Acting Through Animation in Evangelion Ep. 5

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Analyzing “One Bad Apple”

Note that this is a full analysis, unlike my first impression post on the same episode.

Analyzing “Griffon the Brush Off”

Griffon the Brush Off is a fairly unpopular episode. Out of all the non-pony and one-off characters in the show, I’ve probably seen less fanart and love for Gilda than any other character, which is understandable because Gilda’s a total bitch. Griffons as a general race are more popular as an idea than Gilda, but even then, not so much that they feel like a big part of the pony world.

Besides the fact that Gilda’s a bitch, it’s also an early episode, meaning it comes with the usual problems of early episodes (characters not fully realized, show not at the peak of quality, etc.). That said, I’d only seen this episode once before today, and upon rewatching it I thought it was solid. I see the episode accused of being weak on a thematic level, since the lesson is basically, “don’t be a bitch or let people be a bitch to your friends,” but of course I think there’s more to it than that, and I found the statements that the episode makes about the characters interesting enough.

First, let’s ask ourselves: why is Gilda such a bitch? Obviously because she’s a mean-spirited bully—but why does she act that way? It’s because she’s horribly inauthentic. That’s why Pinkie Pie is her perfect enemy—Pinkie is completely authentic to the core. To pull a page out of my own life, I would say Gilda is to Colony Drop as Pinkie Pie is to myself (lolololol).

Speaking Haganai’s Language

Ugh, I should’ve made posts on Ben-to 4 and Fate/Zero 5 this week, but I’ve been lazy about blogging altogether and also that NaNoWriMo things is happening. On that note, you can read my story as I write it over at talesfromthe711.tumblr.com. It’s a series of short stories involving 7-Eleven convenience stores. Meanwhile, omo has been doing great posts on those shows, although not covering what I want to.

Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai gets better every week, proportional to its gain in characters. Watching episode five with a friend was a great idea and I can honestly say I enjoyed this week’s episode. Not that I suddenly think the show is “good” or anything, but here’s where it gets weird: I mostly enjoy this show for the voice acting.

God Damn .hack//SIGN Episode 5

Even at its most tolerable, this show is so ugly and boring that my mind constantly wanders. At one point, I actually thought to myself, “why the hell am I still watching this?” before remembering, “duh, because I’m blogging it.” If nothing else, this confirms that, were I not running this blog and was simply rewatching .hack//SIGN (which I’d planned to do long beforehand), I would have dropped it by now.

There’s no excuse for this slowness. .hack//SIGN could be cut by half its length and lose nothing—hell, it’d probably work with just six episodes. The only reason I can think of for it to be so drawn out is because it’s a franchise tie-in. At the dawn of the franchise, it probably made sense to do at least two cours, even though there clearly wasn’t substantial material for it.

Fucking MADLAX Episode 5

Today I’ll get into Madlax’s vocal cast. Most of the voices in Madlax aren’t bad, but are bland and unmemorable due to the horribly shitty writing—it starts to feel sad when you realize that most of the cast are actually pretty great seiyuu.

FLCL Ep. 5 – BLUES DRIVE MONSTER

Post BGM. (I’m gunna start doing this. I’ve always wanted to anyway. Though in this case it might take 2 plays, lol.)

A post in the Epic Journey. Contains FLCL spoilers. Continued from here.

Episode 5 of FLCL has pretty much always been my favorite. It’s where all the plot setup finally starts moving (late as that sounds) and the whole episode is zany and awesome. What’s especially great is that it’s the most hyper-active, action-packed episode of the show but still has as much depth and subtlety as the rest of the show. And since it’s where things come to a head, it’s also probably the easiest episode to misinterpret. See, up to this point, most of the important stuff that no one gets pretty much goes right over their heads and it’s less that they misunderstand as it is that they just don’t realize something else is going on. In this episode, all of that stuff going on in the background comes rushing to the forefront, so when you see it, it’s some new thing that you try to make sense out of but really can’t without the information you missed. So this is the part where all of our earlier impressions were wrong and it becomes really important that you’ve been reading along! (not to sound pretentious, lol.)