u/Korkez11

I'm anime only so I wonder if Fukuda ever talked about it. If I'm not mistaken with timeline he could play in WC 2002 (unless he was too young at that time) and/or WC 2006 (unless he was already injured).

It's like the world always bends around her to make every one of her decisions to spare her enemies' lives. There was apparently not a single instance where Chisato patched a criminal up (like in episode 2) and they responded by shooting her in the back. There was apparently not a single instance when Chisato let a criminal escape and they kill Uncle Ben... sorry, commit a huge terrorist attack right after that. She doesn't think at all that sometimes there's a trolley problem at play and by refusing to kill one criminal sometimes she's puts a lot of lives of other people at danger. And of course, because writers chickened out from killing Chisato permanently, her dilemma "I don't want to shorten Shinji's life to prolong my own" was solved by Mika without her knowledge. How convenient.

This is frustrating because Lycoris Recoil is very cynical anime in a lot of ways but weirdly idealistic when it comes to Chisato's moral rule and always vindicates it.

I don't know how hyped Gosick was when it came out but it clearly didn't become an enduring classic (which is evident by the lack of rewatches on this sub) and is mostly remembered as "that one mystery anime with Aoi Yuuki". And there's a reason. It's just not that great.

The good:

• Aoi Yuuki. She's amazing as usual. In fact, this is one of her better and most diverse roles. Often she's either monotonous or chewes scenery like Nicolas Cage but Victorique displays full specter of emotions at various times
• Overarching plot is pretty decent and interesting. The final arc where this show finally stopped pretending it's a mystery show was genuinely great.

The mixed:

• Victorique. I can't say she's just an annoying abusive tsundere but she's not that far off. The most frustrating thing is that she starts as aloof ice princess, then quickly defrosts to the point of screaming "Don't leave me!" to Kazuya in episode 5 or 6... and then there's no progress at all in her character and their relationship for the next 10+ episodes. That episode where Kazuya skipped summer vacation with a better girl to be Victorique's punching bag was difficult to watch. The lesson in defrosting freezed products: you're supposed to defrost them gradually, you can't blast them with a flamethrower and then stuff back into the freezer. Nevertheless, when Victorique isn't annoying she's genuinely funny and Aoi Yuuki's voice definitely makes her better.
• [Spoiler character] >!Avril!<. She's fine, the anime just uses her inconsistently. Sometimes she's being teased as potential romantic rival, sometimes she's just a quest giver, sometimes anime forgets about her for multiple episodes in a row. Her rivalry with Victorique is established in one episode and then it goes nowhere.

The bad

• Kazuya. He's dumb. At first it was endearing how protective he is of Victorique but my guy is legit stupid and reckless to a fault. He always dives head first into every dangerous situation with no plan, as if running, screaming "VICTORIQUEEEEE" and trying to fistfight five guys at once will solve all their problems. It's fitting that [Gosick] >!he spends the entire final arc out of focus!<
• Individual mysteries aren't great. I can't feel the sense of accomplishment when mysteries consist of 2-3 episodes of lore dump and then Victorique just solves everything in five minutes. It's clear that the plot structure is modeled after Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin stories, but the problem is that Kazuya... well, see above. He's not Archie Goodwin. And at the same time these mysteries are so overcomplicated, like all villains of Gosick just can't help not to be theatrical and overdramatic. Even the final arc which I praised earlier isn't perfect - it (as well as the entire plot of the show as it turned out) is based around the legend... that was mentioned for the first time only during this exact arc! Foreshadowing? Never heard of that

Overall, Gosick is 7/10 and closer to 6 than to 8. If you want bite-sized mysteries - watch Hyouka. And if you want bite-sized mysteries with high stakes - go read Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie

"I was trippin' lookin' at my portfolio..." and "I've reached my representative who pulled out a C O N T R A C T" are such invasive earworms, oh god. And even musically it grows on me more and more. The second half is pretty intense with Liz doing Disney villainess impression. "It's all mine, it's all mine!"

I wonder what would happen if she made an entire album of "funstyle" tracks but with absurdist humor instead of pop-culture "satire". At least it would have a decent cult classic status I think.

Brought to you by a certain twice-disgraced artist and her "purposeful pop" of very unclear purpose.

Another example is Finnish band Poets of the Fall who describe their style as "cinematic rock". Aside from their frontman being a huge theater kid I still don't know what that means. Their actual style is alternative rock mixed with symphonic rock on early albums and electronica on later.

The phrase "they don't want power, they want endlessly criticize the power" is more about centrists at this point. They stand for nothing, they don't have any ideas that can energize the base. They are just roadblocks preventing any changes from the left. The entire discussion between centrists and progressives for the last 10 years was:

Progressive: I have an idea!

Centrist: No, that's stupid and won't work.

Progressive: So, what do you suggest?

Centrist: Nothing. Better things aren't possible.

They scoff at M4A, student loan forgiveness, minimum wage, affordability in general, but if you ask them how they're gonna address economic inequality, healthcare industry issues, what would they even do if they were in power - it's crickets (or they straight up refuse to acknowledge any problems exist, except for Trump's existence). Their imagination doesn't go further than cute little tax credits for niche bullshit.

And that really is a backwash of the entire political thought (if you can call it that) you can find on this sub or r/Enough_Sanders_Spam . All these takes like

• "caring about economic issues is class reductionism"
• "universal healthcare is a racist dogwhistle"
• "politicians shouldn't have any policies, they just need to "connect with communities", whatever that means"

turned centrists into spineless suits with no thoughts of their own and charisma of a wet toilet paper. Well, congrats, that doesn't work anymore. At best they're gonna lose to DSA, at worst - to MAGA. Because they actually have ideas at least.

Sometimes when foreign artists are trying to sing in English the results are... not pretty and they give us lyrics so bad "Hey Soul Sister" and "Drive By" feel like Shakespeare by comparison.

Children of Bodom for example. Alexi Laiho's (RIP) lyrics were edgy cringe and not even in "so bad it's good" way. They had a song with delightful title "Pusyfoot Miss Suicide" which sounds like something from My Immortal (the fanfic, not the song).

For a long time I thought Nick Cave is dead and Skeleton Tree was his last album. That's understandable because it was released at the same time as farewell albums of two other elder statesmen of sophisticated music (Blackstar and You Want It Darker) and it's also a depressing album about loss and grief so I guess I subconsciously associated Cave with Bowie and Cohen.

Remember how mad people were at Ragatha after episode 5? All these bs theories about her being manipulative bitch jealous of Jax that Pomni decided to befriend him or even that she bullied Jax into isolation? Because of "Not anymore..." comment and accusation that Jax tries to turn Pomni into himself? Turns out, even if she said "not anymore" with intention to hurt Jax she was 200% right because it's indeed Jax's fault he's left without friends. And her concerns about Pomni becoming closer to Jax were absolutely valid.

And what's crazy is that even the narrative was treating Ragatha in episode 5 as being wrong.

There's no other explanation why Jax went from just one of the cast in episodes 1-4 (at best, one of more important ones, alongside Pomni and Ragatha) to the second main character to the sole focus of the almost entire episode 9. It's like Glitch said "Merch with this purple rabbit has the best sales figures, go write more scenes with him" (at the expense of other characters, Ragatha especially). And this is why conclusion of his arc feels so two-faced, like he wasn't that bad for two episodes and was improving his mental state... nope, he abruptly dies anyway, and the deep dive into his mind only reveals that he's fucking insane. Like, the big takeaway from all of this is that TADC is a story about a horrible guy who pushed everyone away from him and fucking died? Cool I guess. It would've been more thematically coherent if not for the previous two episodes.

Buckethead's "In Search of the" is a box set of his 13 previously unreleased albums. Covers of these albums were handdrawn by Buckethead himself. Each of 13 albums in each of 800-900 sets that were released. No two albums had the same exact artwork.

For example, "Have a drink, have a drive" from In the Summertime is shockingly bad line. Apparently, drunk driving was only recently criminalized in the UK at that time so Mungo Jerry didn't get the memo yet that it's very dangerous.