Finish or Fail 11 – I Still Plan To Watch 2nd Gig, But Let Me Rant About Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex 1 For A Bit (Part One, Because I Ended Up Going On About the Animation Till I Had A Full Post)

I’m falling behind on Finish or Fail posts. I still have to do them for Index, Utawarerumono, and Mononoke (spoiler: all finished) but I felt like writing about Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex real quick.

I will say upfront that I did not finish SAC season 1. After 8 episodes, I gave up and decided I would just watch the Laughing Man compilation OVA before moving on to season 2. I would have probably finished the season if I didn’t realize there was a compilation movie, so it’s not like I ragequitted the show. I just figured it would be easier to get through it in a more compact version. On to the rant…

I never, ever get tired of this shot. Oh what could have been...

What's Cool About Light Novels Is They Remind Me What Stuff I Love

“Possibility, or what we refer to as Imagination, is 99% imitation. The real deal is only 1%”
-Kouhei Kadono, as translated by Andrew Cunningham, Boogiepop  Returns VS Imaginator Part 1

A little while back, 2-D Teleidoscope read Zaregoto book 1 and brought up the interesting fact that as he read it, he imagined the world and characters as an anime. Light novels feature illustrations in definitive anime/manga style and often feature characters and situations that seem to be torn right out of those mediums, so it’s only natural that we would visualize them that way – however, when I thought back on the images in my head from reading Zaregoto, I noticed something odd. The characters looked like anime, and the situations played out in an anime-like way, but the world itself looked nothing like anything I’ve seen in anime.

Halo Legends is Completely Awesome if You Ignore Bee Train Screwing it Up As Badly As Humanly Imaginable

I really like these multi-studio vignette productions. They always bring out some of the coolest anime studios to do some excellent short films with some of the highest budgets they will likely ever wield. As much as I liked The Animatrix and Batman Gotham Knight, Halo Legends really blows them both away. Explaining any clip too long would just be redundant, since you can watch them yourself, but here’s a once-over.