Me too. This trip they're taking together implies at least that they might somehow be freed, and then the originals, as they're doing, go back to living their own lives, while the replicas, as they're doing, are free to go do as they wish.
Here's hoping...
Another great episode.
I'm starting to suspect that in the long run, this is going to turn out to be my favorite series of the season. It has some strong competition in An Observation Diary of My Fiancee, which is just so immensely charming, but this one has sort of snuck up on me. It was entertainingly silly all along, and the goddess in particular is a great character, but lately it's started to look as if it's not just building toward some sort of truly epic ending, but that it has been all along, which is doubly impressive because for the first two thirds or so, I didn't even realize it had an overarching plot at all.
Currently working my way through a bit of an oddity - Bodacious Space Pirates.
The concept is a good (at least for my own tastes) combination of intriguing and silly, but it almost immediately went south. But there was an odd thing there.
Okay - so we have this schoolgirl, Marika, who finds out that she's the heir to a pirate ship captaincy, and what's her reaction? Essentially, "Well gee, that's great, but I have to go to my part-time job now." And it didn't seem to matter how much the crew tried to impress on her that this was a serious matter - she was just "Well I have a test tomorrow, so I need to study for that," or "Sorry - I have to go to my club meeting now," or "Well they need me to fill in at the maid cafe, so I'll see you later." It wasn't that she wasn't interested in the ship or the captaincy - she definitely was. She just couldn't manage to keep her focus on that if any distraction came floating by. No matter how serious things got, she'd still spontaneously switch over into being a brainless schoolgirl. And that was really irritating, not least because she did show occasional flashes of intelligence and even brilliance, but inevitably went back to being a simpleton sooner or later.
But just about the time I was ready to drop it, they introduced another character, and in fact another schoolgirl who's heir to a ship, and her role in large part turned out to be a sort of audience surrogate who tells Marika to knock it the hell off. Specifically, "When you act like a ditz, you put people in danger, and it makes me mad, so you need to stop doing it." And though it does take a while, she does finally stop being such an annoying ditz and actually focuses on being a pirate captain, and turns out to be a very good one.
I thought that was odd though. Rather than make her competent from the start, the writer(s) made her irritatingly shallow, but apparently knew enough to recognize that that was going to be irritating, so made it a pose that she was striking for some inexplicable reason, and included an audience surrogate to tell her just how irritating she was being and to knock it the hell off. If I had thought that she was just going to be that way, I would've dropped it, but just about the time I was ready to do that, they introduced a character who called out the exact problem, which is the only thing that kept me watching it.
That's kind of a neat trick really, but seems like a lot of trouble and risk to go to when it would've been easier to just not make her irritating in the first place. I can see writers inadvertently making a character so irritating that they lead to people dropping the series, but deliberately doing that, then saving it at the last minute by having someone in-universe call it out? At the least, I don't see how that adds anything of value to the story.
Still though, now that that's (apparently) a thing of the past, it's settled down into just being a sort of stylized adventure story, and is pretty good all in all.
At this point, there seems to be a just about 50/50 chance that this is going to end happily and that it's... not.
On the one hand, the originals are together now and overtly sharing their appreciation for the replicas.
On the other hand, it already has an established history of delivering serious gut punches, so it's not unreasonable to expect another one.
Exactly. And meanwhile, the OP is on Reddit, where we're not.
It's sort of like going to a restaurant and being served a picture of some food from some other restaurant.
Binged this last night, and it is very good. Not perfect by any means, but very good.
And the ED's still in my head.
Good riddance.
The whole idea of reposting Reddit content on the fediverse has always been stupid and toxic. It's never going to get any meaningful engagement, so it's just a waste of server space at best.
Sort of thinking through my fingers here...
The first notable one I can think of is watching the entire run of Elfen Lied in a single sitting, so 12 episodes. I've done that a number of times since though, most recently with the first season of Zombieland Saga.
One curious one was Magic Knight Rayearth. I watched most of the first season - 20 episodes - in a single day, but not so much because I was so hooked on the story. What it was was that if I didn't catch it in time at the end of one episode, the next episode would start, so the OP would start, and that was it. There was no way I could turn off what is, IMO, the best OP ever, so I'd end up just letting it go, which led into the episode, and so on. I'm not sure how many total episodes I watched that way though.
I can only think of one instance when I'm certain I watched more than a single season/cour in a single sitting, and that was The Apothecary Diaries. I watched the first half or so of the first cour of the first season one day, and it was certainly good, but it hadn't yet fully hooked me. But then when everything started coming together in the second half of that cour, I couldn't stop, and I watched the rest of it plus the entire 12 episode second cour in one long binge. I'm pretty sure that started from about the time that Maomao went home to visit her father, which was episode 7, so that's 18 episodes or about 7 hours.
There's nothing quite like it really.
The closest comparison I can think of is Drifting Classroom, but it never got an anime adaptation.
Bokurano is similar in some notable ways, but it's an ensemble and set in (more or less) our world.
Casshern Sins is sort of oddly similar - broadly similar setting and tone and a lot of the same themes, though a much different story.
I guess Noein is sort of similar, insofar as it's a cast centered on children, the stakes are much bigger than they initially seem and tragedy lurks around every corner, but it's different in most details.
And Kaiba is actually sort of very broadly similar too - much different setting, artstyle and story, but a similar downbeat tone and broad subject of people, and mostly children, at the mercy of a screwed-up world.
And I can't think of anything else even vaguely similar.
Fate/Stay Night - couldn't say - it's never interested me. Note that it's not "forgotten" by any stretch of the imagination.
Mushishi - very, very good. And entirely the opposite of "forgotten" - hardly a week goes by that I don't see it mentioned in some context.
xxxHOLiC - Clamp. I can sort of see what I guess the appeal must be, but have no interest in investing the necessary time and effort.
Negima reboot - important to stipulate "reboot," since the first series was ridiculously awful - like they actually went out of their way to try to make it as bad as possible awful. The second series is okay. The manga's better.
Witch Hunter Robin - I've bounced off of it three times now. It looks intriguing, but for some reason...
Hellsing Ultimate - I prefer the original.
Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles - Clamp^2
All in all, a pretty awful list. Here's a better one, just off the top of my head:
Yeah - that was a good Jugemu.
And I'm tempted to drop this right here. I just have no hope that what's going to come next is going to be satisfying.
longish rant
There was a scene in this episode that neatly illustrated why I've gotten so disillusioned with this series - Issho after Akane's performance.
They show him rising up with that full angry look on his face, then sneering that Akane knows that she shouldn't even be there, and she immediately agrees. Then that's it - they end the scene and jump forward to backstage afterwards. We don't get to see whatever that interaction was - we only get to hear a description of it later. And what's the description? That he went on to tell Akane that a professional shouldn't be disrupting a competition for amateurs.
So in spite of the full angry face and the sneering delivery, he went on to pay her an extremely high compliment.
So the full angry face was a fake-out. Why? Because they still have to pretend that the whole beginning of the story meant something because Akane hasn't yet had the one-on-one confrontation with him that was the entire point in the beginning, so they still have to go through the motions of making Issho look like a villain just a little bit longer. But the reality is that they're laying the groundwork for pretending that his full angry face all along was just a fake-out, including, most notably, when he summarily expelled everyone, including Akane's dad, six years ago. Why? Because the whole idea that he was some sort of villain that Akane was going to confront - the whole driving force behind her decision to dedicate herself to rakugo - is going to end up being tossed aside.
And why didn't they show the rest of the scene between Akane and Issho when she was on stage? Because it was stupid. It's a stupid concept. There's no way that they could've started with that entirely threatening intro, then shift to Issho calling her a professional competing against amateurs without it turning stupid some way or another. He'd look stupid making that switch, and she'd look stupid listening to it. AND then it would completely deflate the whole one-on-one that the entire series has been building up to. How could she go in there with a full head of steam to confront him over her dad getting expelled when he just paid her a ridiculously high compliment in the competition? She couldn't. So they didn't show the scene. They included it, because it was necessary for it to be there to retcon the entire narrative, but they couldn't show it because it was too stupid - because this whole retcon is too forced and too stupid and they have no way of actually showing it in detail without revealing that fact.
And now what do we get? She goes in to confront him - the moment that the entire series was initially built toward - and when she asks her question, he stands up and smiles like a Disney princess meeting her beloved. Why? Obviously I can't know, but it's pretty safe to assume that it's because that's going to be the debut of the fully retconned Issho, and he's going to vomit out a whole spiel about how much he loves rakugo and how desperately he wants it to continue, but that required making some hard choices and it hurt him to do it but he had to shake things up because that whole generation of rakugoka was too conservative and too timid and the craft needed new blood and now look - there's Akane and smug guy and voice actress and they're all wonderful and he loves them all so much and blah blah blah blah blah. And it's going to be smarmy and repulsive.
And I have a further prediction beyond that - one way or another, she's not going to be entirely taken in by his response, because there needs to be one more gross retcon scene.
Who haven't we seen hardly at all in all of this? Akane's dad. Why? Because they're saving him for the penultimate scene, in which he tells Akane that Issho was right to expel him and he really shouldn't have been trying to become a rakugoka and he's better off now and she's better than he would've ever been anyway and Issho's right and she's the future and blah blah blah blah blah.
And then the transition from an engaging tale of betrayal and determination and a quest for justice to an insipid Jump perpetual motion machine will be complete.
I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think so. There's just been too much insipid garbage already (and especially that scene after Akane's performance, or more precisely, the fake out introduction to the scene and then the after-the-fact capsule description of it) and I can't see it leading anywhere else.
NegaPosi Angler - though about fishing, it's largely about forming human bonds, and plays off of the fact that people who fish tend to share an instant bond with each other.
Hanayamata -five girls who form a Yosakoi dance team - easily one of the most adorably uplifting and satisfying anime I've ever seen.
Sabagebu! - Survival Game Club - combat games with AirSoft guns - very stylized and often surreal and very funny in a sort of Nichijou vein.