested in her character. She even upstaged the school prodigy Diana Cavendish at their school festival and it was because of her way of thinking outside the box and playing to her strengths that gave her the edge.

But while I do love this series to the point that I’d say it’s the best anime I’ve seen in 2017 I do have some problems with it. Namely the climatic battle at the end. It was eerily similar to the climatic final battle in Kill la Kill but with magic instead of weaponized cloths. Don’t get me wrong I love Kill la Kill, it’s one of my favorite series of all time but I’m not watching Kill la Kill, I’m watching Little Witch. It would’ve been nice to have a different final battle scenario is all. But this is something I can forgive because the story weaves exposition into the narrative so well that it stays with us the whole way through like where (really trying not to spoil here) we know of this “thing” about Akko and when it’s revealed about what caused this “thing”, it hits us just as hard as it hits Akko. Maybe it’s because my heart is a dried up little rotten apple of cynicism but It takes a lot for an anime to get me to feel anything. The fact that I got emotionally moved multiple times during the series proves to me that this series was well worth my time and I recommend it fully.

Ajin a.k.a “How to make a Demi God boring”

You know I don’t think there isn’t a single person in the world who hasn’t imagined what it would be like to be a God. Sure pass times like The Sims help with working out your God fantasy by creating communities, getting your Sims married and drowning them in the pool but that approach is more “on the outside looking in.” Which brings us to Ajin, a series where people have God like powers but are about as interesting as soggy toast.

Yes if the title of this review wasn’t clear enough for you, I don’t particularly like Ajin. Normally when it comes to Anime I go by a “rule of five.” Which means; I give a series five episodes (weeks) to get me invested and to give it a fair chance to impress me. If I’m not invested or care about what’s going on after fives episodes, it’s not worth anymore of my precious time. Which is why I’m particularly bitter  towards Ajin because I had to watch the entire first season because a friend of mine wouldn’t shut up about it and there wasn’t really anything else to watch so that’s two bullets in the foot for me.

In a world not much different from our own, there exists a small group of people who can never die and have a spooky ghost shadowing them, these people are known as Ajin and whenever one shows up the governments of the world track them down and proceed to torture them for pharmaceutical needs, weapons testing or just getting a kick out of chopping an arm off and watching it grow back. Our protagonist is Kei Nagai, a Japanese student whose ultimate goal is to follow his mothers orders and have a normal life with all the emotions of a cold fish. Just from the first few minutes of the series we’re shown that Nagai isn’t a good person. He ditched his best friend without question when his mom told him to and that he could only have friends if she approves of them. He’s cold towards his sister in the hospital and to top it all off when he sees his best friend from childhood and his approved friends make fun of him, Nagai joins in. I belive the proper term here is that Nagai is a tool.

Anyway after a brief exposition into how governments torture Ajin and rumors of large rewards for capturing one surface, Nagai get’s hit by a truck and is discovered to be an Ajin. Which isn’t that big of a surprise since he’s the main character. So Nagai runs away from the scene of the accident out of panic and is eventually contacted by Kaito the childhood friend that he abandoned who seems to be pretty ok with that fact and just wants to help Nagai get out of the city. So after a few twists and turns of evading the police, unintentionally saving a girl from sex trafficking a motorcycle chase and spooky ghost murder, Nagai decides he needs to continue this journey alone before Kaito gets anymore involved, which I actually respected Nagai for. It’s the only time in the entire season (and the entire series as far as I know) where you see the possibility of an arc in his character, saved by the friend he shunned and in turn protecting him from the future danger he’s bound to run into started to make me respect Nagai.

We’re then formally introduced to our antagonist Sato; an older looking Ajin with a cool hat and the only character I like.  He invites Nagai into his kill all humans club before Nagai gets hit with a tranquilizer dart and wakes up on a government operation table, which receives special mention because we’re walked through all the things they do to Nagai while he’s still conscious; drill trough his teeth, remove an organ or two, amputate a limb. It gets rather disturbing very quickly and having a weak stomach doesn’t help. But then Sato single-handedly breaks into the compound to free Nagai and proceeds to turn every armed guard and bystander into mulch by cleverly killing himself to do his Ajin thing and then killing everyone in sight and after Nagai declines his offer into the kill all humans club, he decides to cut Nagai’s head off, which is fucking amazing.

You see the reasons I love Sato so much are rather simple. He’s the only character with any kind of passion, he’s evil and he loves it. He’s the only character with a goal that he’s working towards; which is a war against humans, build a country with blackjack, hookers and is exclusively populated by Ajin. He’s the only character that uses his powers realistically. By realistically I mean he does what any other person with god like powers would do, abuse them and most importantly he’s the only character with signs of life in him. Every other character from Nagai to the government officials tracking him down are about as lively as printer paper, but Sato loves life and he loves taking life away from humans as if he’s playing a video game. He may be the villain but I’m rooting for him to come out ahead.

After Nagai fights off Sato, saves the two doctors that were torturing him and escapes the hospital he winds up in a small village and I have to say that this was it. This was the moment when Ajin went from potentially good to kinda shit in almost record time. I’m throwing down major spoiler warning because I need to make my point about what finally broke me. The rest of the Nagai narrative goes as follows; Meet old lady, mooch off old lady, meet fellow Ajin who learned of one of Sato’s plans and came to Nagai for help in stopping him, locks kid in shipping container so he doesn’t threaten his “normal life.” it’s at this point that Nagai isn’t a bad person, he’s a full-blown asshole. Even when Sato executes his plan (which is honestly one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in my life involving bombs, Sato riding a building like Commander Kong in Dr. Strangelove and a drone bringing him a replacement hat) and is being shown on TV as living proof that he’s a one man army capable of mass destruction Nagai’s just sipping tea with not even an ounce of emotion as if he was saying “Oh I guess that psychotic sociopath who wanted to kill all humans is actually killing all humans, but that’s none of my business.”

I was pretty much at the boiling point at this part of the series but what finally pushed me over the edge and cemented this series into the burning landfill of hate was when Nagai get’s found out and holds the old lady hostage as he makes a break for the kid he’s had trapped for weeks so he can help him escape then he blames Sato for ruining his chance at a peaceful life. At that point I paused the video and yelled out “Fuck you! Fuck you Nagai! You’re blaming Sato for your own problems? Who imprisoned a kid that wanted your help? Who took advantage of an old lady’s kindness and just decided to live in her house? Who had full knowledge of what Sato was planning and sat back and did nothing about it as he killed hundreds if not thousands of people? Sure I doubt you would’ve stopped Sato from enacting his plan but I would’ve respected you for at least trying, you don’t even care.” All in all I wish Ajin the series and Nagai would get thrown back on the operation table and be torn to shreds for all eternity.