Category: TV Shows

Dororo

  03/26/2019       Farla      3 Comments

So, let’s continue to talk cartoons.

I’ve been really enjoying the anime Dororo. It is very gory, and the lion’s share of that gore is the suffering of innocent people. I found it tasteful in that its focus is clearly to show sympathy/horror while samurai getting diced was just artful splatter because fuck them but it’s pretty intense misery all the same.

The pitch for Dororo is that this guy makes a deal with demons as a result his son loses most of his body parts to them an instant after being born. To regain his missing parts the son, Hyakkimaru, must go on a quest to slay each of those demons, and also he gets a small child following him around for comic relief. And this is true for the original manga and the original anime adaption.

The modern one, though, when considering the important question, “how would you tell a blind deaf quadriplegic kid this or, really, anything?” realizes the answer is “you can’t” rather than “telepathy!” And that’s how we get him wandering around running into monsters, murdering them for trying to murder him, and then being intensely distressed when sometimes, for reasons he can’t understand, that means he regains body parts and senses he didn’t know he ever had, with reactions varying from wtf??? :( to GREAT HOW DO I UNINSTALL IT. As a result, spunky kid sidekick Dororo turns out to really earn having their name be the title, as they’re the one making everything happen while Hyakkimaru is tugged along behind them.

An interesting then vs now comparison of a scene from the opening episode:

And with all that said, I’d now like to have a spoilerific chat about the character Mio and the roles (and fates) of women. (more…)

   Anime, TV Shows      ,

Kill la Kill

  12/26/2019       Farla      12 Comments

I watched Kill la Kill, or, that anime where the magical girl costumes involve stripper gear.

Note neither character is transformed here, because their actual outfits are Not Safe For Work.

Here is what I can tell you about it:

1) I watched all of it in a few days.
2) I almost never had the slightest clue what would happen next.
3) Fight scenes.
4) Really loved the female characters.
5) Japan why must you be so rapey.

So! When I say I would recommend it, definitely consider that last bit. (more…)

   Anime, Recommendations, TV Shows      , ,

The Witcher (Netflix), Misogyny, and Narrative Trust

  12/30/2019       Farla      21 Comments

I checked out The Witcher on the basis of random gifs showing up on Tumblr and Act’s comments that the books had been surprisingly non-misogynistic after the miserable disaster that was the games.

It has a lot of women, who do a lot of talking, and it portrays the women in a really…on their own terms way, is the best way I can articulate it, and this is both what I want and deeply unsettling. I am three episodes in and intensely invested in seeing the rest of it, but there is the unshakable sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like, you can’t have women like this and mean it that way, right? (more…)

   TV Shows      ,

Twelve Forever

  04/15/2020       St. Elmo's Fire      20 Comments

Twelve Forever is a cartoon about a girl who wants to be, you guessed it, twelve forever. This desire manifests through the ability to transport herself to an alternate dimension, the aptly-named Endless. In this world, she is granted the powers of a superhero and is able to play and indulge her childish fantasies to her heart’s content; however, on her twelfth birthday, Endless becomes haunted by the Buttwitch, a demon representing her fears of puberty and adulthood who seeks to destroy her and her paradise.

Unsurprisingly, like most of the story-based cartoons we get these days, this is a coming-of-age story about the fear of growing up. I therefore did not expect much of it, as I always feel a disconnect with the genre. I am an adult who has already come of age, and many of the typical coming-of-age stories hold little to no relation to my own experience, with many of them being uncomfortably normative in their push of heterosexual and neurotypical life experiences. (Can we please stop having stories about extremely flirtatious tweens finding their soulmates at age 12, it’s deeply creepy.) I can enjoy them as a narrative and even as a good message for kids, but I often feel at a very far remove on a personal level.

That was not the case in this show. The characters all felt devastatingly real and relatable to my own childhood and life outlooks.

There will be some vague spoilers here, so you should probably watch it yourself. It’s only one season because it was tragically canceled, but I think it still holds up well as a complete product.

(more…)

   Recommendations, TV Shows     

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts

  08/17/2020       St. Elmo's Fire      28 Comments

(Disclaimer: As of this writing, I have only seen up through season 2, and the show is still ongoing.)

This is Extruded Cartoon Product. Its blurb sounds like a blender of modern cartoon cliches: Post-apocalyptic! Female protagonist! “Journey home” plot! Power of friendship! Giant talking animals! Secret tragic villain backstory! But it doesn’t actually do anything with it. The whole thing has a very design-by-committee feel to it — it’s just woke enough to make the Tumblr crowd spread it like wildfire, without being truly transgressive or subversive.

(more…)

   TV Shows