#fouryearsandananime

[tokiro07]

In my review for Ichi ch.22, there was one topic I wanted to cover that I couldn't think of a good way to work in, so I decided to make it a separate post

Ichi's comment about not being able to conceptualize the future is, as far as I know, very unusual for a shonen protagonist

Most of Jump's heroes are defined by their ambitions, their dreams, their vision of the future

Even in Undead Unluck, where Andy's original end goal is to die, it's still portrayed as a plan for the future. "Some day, I'll be able to die, and when I do, it will be the Greatest Death Ever"

Ichi, on the other hand, isn't trying to die, he's simply accepted that one day he will die

Under normal circumstances, the acceptance of death would be the end of a character arc, the lesson to be learned, and yet Ichi already has that mentality

This does not mean there isn't a lesson for him to learn though. The problem isn't that he's at peace with the idea of death, it's that he's complacent about it

He claims to be terrified of the thought of dying, but he knows he has no control over it. Something's going to be stronger than him, or he's going to be in a situation he can't get out of, and death is just going to take him suddenly one day. And if it's going to happen someday, what difference does it make if it's today?

This mentality causes him to play things fast and loose. Jumping into a shark's mouth, allowing himself to pass out in front of a malevolent god just for the chance to land one hit on a hunch, these are the kinds of reckless actions that are par for the course for a "brave" hero, but most heroes act like that because they have absolute faith in their abilities

Ichi, though? After he failed to kill the World Hater, he basically just said "whoops, guess that's it for me!" He just doesn't seem to care too much

However, that's still not totally unique to Ichi

One Piece's Luffy also had a moment very early on where he found himself in a situation he couldn't escape, captured by Buggy and shackled to the gallows out of reach of his friends, and once it became clear that he had no way out, he simply smiled and declared "sorry guys, guess I'm dead"

Both Ichi and Luffy made an effort to survive and to win, but when faced with a death they couldn't avoid, they accepted their fate with a smile

So why is Luffy's reaction to the same scenario treated by the narrative as a heroic trait while Ichi's is treated as a lack of self-preservation?

There are a ton of thematic reasons for this dichotomy, like their dynamics with the people around them who they'd hypothetically be leaving behind, but I think the most notable in this instance is the very premise of this analysis: because Ichi has no ambition

When Luffy is faced with certain death, it's because he was working to achieve his dream. He knew the risks of living his life that way, but it was his choice, and complaining about the outcome would be the same as admitting he regrets that choice

"If I die, then that's all I was worth anyway" is a recurring sentiment from both Luffy and Zoro, meaning that if they want to be the best, they have to prove that they're better than everyone else. Dying would just prove that they weren't, but it's better than living without trying

Ichi, on the other hand, is just...dying. He's not dying for anything, he's just fighting something outside of his wheelhouse because he's curious what his own ceiling is. He knows something is going to be strong enough to kill him, but it's just fun to push that boundary. He's not trying to prove anything or make anything of himself, he's just after the high, and like any illicit drug, he runs the risk of an overdose when chasing bigger and bigger dragons

Luffy has an end goal, accepts the possibility that he'll never reach it, but wholeheartedly believes that he will

Ichi has no end goal, finds considering anything past today stressful, and instead lives so fast that there's a real possibility he won't have to worry about tomorrow ever again

In video game terms, Luffy is living his life on Story Mode and going for the Best Ending, while Ichi is living his on Arcade Mode and is just seeing how high of a score he can get before he runs out of quarters

[melodiblues]

I don't know why I like him, I just adore this boy.

[wickedsick]

Hey, wait a damn minute

Fuuko has an artificial heart now.

So either the Heart is metaphysically attached to Fuuko's body, or it's currently tied to wherever her flesh-and-blood heart was last.

And, well, the last person to touch Fuuko's heart...

[healthiffy]

[tokiro07]

The foreshadowing game in this manga is insane

[tokiro07]

UU Appreciation Week Day 6

Something You Appreciate About Loop 101: The Fix

The most common complaint I heard during L101 was that it felt like there were "no stakes," because it was just Fuuko hopping from one Negator to the next and fixing their problems without incident

No one dies, no one loses anything, everyone's happy

And this is...a bad thing somehow?

L100 was entirely centered around finding happiness in your life, about playing the hand you've been dealt, unfair and tragic as it may be. It was inspiring to see the strength it took to stay positive despite it all, to find the will to make a change, so on some level, I get it: it's a testament to the human spirit, and without those hardships, the story would suffer

But that's the thing about L101: it isn't a story without hardship, it's a story after hardship

Fuuko didn't literally appear out of nowhere to make sure that no one was ever sad, she appeared in a new version of the world she knew with knowledge and direct experience of how it could all go wrong, and put in two centuries of isolated effort to ensure none of her friends had their happiness stolen from them by an unforgiving God

We know the stakes for L101, they're called L100! We spent 130 chapters seeing the worst-case scenario for every single character, so why would anyone be upset that they got back the lives that they lost?

What would the point have been if Mei still died? What would that have done for Shen's happiness? We know how it destroyed him to lose her, and how it impacted his relationship with Feng - why shouldn't we see a version of the world where Feng doesn't commit such an unforgivable act of cruelty that he and Shen can't be mutually happy?

The point of Undead Unluck is to enjoy life. We saw a version where the Union made their happiness after picking up the pieces, don't they deserve a version where they retained their happiness in the first place?

They still learned the lessons, they still became more complete people, why is that only valid if they suffer?

No, L101 wouldn't work in isolation, but off the heels of L100? It's beautiful, it's cathartic, it's exactly what I wanted, and I appreciate how well Tozuka crafted the two halves of his story to convey the themes from two different directions

[tokiro07]

I'm not one for powerscaling, but I had a thought

In most media, a character's feats aren't typically given hard numbers because usually the creator doesn't have a degree in physics and just wants to show something cool. This results in, for example, characters doing things that are, logically, faster than the speed of light, even if the creator didn't intend for that to be the case

In Assassination Classroom, Korosensei's speed is capped at Mach 20. This means that, canonically, even if he does something that should logically exceed Mach 20, the internal logic of the series dictates that that can't possibly be the case

If you were to compare Korosensei's faster-than-the-eye movements to, say, Undead Unluck's Andy, who has never been shown to be so fast that no one could even see him, you'd conclude that Andy must be moving at significantly less than Mach 20, right?

That may be true in general, but Andy has proven that he is perfectly capable of far exceeding Mach 20 through one specific feat: firing a Finger Bullet from the sun

First, let's consider how Andy even got to the sun in the first place. He either went straight there once he regained consciousness while drifting in space, or he got sent back to Earth and then launched himself to it. If the latter, that would mean that Andy, even if only firing a single finger, would have needed to fire it at Mach 33, over 1.5 times faster than Korosensei

If the former, we still know he's capable of that speed because he was able to fire back to Earth from the sun, which has an escape velocity of Mach 1800

Even if you assume that that's just one single burst of speed from Andy's blood and not a speed he can maintain or control beyond firing in a straight line (which is obviously not true since he had the precision to land basically right in front of Fuuko), that's still 90 times faster than Korosensei, meaning that all he'd need to do is get ahold of a tiny amount of Anti-Sensei Material and he'd be able to hit him without any chance of missing. At that speed, Korosensei probably wouldn't even have time to enter Absolute Defense Form

TLDR; no matter how impressive you want to make your character sound on paper, using hard numbers has had the unintended consequence of making characters seem weaker due to the internet's fascination with power scaling, so even a near-unkillable character like Korosensei would absolutely lose against most lesser-defined characters in the context of power-scaled matchups like Death Battle. This is, to me, a detriment to the enjoyment of things like battle shonen because that mentality leads one to care deeply about those hard numbers and less about the intended spectacle itself

[tokiro07]

Undead Unluck Winter Special thoughts

[Winter Lights, Winter Fights]

(Topics: Criticisms - recap/CG, Praise - animation, Speculation - upcoming seasons)

Merry Christmas, everyone!!! Hope you're having a good one! I know I am, cus David Pro just gave me two fantastic gifts: the Winter Special and the announcement of Season 2!!!

No release date for Season 2, but in the meantime, let's unwrap that first present, shall we?

Mama Mia, Here We Go Again

For as much as I always hated all of the recaps, I'll be honest, I was almost charmed seeing a full seven minutes dedicated to summarizing Season 1. Like it was almost nostalgic to see even the least enjoyable part of the series again after all this time, plus the fact that the time difference made doing a recap more reasonable

It's Only a Model

What I liked significantly less, though, was the use of CG models for Burn and Spoil. I felt like they were pretty stiff and not very good to look at, but they weren't present for very long, so it wasn't that big of a deal over all

I'm pretty sure Spoil's mouth didn't move in Season 1 either, but I thought that was a weird choice then, too

One bit that I thought was especially poorly done was when Spoil started firing at Burn after Juiz said he was a disadvantage. In the manga, the composition of that moment highlighted Spoil's expression, but here it didn't even show his face because of how dynamic the scene was. I do like that it was dynamic, I just don't think that dynamism should come at the expense of composition, is all

Fortunately, that's about the end of my criticisms, as the rest was all very well done

Rock Your Sakuga

Juiz vs. Billy was excellent, I think to the point that it may well be the best fight of the entire anime so far. I almost wish that they hadn't bothered doing any original content and just added more fluff to the main fight, cus I could have kept watching that fight for a lot longer

Even the slower moments had pretty solid animation. I never got that feeling that the characters were static except for their mouths, it felt like there was near constant motion, or at least enough that it didn't feel stilted. There were a few still shots like the stained glass when Juiz was talking about Victor, but that was rendered so beautifully that I didn't even care if that was to save on animation budget

And of course, the Balance fight was absolutely sick; a bit short, but extremely fun while it lasted. The speed of Andy's attacks, the rough animation style, and of course, the inventive method of charging Balance with Unluck by chopping Andy up in the turbines all made for what I think will go down as one of the more fantastic spectacles in the adaptation as a whole

I was kind of hoping that Balance would have more of an emotional or philosophical angle to make it more than just a cool fight, which I think could have been pulled off by either cutting out the recap or skipping the Buroja backstory, but I don't know how much depth an additional 7 to 14 minutes could have really afforded, so a spectacle is probably all it really needed to be

That said, I do wonder if the Buroja scenes were particularly necessary in and of themselves

One Step Back, Two Steps Forward

I do think it's good to give more context to Tella and Billy early like this, but the scene was beat-for-beat the way it was in the manga in L101, with the exception of removing Tella's singing. It gives a lot more weight to Under's formation and Billy's betrayal, but there are two reasons I think that might not be so good

First, I think the mystery of why Billy betrayed the Union was part of what made the Under saga so compelling, but this iteration of it highlights Billy's more sympathetic motivations, whereas originally his underlying goodness was much more subtle. That's a matter of taste, though, I think, and I can easily see people being more invested this way

Second, I have no idea how they're going to handle this in L101. Are they just going to play the exact same scene again? Are they going to embellish some things, skip past some of it, do an Endless Eight and redraw it with subtle differences like camera angles or removing the rain?

That's a bridge to cross waaay later, but it's not a hard one to see coming, and I worry that this indicates a lack of forethought. I don't want to believe that, obviously, I just can't think of what could be done to improve it now that this particular shot has been fired

Whatever the case, the fact that we're getting a second season means we're infinitely more likely to even reach that point down the line, so even if one scene gets messed up later, the investment we're seeing in the scenes we're getting now is far more valuable

All in all, I would say that this was an imperfect but very enjoyable special, and I had a ton of fun getting to write another review like this! I definitely plan to pick it back up when Season 2 comes out, so hopefully we won't need to wait another two years for it!

Until then, let's have a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and of course, let's enjoy life!!!