#amenta au

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Review: Risat, Norim and Sana

So a few weeks ago I saw someone use a reaction image with a blue guy in a lab coat rolling his eyes and making air quotes, and the pupils were drawn in a weirdly distinctive style so I went and checked it out and then decided to watch all of it

[possibly minor spoilers, I’m not sure]

(a screenshot of the family)

It’s from a sci-fi cartoon called Risat, Norim, and Sana. The guy’s actually a green genius (blue!Risat from the gif was an alternate-universe version of him), and also kind of a jerk who build a machine for making portals between dimensions.  Only it turns out all the other dimensions have kinda gross aliens, or are unseasonable, or are otherwise unlivable, and have more advanced weapons. So instead of giving the portalmaker to someone official, he lives with his (half-purple) orange grandkids and takes them on vaguely-illegal interdimensional sci-fi/fantasy adventures.

the show has a lot of kind of dumb jokes and plots, and a lot of kinda funny parody of other staples of the genre (like that one a few years ago where the first space colonists find gross alien slime monsters and have to kill them all before they infect everybody? and of that kinda dumb popular one about the magic yellow who takes over the world with the power of computers).

It’s got a neat art style, and some actually touching and moving or deep moments, and some actually funny jokes. It’s also got a weird mixture of uncomfortable or awkward truth, and straight-up lies, and edgy-on-purpose gremlinhood. The aliens are often weird and funny or cool or have strange concepts, and are visually interesting. (A lot of insectoids and slug-oids and scifi-cyborglikes and some strange blobby spiky abstract things). The inventions are cool and often surprising (like, Risat’s too impatient to decontaminate after every possibly-unclean dimension they visit, but instead of doing the classic scifi handwave and going through a teleporter that removes or remakes all the unclean molecules or a purifier screen or whatever, he just has a machine that fricking anesthetizes, melts, and regrows their skin.)

The characters are all incredibly flawed people. These people shouldn’t be in a family together at all. (There’s this one incredibly tense scene where the kids’ dad (purple) is passive-aggressively asking Risat to stop taking them to other worlds because it’s bad for their education and also illegal for them not to attend classes, and he responds by saying that instead it’s bad for their education that they have their stupid dysgenic dad. And yeah it’s kind of true that in anywhere other than cartoon!not!Voa he wouldn’t have kids and Ves would’ve had smarter kids with someone else, but then it cuts to Sana overhearing and being hurt and I had to stop it and walk out of the room.) But they’re fun to watch interact and they grow on you and you care about them.

Anyway, overall, it’s funny, it’s decent-quality, it’s got some cheap-laughs and some actual good stuff. It’s also got some really bad awkward cringey stuff, and some stuff where you can tell the authors were really impressed with themselves for things that are just mediocre. It’s good, but if you don’t like the first episode, don’t bother watching it. Also it’s got some pollution, and death, and sterilization, and characters doing illegal things, and body and psychological horror, and mass destruction, and babies, and borderline emotional abuse, and people being bad at coping with things.

(Addendum: the show itself is okay. If you meet someone who decides to quote more than three scenes of it within an hour, especially the caste-commentary, they’re probably kind of an obnoxious person to steer clear of. Especially if they’re green and like explaining how being good at whatever they’re good at makes them better than everyone else.)

(I’ve just been writing things as they come to mind, if anyone isn’t sure if they want to watch it and want more details, I’d be happy to answer questions in more depth.)

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Review: The Vision Bird

A month or two ago a local theater group did a production of The Vision Bird. It’s an opera based on a few short stories Araim Something (I don’t remember? Maybe started with M?) wrote back when Oakh was conquering everything and some fables. It’s set in ambiguous history, it looks like before castes have entirely shaken out, and before electricity.

The story was kind of all over the place and did not make a ton of sense, but you definitely got the sense that whoever wrote it didn’t really like blues. But it was silly and exaggerated enough that it didn’t actually seem to represent any actual nations, and some things were so wildly unbelievable that nobody could actually get in trouble for it. The music and songs were pretty, and the costumes and sets were gorgeously detailed.

(Pictured from right to left: The emperor, his two quarreling childless sons, and half his court.) I was also impressed that they portrayed actual purple traders rather than just blues and greens (and a yellow) as an important part of the court.

When the emperor was younger, he conquered his nearest neighbors so he could expand and avoid actually enforcing population controls, but now that he’s old he just wants to have grandchildren. But his new neighbors are attacking his borders, and his empire is running out of space and resources so his population is rioting, and so this magic bookie (? She’s got this motif of math symbols that project onto the floor while she dances? I do not know exactly what she does) person shows up to help.

She showed up to the court and did this amazing dance around this bird under the light of all the moons, and the bird turned golden and gained the ability to sing words and see things far away, to warn the emperor of any trouble he needed to react to. (The bird was more normal looking, he looked yellow and white and blue, and then while the bookie danced around him, the stage lights shifted, and they did something clever with whatever they made the costume’s feathers out of, and he spun and turned this shiny metallic gold. Also, it doesn’t really show up in the photo, but the bookie had some sort of silver thing in her hair and it was mostly invisible, but sometimes the lights hit it just right and it reflected really brightly in weird patterns, and this was the coolest scene! It was so pretty and kind of creepy and weird, and the dancer did a really good job, and the strings and drums and metal-percussion sounded incredibly magical)

The bird warns about riots and attacks (and sings advice about implementing rudimentary population controls) and he sends people to respond in time. Then there is a riot near the coast, and he sends his sons to practice dealing with it, and they don’t come back. The bird warns of an attack on the coast, and so he tries to send his army to attack, but they aren’t willing to go, so he says that he’ll go, and they agree to follow him, with this proof that he’s not throwing their lives away.

(He is not any good at this, but I think this was also before specific agreements about non-greys fighting in wars? But as you can see he is not a good soldier.)

This part was sort of grimly comedic, and there was a very nicely sung part where the entire court and army sings that they need more space and food but he keeps wasting their resources in pointless wars, and then this shift to a louder more traditional military-ish song while they all pile him onto his horse and follow him offstage. The emperor missed a few of the notes while he was climbing onto the horse, but I think it was on purpose. Also the entire army was clearly the earlier court members, but changed out of their beards and wigs and into helmets with conveniently long grey neck-guards.

Without spoiling too much, here’s the alien/fairy/extremely-foreigner queen explaining that she rules a nearby island with so much extra space and that she has magic that can fix his problem and they can have so many babies if he just marries her and merges his empire with her kingdom. (I looked up videos of the song later and I think she transposed it down an octave to hit all the notes, but it sounded really good). And he falls under her spell and agrees, and ignores her description of promising the same thing to whichever of his sons killed the other, and the implication that they’re both dead right offstage (ew).

Her wig was black, but they did something with the stage lights, and its highlights started to look weirdly red as she slowly corrupted the empire. It was really unsettling.

And the makeup on her black- and glowy-silver-haired army looked off, and combined with sections where all the lights went out and it was just the drums and this incredibly uncanny brassy-sounding-theremin and their steps and swinging metal noises and faint glimpses of movement while they invade, and they all looked totally alien and it was incredibly creepy and cool!

And then at the end the bird explains that it was a fiction and a moral lesson. Yes, thank you otherwise I might have missed that. And then it says that this actually wasn’t a tragedy because nothing but the bird was real?? Wat.

Other than the copout at the end though, and the expectedly-silly plot, it was really good!

[OOC: credits: The court (slightly edited for reds), astrologer and bird, riding to war, the seduction. All are from various photos online of performances of The Golden Cockerel]