ingvild

Magical Girl Revy-chan.

It was in the manga omakes, but seeing it animated...

(Note: You should be familiar with Black Lagoon to get why this is so wrong.)

I'm having a busy week with preparing for Japan and work, so naturally I took the time to get hooked on and read a new manga series, Buso(u) Renkin (by the same guy who did Rurouni Kenshin).

The plot is basically this: Boy sees girl about to be attacked by a monster, pushes her out of the way and gets stabbed through the heart. Girl puts magic rock alchemical device in his chest to act as a heart for him, and reveals that actually, she was just pretending to be helpless to lure the monster out, she's actually a kickass Alchemy Warrior. The alchemical devices, called kakugane, turn into weapons whose shape depend on the user's personality or something. The monsters are homunculi.

The words "alchemy" and "homunculi" are the only similarities with Fullmetal Alchemist. It's more like Bleach, only without the endlessly dragged out story arcs and fight scenes (it clocks in at ten volumes of manga and 26 anime episodes). The main character's power ups are also plot relevant and not a good thing.

Male lead and main character Kazuki is one of those idealistic sweethearts. Female lead Tokiko is awesome. And then there is Papillon.

Anyway, watching this show finally clued me in to why I took to Judau of Gundam ZZ immediately, but it took Kamille of Zeta Gundam so long to grow on me. I'm pretty much an omnivore when it comes to female characters - as long as she has agency and a personality, I don't actually care what the personality is. With male characters, I'm much more picky. Basically, I like two types: socially awkward/dorky and complete sweethearts (often also wide-eyed idealists). Judau, like Kazuki, falls in the second category.

I guess this is also why I prefer Superman to Batman, and Captain Marvel (him with the Power of Shazam) to them both (Superman is a Good Person, while Captain Marvel is both a Good Person and still keeps some of his innocence).

So...I kinda finished Gundam ZZ. Heh. I actually liked it better than Zeta, even if Zeta probably was objectively better. But ZZ really got good after ep 21.

( 11-21 )


( 22-31 )


( 32-40 )


( 41-47 )

Overall, I actually really liked this. I want to write fic, which is a first for UC Gundam for me.

Now that I've figured out screencapping, you're getting Patlabor images, like I threatened promised. Note that these are from the TV series, not the movie series.



( 33 images behind the cut )

No. Sorry. Why would they make a war machine that's unarmed?

That new opening is creepy. It seems like it's a lot like the old one, bum bum Char's face gets shadowed, and then BAM! SCIROCCO IN YOUR FACE!

It's rare that I hope for the death of a character, but Scirocco and Yazan could die next episode and I'd only be happy.

Uh, Reccoa? Huh?

Hey Mariemaia, now I know where your creators got your character design from. Minerva Zabi acts more like a real child, though.

Only 15 more episodes to go! Omni, I'm catching up with you

Now for something completely different.

I thought I'd figured out screencapping, but two problems arose. When I didn't pause the vid I was capping, it just kept playing in Paint. Okay, that's fine, I thought, I'd just pause it. And it seemed to work. But then when I'd exited the file, it went all black! Whut? ETA: Works just fine on vids on the net. It's just vids from a DVD that's a problem.

ETA 2:
( Cut for spoilers, Zeta 36-38 )

Right, so now I'm halfway through Zeta Gundam, and I've noticed something.

When they're still on Earth, Amuro tells Kamille that he has to go back to space, because it's impossible to see the big picture on Earth. In the episodes on Earth, I couldn't tell what was going on, but in space it was much easier to understand. Coincidence, or deliberate?

Also, I had no idea how much I missed Emma until she was back.

By the way, Zeta is going insane with the number of female pilots. Kamille even comments on how many women there are fighting. How good they are at it varies, but damn there's a lot of female mobile suit pilots here.

The ones I remember:
Emma
Reccoa
Fa (after a while)
Four
Rosamia (Fear of colony drop girl)
Lila
Muoar
Sarah
Holly
That person who died that Holly replaced, her name began with S

Anyway, I'm slowly but steadily catching up. Omni, how are you doing with Nanoha?

I'm now 15 episodes into Zeta, and I'm still not sure what I think.

I like the worldbuilding, and the science fiction-y feel of it. That's good. I like the central conflict.

On the other hand, I have no idea how this is going to keep from getting aimless. I also think there are too many characters. I can't seem to get to know most of them, and the ones I do get to know (*cough*Kamille) I don't really like all that much.

I felt like they wasted a good subplot about the tension between the Titans and the Federation forces by killing off Lila.

A lot of the time, I can't tell which suits belong to which side. The Gundam and Char'sQuattro's golden thing are nice and distinctive, but not so much the others.

I thought it was funny that the original White Base crew was in the opening, but that it took so long for anyone other than Bright to show up. Right now, I wonder what's going on with Amuro. I seem to be more attached to the holdover cast from the first series.

Now to something that bugged me, not from this series, but the side story miniseries: Spacenoid. Can anyone remember if they used that word in the original series? I don't think so. It's being used here, but the first time Kamille heard it, he didn't recognise the word.

In 0083, Kou points out that the spacenoids themselves want to be called that. It was going into fashion then. I can accept that Kamille just had his head in his ass for four years and completely missed the word. But why did they use it in MS IGLOO, which takes place at the same time as the original series?

HMMMMM.

For me, who was first introduced to Gundam Wing through fanfiction, it was a real shock to actually watch the series and realise that the female characters were actually

a) Present
b) Important to the plot (some more than others, but the same can be said for the male characters)
c) In possession of different personalities
d) Personalities which were not solely dependent on their “designated male”.
e) Heck, some of the women were more developed as characters than some of the men!

I fell for them all. Some more than others, but to a certain extent I appreciate every single Gundam Girl. So here is my love post. Warning: Image-heavy.

(And please, if you don’t like one or more of them, could you please save that for the quarter million webpages where you’d get a chorus of “Word!” if you said so? This is my squee. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t harsh it.)

(Also, I didn't cap these myself. I found them somewhere - if I can remember where, I'll put it up.)

( The Wonderful Women of Wing )

I call myself a mecha fan, but can I truly do so when I haven't seen all of Gundam yet?

(If the answer is yes, I'll be very worried.)

I should at least watch everything in the UC timeline, right? I'm well under way! Only 170 episodes and two movies left! Why, if I watch three episodes a day, I'll finish before the first season of Patlabor arrives in the post!

The second and third season have been sitting on my shelf, taunting me, for most of January. It says something that I bought the whole thing after watching only one episode at the Anime club in York and reading some descriptions. It's so frustrating that I couldn't find it anywhere else, the only way to get it was to buy it. I've been resisting temptation for so long, but when I got money for X-Mas I could resist no longer. Now, if only the first season would get here soon...!

ETA: "Season" is misleading. It's a box set in three parts, and I have part two and three.END ETA

In better news, the third season of Avatar: TLA* has been shipped, and should arrive soon. Yay!

I really should reign in my shopping habits. Still, Patlabor was pretty cheap, and I've already watched Avatar: TLA twice, so I know I love it.


*I feel like I need to specify now that That Movie By The Same Name is out.

Some time ago, I did an anime rec week (click the anime or rec tag), which was a little hampered by the fact that those were all the anime I'd watched at the time. Now, I've watched/read a lot more.

This isn't a rec list. It's just a list of all the anime/manga I've read/watched - mostly, sometimes I like just reading little oneshots on scanlation sites. Also, it's only the stuff I'm up-to-date on - like, it's finished, and I've finished it, or it's on-going, but I've read/watched everything that's available in English.

( Long lists beneath the cut )