being a Bandit is pretty great. Just got a new place with a couple friends, in Doghammer Cave (long history of hammering dogs there). It's pretty nice for the area! Zero bedrooms zero bathrooms, but it's got a falling spikeball trap in the entrance and a couple big linear multipurpose rooms full of barrels. I put a couple gold coins in each barrel. Really makes it feel like home.
Our leader is Klade Doghammer (long history of hammering dogs). He's the only one of us with a name. He likes to sit in the last room (our house has a last room because it's linear) at a desk with a half-finished page of notebook about how he'll get revenge on the town someday. My best friend Female Archer Bandit said the people in the town don't even consider us human. She says if you stay a bandit long enough they kill you for money. Sometimes when she and I are alone on watch late at night I get a funny feeling in my bandit parts. I think I just heard the falling spikeball trap go off. We didn't invite anyone over today but I hope it's someone friendly. Being a bandit is pretty great.
so i have finished a psychological thriller novel, and have begun the process of doing research so i can prepare to query agents. now, my novel has some pretty intense triggers in it, so i am aware it’s a bit of a hard sell– that being said, many agents have a “do not send me your novel if it has these things” list, so that’s what I’m looking for so i don’t accidentally trigger someone.
so i’m going down this list, and i find this agent. their “do not send me” list includes the following: non-consent/sexual violence, age gaps, teacher/student relationships, stalkers, cheating, everyone dies at the end, miscarriage/pregnancy, and abuse masked as love.
okay, cool! everyone has different tolerances for stuff, and it’s perfectly reasonable to not want to be involved with a story that has stuff you’re uncomfortable with. not the agent for me, but good on them for defining their boundaries.
but then i scroll back up and they’re requesting for gothic horror.
excuse me?????????
gothic horror without pregnancy or miscarriage? gothic horror without cheating? without stalking? gothic horror without major character deaths? GOTHIC HORROR WITHOUT ABUSE BEING FRAMED AS LOVE AND THE INTERROGATION OF THAT DYNAMIC?????
Listen I get it but you CANNOT use "sensory nightmare" as an excuse to avoid essential things. You HAVE to find a way to make it work, such as finding effective alternatives. But you can't just avoid it.
You need to eat some vegetables in your diet or you will become a lich.
You have to wear a life jacket or you will literally drown and die.
You need to be able to exist in public spaces with children.
good LORD the piss is flying all over the place in that comment section! If you're poor do NOT leave your house you're definitely gonna get caught in the crossfire.
been reading cicero's rant about words being given obscene meanings and i don't think i've ever seen a latin sentence that made me burst into such immediate and violent laughter before
had a couple people be like "i have no idea what this means" so to clarify: the word penis in latin originally meant tail and only later got the sense of, uh. penis. so this is cicero complaining that nowadays all these hooligans are using the word "penis" for naughty purposes
whenever i look into a historical monarch who doesn’t get talked about much and is just kind of a blank spot in my understanding of the historical narrative, 95% of the time what i find is pure white hot blistering capability. a pencil pusher for the ages. a 39 year reign with no more than three hours of sleep a night. there aren’t any good stories from his reign because he systematically caught and stopped all catastrophic good stories before they could start. you shrimply must respect it
"came back wrong" what about Came Back Afraid. You used to be brave. Too brave maybe, defying the odds at every turn, a fighter, cocky, playing with fire, first to throw yourself at the enemy. Until one day it all caught up to you. You came back, somehow, but now you know all too intimately how it feels to lose, to die, to be destroyed. Now you flinch and freeze and cower at the slightest provocation. Who even are you now if you can't be brave? The grave may have let you go, but the mortal fear still grips you tighter than ever.
reading about the participation of children in rituals as a form of play in ancient greece and came across an incredibly charming story from julius pollux's onomasticon where a flood prevented the adults from reaching a sanctuary to sacrifice a ram to heracles, and the children solved the problem by....sticking a bunch of sticks in an apple to give it "legs" and "horns" and offering it as a sacrifice instead. it's such a charming thought and i can perfectly picture kids these days also pretending at sacrificing an apple "goat" at recess
So Mari calls Lara アホ/aho, which is like バカ/baka, but regional I guess. As a non-Japanese speaker, it's hard to parse dialect details, but it does make sense coming in after knowing that Shiga prefecture is Kansai, so there's some stuff to listen for.
There are a couple points where the sub script and dub script are opposite. From what I know of JP localization, this isn't necessarily an uncommon situation—where if you directly translate the words, you get one meaning, but it's actually the exact opposite because of context, usage, or slang. (Try translating "Yeah, nah" and "Nah, yeah", or even "Yeah, nah, yeah" into another language.)
Sometimes a line is generous enough to provide a verb to go with the object, but it's still anyone's guess who the subject is. Given how Mari calls Lara aho multiple times in the show, but never herself, I think she's calling Lara dumb in the final scene once again, so the dub's got the right of it.
Though it doesn't use the same words, I think it's still a callback to the first half of the episode, when Grace says Mari must have kept her because she was unusual or interesting.
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I didn't get to post my thoughts on Episode 2 before the next airing, but I thought I was so smart for putting stocks in the hot chocolate can, saying it represents a replacement for the ring (symbolizing "Wish to Find True Love", but she's holding the can when she asks Grace if she really can True Love in Shiga after losing the ring), and speculating that the can would persist in appearing in future episodes. That was actually already answered in the OP, where the can appears very briefly housing flowers on the windowsill, though before it even appeared in the story. The can is much more visible throughout Episode 3, and is among the objects Lara puts in her backpack when trying to move out.
The royal ring is noticeably missing from human Lara in the OP, when it's very visible on mermaid Lara's right hand. I did wonder if it might never appear again after Episode 2, but then Lisa finds it at the end of Episode 3. Still, it might stay out of Lara's hands for some time yet.
Lara's recurring shining white light motif has this curated chromatic aberration of red, blue, and green. At first blush, these seem to align with just the general character design and color scheme. The mermaids are primarily red or blue with white as a neutral color, or inverted like Grace and Mari who have black as a major color with red and blue highlights. But then you get things like human!Lisa who now has full dress that is overwhelmingly a specific shade of green. In the Episode 4 preview, Mari's tracksuit also this green. And finally in Episode 3, when Mari is talking to her grandma at the lakeside, she stares out into the lake where three lights reflect on its surface, red, blue, and green. What's it all mean? Dunno, excited to find out!
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In Episode 2, Lara despairs from losing her home, her family, and her ring (which represents "Wishing to Find True Love"; True Love which is needed to save home and family), disconnection from the world which is a metaphorical death. Mari saves the mermaid from literal death (an inversion of Lara saving the human prince from drowning), and offers to take her home to Mari's family, reconnecting her. (There sure is a lot of handholding imagery in that OP.)
Mari is already depicted as coarse and aloof, but it comes to a head in Episode 3, where she's shown having friction with the other members of the boxing team. Thanks to Lara's intervention, Mari ends up connecting with them. Incidentally, given the "Don't look away" arc-words, Mari may be using boxing to process her grief or keep the connection with the memory of her mother, to the detriment of other relationships. We may be seeing some development in the future that doing things other than boxing is not "looking away" or disconnecting from grief, and that those and moving on are not mutually exclusive.
By the way, did you know that the original Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" is public domain and free to read on the Hans Christian Andersen Centre website just a websearch away? Apropos of nothing, here's an except from the original story from the Jean Hersholt English translation:
The little mermaid swam right up to the window of the main cabin, and each time she rose with the swell she could peep in through the clear glass panes at the crowd of brilliantly dressed people within. The handsomest of them all was a young Prince with big dark eyes. He could not be more than sixteen years old.
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Final Stray Thoughts (but it could be nothing):
When Lara awakens after death, it's 200 years in the future. She struggles in adapting to modern human life. It's only tangentially related, but the fairy tale Urashima Taro also features a person out of time after visiting the Dragon Palace under the sea.
There's an intense tragedy to Lara almost drowning; she lost home, family, and the means to save them, making her the last mermaid, only to find as she's drowning she doesn't even have that distinction.
Also not that related. I just wanted an excuse to post The Last Unicorn.
While hardly the only anime to do fairy tale/school gender shenanigans, Revolutionary Girl Utena sure does feature those things heavily, including the fairy tale role of "The Prince" being fulfilled by many different characters depending on the context, but most notably by protagonist Utena, a girl.
Mari has multiple shirts with "SIGA" printed on them with space theming, eg. ring around the logo with a star, constellation patterns. I couldn't find if this was a real thing with just a cursory search, but I'd guess it's a fictional version of NASA or Japan's space org JAXA. Curious clothes to have for a boxer.
In the final lakeside scene in Episode 3, it looks like there's some artifacting or dropshadows around the characters (though it could just be me). It makes it look like the characters were drawn on cels on top of a background, even though the production is digital. There are a few shots in the OP that are confirmed to have used physical cel animation.
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