What Are You Watching?

[Spark Of Spirit]

I guess that's better than trying to watch green haired women with big boobs and glasses.

Sigh, don't remind me. 

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I finished the re-watching the first 10 episodes, and I have to say that I'm really annoyed with how the writers handle Rika's character in the series, so far. Initially she's fine, being the typical "Digimon aren't real and their for fighting and blah, blah, blah" type of character (sort of like how Ken was during the first half of Adventure 02, though much less extreme and twisted them he was), but then a few episodes in she shows that she cares for her Digimon which gets her to digivolve. Fine enough, and I didn't expect her to be completely different, but thought that maybe there would be some subtle change in which she showed her digimon more understanding, but she just went back to being a brat about Digimon right away after that incident, making it feel very insignificant in terms of either plot progression or character development. Then in the episode with the evil ice Digimon who wanted her to become his tamer, she ended up showing signs of caring for her own digimon again and once again that cause another digivolution, so I thought that at least this time she might have shown some change (its been a long time since I've seen this series, so I don't remember how a lot of stuff plays out), but nope....she just says that she hates all Digimon now for now apparent reason.

I'm not sure, maybe the writers are intentionally playing her out to be too bratty for her own good or something, but its annoying when they make you believe that she has at least experienced some change or development during a significant incident only for her to regress completely back to being snobby right after that.

Other than that, the show's OK so far. I can't fault it for having an average start since neither of the seasons of Adventure had a strong start, themselves, so I can only hope that the quality of writing improves as the series progresses, like how it got much better with season 1 of Adventure.

[Angus]

I guess that's better than trying to watch green haired women with big boobs and glasses.

Sigh, don't remind me. 

uh oh which show did you see? Maybe it's the same one I'm trying to fall asleep to?  (Rin and Popotan)

[Spark Of Spirit]

I guess that's better than trying to watch green haired women with big boobs and glasses.

Sigh, don't remind me. 

uh oh which show did you see? Maybe it's the same one I'm trying to fall asleep to?  (Rin and Popotan)

I don't want to mention the title for several reasons, but you aren't far off the mark.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Watching Utena alongside Nadesico since I need a show to fuck with my mind. So far, things seem to be disappointingly lucid.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So, I finished Digimon Tamers. I suppose I'll write my overall thoughts on it now. First off, I will say that I did find it to be better on the whole than I did as a kid, and now that I actually saw the final quarter of the series its certainly a lot better than anything else I had seen up until that point. Just for the record, Adventure season 1 is still my favorite Digimon season, but there are a few noteworthy things that I find Tamers did better.

First off, I noticed that the quality of the English dub was MUCH better than in the first 2 seasons. The writers for this series clearly had more respect for the source material, and while I'm sure there were some added jokes and inaccuracies in the English script, they pale in comparison to the horrendous amount of needless jokes and off-key lines added in the first 2 seasons (especially season 2, which oddly enough to a worse dub than the 1st season, for whatever reason). I also think that the music used in the dub for Tamers was used a bit more properly than it was back with both of the Adventure series, as JO had pointed out that while the music composed for the dub was actually quite good whoever was responsible for matching it with the proper scenes did a terrible job. In Tamers, its definitely not perfect, but at least they didn't use it all the time and kept certain moments silent when they needed to be, so I'll give it some credit for that.

In terms of characters, though, while it was done well, I actually feel that the characters were balanced out a little better in Adventure season 1. Its weird because Tamers chooses to focus on less characters, even though it ends up having 8 Tamers in total just like how there were 8 digi-destined in Adventure (but it only focuses on 4 of them in terms of developing their characters, whereas Adventure actually tried to develop all 8 kids to some degree). That said, I think the whole idea of the kids' problems and their relationships with their parents was handled a bit better in Adventure, probably because in that series they also showed the parents reflect on their relationship with their kids which made things feel a lot more fleshed out.

To give Tamers some credit, though, I feel that it handled its story better than Adventure did. I do think Adventure had some good writing, but the problem was that it was never meant to last that long and only got extended past 13 episodes when it was already airing, so the writers hadn't planned things out and literally had to pull stuff out of their ass on occasion to move along the plot, and while the plot was overall fairly good for a kids show it had some pretty obvious plot-holes. I noticed a few things that I would consider plot-holes in Tamers, but overall it was much more consistent than Adventure in its story-telling, and it was also a bit more ambitious in how it tried to actually make things seem more sensible than they needed to be for a kids show (in how they had the adults play a big part in the story and try to explain the logic of what was going on).

One other thing I like about this season was that it didn't rely nearly as heavily on stock-footage of the digivolutions as Adventure did. I hated when they did that in Adventure because it was obviously there to pad things out and save cost on the animation budget by recycling old footage, but at the same time it made things feel more dragged out than they should have. In Tamers, they are still guilty of using this trick to an extent, but compared to Adventure it comes off as relatively mild and certainly much more tolerable.

Having said all of that, I still feel that the first half of this series was pretty average on the whole, and I do think that the arc where they make it into the Digital World could have been handled better, but I feel that the D Reaper arc was the best thing I've seen in Digimon since the Myotismon arc from Adventure (that's not counting Our War Game, though, which I still firmly believe is the best thing in the Digimon series, period).

I'll probably move onto watching LotGH pretty soon.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Make sure to get some of The Wire and Doctor Who in between that anime binging.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Do you know of any place I can watch those? I might be able to convince my brother to let me use his Netflix account to get those since he doesn't really rent any DVDs from there (he basically just streams stuff using his XBOX360). Also, I forgot if there was a specific place you wanted me to start from or any particular recommendations you had from the franchise since Dr. Who has been around for decades. I'll also check out The Wire when I can.

[Avaitor]

I'm pretty sure that all the new seasons of Dr. Who, besides maybe the most recent one, are on Netflix. The Wire, I'm not so sure of.

[Spark Of Spirit]

I'm just glad that EK doesn't seem to outright loathe Tamers any more. 


... But, uh, you might not wanna bother with Frontier. 

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I'm just glad that EK doesn't seem to outright loathe Tamers any more. 

I never loathed Tamers, but honestly I got really bored with it and stopped watching it around episode 30-something when I was a kid. To be fair, I still do think that the first half of the series was kind of lackluster in parts (not bad, but just kind of average for me and a bit underwhelming), though I have come to appreciate it far more than I used to be for its ET-esque beginning and the fact that it actually decides to be more original and take place entirely in the real world and only introduce the digital world much later on, but I do think that the series picked up in the 2nd half a great deal, and I had never seen the D Reaper arc before now since I had stopped watching the series shortly after everyone came to the digital world back when I was a kid, so I couldn't judge that arc.

I guess like JO said in her top 25 list, though, there are some themes to the series that you actually would appreciate more when you're older whereas they would have gone over your head as a kid. I think that holds true enough for this series, though once again, most of that stuff comes into play around the 2nd half. So, overall its a good series, but I do think the characters could have been handled a bit better, or rather, while the main 3 characters were handled relatively well I felt that every other Tamer got little to no characterization at all which struck me as a bit of missed opportunity, especially since the first season of Adventure did such a good job with that element (IMO).

... But, uh, you might not wanna bother with Frontier. 

I'll be interested to see what JO has to say about it when she does her retrospective (as someone who's never seen anything Digimon-related past Tamers). That if, of course, if that review comes out at any point in my life-time.

Now that I finished Tamers, I'm actually pretty interested to see JO cover that in her upcoming part of the retrospective, which will hopefully be put up at some point this summer.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Finishing up Nadesico. So far, it's quite good. Kind of like the Animal Man to Evangelion's Watchmen.

[Dr. Insomniac]

And done. Ending was kind of rushed. Been told to never so much as touch Prince of Darkness, so I'm pretty much finished with Nadesico.

[Spark Of Spirit]

The ending will tell you nothing and open up more questions. It's also not very good. Don't know what they were thinking with that one.

[Avaitor]

Just was I was about to drop Brotherhood due to lack of interest, [as] picks up Durarara!!

Now I have something to look forward to every week.