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Post by Jay on Jul 2, 2017 23:06:51 GMT -8
AoT Second Season: ULTIMATE EPISODE aw yeeah
* Probably not adding anything new but on the off-chance, this episode is named "Scream," which is more or less a translation of what "Ymir" would mean in some of the Norse languages (it's only pronunciation that really separates them so far as I know, but whatever)
* This feels good for a season finale. I had forgotten about the lining up events like the Grinning Titan reappearing and the death of Hannes coming around this time, but I think it parses out the season into a discrete thematic unit, whereas I would imagine that next season would be (however many episodes it takes), the Historia arc, possibly culminating in her being crowned, possibly culminating in the retaking of Shiganshina. Either would work although I'm not sure if you could retake Shiganshina in thirteen episodes without some bloat.
* I often compare Eren to other shonen heroes and find his limitations more compelling, so I'll add that within the context of this episode, his grief also feels more real at being confronted with those limitations. Other series have had a tougher task convincing me that the protagonist has bottomed out, but I think the stakes and the impact for Eren make feel closer to the bone where other series have faltered.
* One thing I wondered, watching this, was why Bertholdt couldn't turn into the Colossal in this moment. The first explanation I came up with was that Reiner was too close, but then I remembered what happened atop the wall and it seemed like a less viable excuse, plus Reiner is already Armored. It's not a bit deal, just sort of curious.
* Children singing or going "la la la" is not usually an element I'm a fan of. No different here, though the annoyance was more mild.
* There are various anomalous locations within the AoT universe. Utgard Castle, I can make sense of. The underground cities within the walls, I still puzzle over. I don't expect to get an answer either. (I tried reading one of the prequel manga where the answer might have been revealed, but it was a different author and, in a word, "bad")
* This is relevant insofar as bookending, but I watched part of the dub of the first episode of this season last night (it was on) and I remembered one of my qualms, one that I summon for a lot of series, which is that Mike Zacharias was described as "second only to Levi" in skills for the Scouts and yet his main function is to get offed to legitimate the threat of the Beast Titan and we barely get to see him do anything. I regard this as lazy writing, but since so little of the series bore on him doing anything, unlike other examples I've cited, I find it less offensive.
* A sort of conspiracy theorist styled observation, but titans can regenerate (fact) and in the midst of Eren's use of the coordinate, the Grinning Titan had its head torn apart but the nape of the neck, the critical point, was seemingly left intact before the mindless titans were redirected. Perhaps years of watching various series have left me with the attitude of "it's not dead until we've seen it conclusively," but I wonder a little.
* AW SNAP WALL MOTIF GUYS IN THE FIRST EPISODE THEY FOUND THAT WALL TITAN AND NOW ERWIN IS TALKING ABOUT BREAKING DOWN THE WALL THAT LEADS TO THE TRUTH YOU GUYS THE TRUTH IS BEHIND THE FOURTH WALL WE WERE THE TRUTH ALL ALONG THIS SHOW IS ABOUT HUMANITY
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Post by Zarnium on Jul 3, 2017 5:04:27 GMT -8
It was a pretty awesome finale, for sure. * This is relevant insofar as bookending, but I watched part of the dub of the first episode of this season last night (it was on) and I remembered one of my qualms, one that I summon for a lot of series, which is that Mike Zacharias was described as "second only to Levi" in skills for the Scouts and yet his main function is to get offed to legitimate the threat of the Beast Titan and we barely get to see him do anything. I regard this as lazy writing, but since so little of the series bore on him doing anything, unlike other examples I've cited, I find it less offensive. Yeah, it's a bit contrived, and something that AoT tends to avoid most of the time. Like, in the first season, Levi's entire squad gets significant screen time before being offed by Annie, which is a much better way of doing things. Incidentally, I was thinking about how his name can be rendered as "Miku," "Mische," or "Mike" depending on the translation, which then got me wondering, how exactly are all these Germanic names spelled in the Japanese manga? My understanding is that foreign names are typically written with Katakana, they can be written with Hiragana, and it's not possible to write them in Kanji without arbitrarily assigning characters, but I just realized that I have no idea what the conventions or practices for foreign names in fiction are. Also, now that the theme song has been overexposed, everyone knows what the phrase "shinzou wo sasageyo" means, and most viewers have noticed that Erwin shouts it before charging into battle in the finale. However, I'm pretty sure he also says it after giving his speech to the 104th training corps, so it's been his catchphrase for a lot longer than it's been a meme, and no one over here noticed it.
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Post by Jay on Jul 3, 2017 10:16:55 GMT -8
To be honest, I tend to ignore translations or subs of OP lyrics because I find the writing to be mostly dreck (we all remember Parasyte), and most unofficial subs don't bother with them anyway, probably for the same reason. So, any hidden meanings in the openers or the closers are not mine to pick up on (although I did appreciate how unsettling this season's ending theme was).
It's kind of hard to parse out the uses of the three writing systems because some of the boundaries blur. Katakana is used for foreign words and sounds, hirigana for Japanese words without Kanji, and most Kanji were borrowed from China although they don't necessarily carry the same meaning over from China (much like there are slight variants in meaning with English words and their German or French predecessors), and, additionally-- this is one of the tricky parts that makes the language a pain to learn-- the kanji when compounded into single words or concepts often carry over a semblance of their earlier Chinese pronunciations rather than staying with the Japanese. It's why you often see the smaller letters above or to the right, furigana as they're known, which serve the purpose of aiding reading.
That being said, even though there are a lot of words that are doggedly rendered in katakana as homage to Japan's isolationist past ("ramen" is in katakana because they got it from the Chinese!), much like in the U.S. parents name their kids with conventional names spelled unconventionally, some now go by katakana first names. The dude who does the Tokyo Ghoul manga is one such example. Also, this is something I picked up from reading Bleach for years (sometimes to my own detriment *cough*), you can assign katakana to kanji. When he was borrowing heavily from German and Spanish to describe his characters' movesets, he'd have a katakana reading that would be a reasonably close transliteration of the sounds and then kanji inserted that gave a different reading/rendering that was closer to what he was symbolically trying to evoke by using it.
Since katakana is an imperfect syllabic system that can only approximate and the voice actors have varying levels of guidance or proficiency with the languages they're trying to imitate ("GOODO EBENINGU MISSU HERUSINGU"), what it's supposed to be is anyone's educated guess and only the mangaka really knows. Maybe.
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Post by Zarnium on Jul 3, 2017 12:42:58 GMT -8
To be honest, I tend to ignore translations or subs of OP lyrics because I find the writing to be mostly dreck (we all remember Parasyte), and most unofficial subs don't bother with them anyway, probably for the same reason. So, any hidden meanings in the openers or the closers are not mine to pick up on (although I did appreciate how unsettling this season's ending theme was). It means "offer up your heart," but since it's repeated over and over again in the song, that makes it prime material for people to make crappy meme videos about. So, if you look up one or two covers, you get a thousand videos like this one popping up in your recommended feed.
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Post by Jay on Jul 3, 2017 13:56:10 GMT -8
I can't even read that phrase without having flashbacks to early episodes of Preacher so I'll pass on clicking youtube links.
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Post by Jay on Jul 6, 2017 11:51:07 GMT -8
I read the comments on the latest chapter and I am sorry that I read the comments because the series right now is going for more background and dialogue and establishment of characters and a vocal part of the fanbase just wants stuff to get smashed.
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Post by Zarnium on Jul 6, 2017 14:40:10 GMT -8
Given that this is a complaint the manga readers have any time there's a lull in the action, I'm sure we'll never hear the end about how much AoT is ruined forever next year when those complaints are magnified ten-fold by the anime-only watchers.
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Post by Jay on Aug 11, 2017 12:54:23 GMT -8
A new translated tankobon came out on August 1st, so I'm curious to hear your responses when you get your hands on that, albeit more curious to here about the one that comes after, which won't be out until mid-December, alas. For the record, long-time readers of the manga are still complaining about the lack of action so you know it's good stuff.
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Post by Jay on Aug 12, 2017 12:23:28 GMT -8
I've also seen where they're doing some OVA adaptations of the Lost Girls spin-off novel set which focuses specifically on Annie and Mikasa. I don't have much positive experience with the stuff that Isayama didn't write and these OVAs are a long ways off yet, but it's interesting to me the ways in which anime is developing along similar lines to what we note Hollywood doing, cinematic universes, etc. I've seen several anime that were self-consciously trying to start a franchise from nothing (Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress probably being the most egregious example), but I feel ike this one came about more organically and that it wasn't Isayama's intention from the get-go. I read the one-off, proto version of Attack on Titan a long time ago and the manga didn't actually start until years later, but the prototype wasn't exactly well realized or fully conceived in the same way and had nothing resembling the extended commentary on war that we now know the franchise for.
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Post by Zarnium on Aug 13, 2017 11:12:48 GMT -8
I finally read volume 22, so I'm caught up to when they get to the sea. One thing I'm impressed with is just how well the whole Marley story meshes with the earlier chapters. It would be easy for such a drastic change in how the outside world and its history are portrayed to feel cheap and unconvincing, but all the background information we've been given actually fits in really well with what we've been seeing since the beginning, and explains everything better than the post-apocalyptic model did. Like, why are all the titans white, rather than being of multiple skin colors? Because only one specific light-skinned race is capable of turning into titans. Why do most of the titans have a male appearance? Presumably because men are more likely to get on the bad side of the authorities and engender less sympathy than women, so they're sentenced to titanization more often. Why are there more titans at the south of the walls near Shiganshina than anywhere else? Because titans are only created and released from a particular spot on the south of the island. Etc.
Just one thing I'm confused by; why does Eren think that he might gain control over the coordinate ability by eating Historia? Wouldn't it be the other way around? That's what Rod Reiss was trying to do and is consistent with Grisha's books and memories, so he should know better, unless I'm missing something.
Also, I assumed that the titans used by the ancient Eldians to conquer Marley were shifters who retained their human minds after being turned and that the knowledge of how to do that was lost at some point, which is why the non-power titans are now mindless, but now that seems confirmed to be wrong. So, the ancient Eldians titanized thousands of their own people to use as mindless weapons? Yeesh.
I've never read or seen any of the "expanded universe" materiel, though the Before the Fall backstory involving a titan getting inside the walls before their weaknesses were discovered and 3D maneuvering gear was invented sounds interesting.
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Post by Jay on Aug 13, 2017 11:26:54 GMT -8
I've read a few chapters of Before the Fall and I can't say I can recommend it. The concepts were interesting, but it was about as nuanced as a Disney movie as far as good and evil went, and so I made a quick exit.
As for the titanization and how it works out, I'm several chapters ahead and I'm not 100% certain that it's been worked out as you suggest. It could be possible given that becoming a shifter is a long-term death sentence, but to become a regular titan may be something reversible and they simply lost access to that technology in the mass exodus. It's something that hasn't explicitly come up one way or another. I would say that given that certain extra abilities can be granted, such as Eren getting injected with a serum and learning how to harden his form via that, it's possible that there's something similar out there to reverse some of the process, given that the abilities aren't 100% transferable from one shifter to the next but sometimes require supplements.
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Post by Zarnium on Aug 27, 2018 5:56:51 GMT -8
Season 3!
I'm reminded again of how much variation there is in how names are spelled and pronounced between translations. In the official manga translation and (I think? I don't quite remember) the anime dub, Zackly's name is "Darius Zackly," which is obviously a corruption of "Zachary." In the Funimation sub, he's called "Dhalis Zachary"... so they got the "Zachary" part right, but got the given name wrong!
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