[Ginkasa]

My wife and I have been keeping on with our "Toonami" four show block! We've completed a few shows since I last posted. Here's how the lineup has updated:

Gundam Seed > Gundam 00
Excel Saga > Madoka Magica > Sailor Moon
Revolutionary Girl Utena > Revolutionary Girl Utena (again!)
Nier: Automata > Gurren Lagann > Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

As mentioned above, I really enjoy Gundam generally, but I'd always kind of bounced off of Seed (unrelated: the Final Fantasy fan in me always wants to spell it SeeD). I was determined to make it through this time and give it a fair shake, though. It is firmly Okay, I Guess. It has some pretty good dramatic moments, but those tend be fairly far between and the time in between really drags a bit. I never really fell in love with any of the characters. Some of the plot beats missed. There were some Big Twists at the end that I don't think hit as much as they were intended. They held them back too long so they couldn't really impact the plot and they were covered pretty briefly and vaguely. Initially my plan was to move on to Seed Destiny as it was the next released, but my lack of interest in Seed generally and the poor reputation of Destiny means we skipped it in favor of 00.

We just started 00 and I've never seen it before, but I understand its supposed to be good!

Excel Saga was an enjoyable watch. It does have some cringy moments, cringy enough they kind of bring down my opinion, but overall we enjoyed watching it and had some laughs. I'm glad we revisited.

Madoka Magica came after and I really enjoyed it! The art style put me off a bit. The overly cutesy, "drawn young" characters in magical girl outfits kind of icked me out at first, but the witchy bits are really inventive and interesting to watch. I realized overall that the contract is intentional and helps visually convey the story the show is trying to tell. It really won me over with the dark tone and commentary it makes on the magical girl genre. I'm excited for the new movie to come out some time this year!

Following that and also Utena I felt like we should revisit the founding work in the genre with Sailor Moon. I'd seen bits and pieces back in the day when it was on Toonami, but during the school year it was on before I got home so I never could watch it regularly. So we're watching it! It is a little antithetical to what we were originally look for: shorter, contained series with a larger focus on a tight story. Sailor Moon, in contrast, is a classic multi-hundred episode series filled with episodic "filler" between major story beats. But we want to watch it so here we are! Potentially if we want to take a break after the first major arc we can do a smaller show and come back (or not if we're not enjoying it by that point).

Revolutionary Girl Utena is definitely one of my favorites now. I like the style, I like the characters. The overarching themes of overcoming trauma and growing past it really resonate with me. Its a very metaphorical show. Many of the events on screen don't make literal sense, so once we finished we decided to give it a second go to pick up on stuff we hadn't realized the first time. Especially early on I wasn't sure what kind of show it was going to end up being, so some of the directions it went were not expected.

Gurren Lagann is a much more Masculine show than a lot of the others we watched. Its not generally the tone I'm going for nowadays, but we enjoyed it overall. I really appreciated how quickly it ratcheted up the energy and move the plot along briskly. At the beginning, I thought I knew what the formula of the series woudl be (at least for a while) on episode two. And then on episode 3 or 4 it threw that away and skipped ahead to the next "formula" and then moved quickly past that and that and that. The way the scope just ballooned by the end was very satisying. If this were DBZ or something the team would have still been wandering the surface fighting Beast Men of the Week at episode 27, but instead the show zipped ahead (without every feeling poorly paced) and we were done at that point! It was very enjoyable.

Fullmetal Alchemist is something I've never seen before, but I've heard it was good and I remember when it was new and kind of The Thing. It was next on the list I had mentioned in my prior post, so we went ahead and put it on here. We chose the Brotherhood version both because that was what was on the list and also I've always heard its the better take on the material. Just a few episodes in! I wasn't really into the first episode and was concerned we'd bounce off of it, but then it did the origin story in episode 2 and that drew me in. Three was okay, but four was messed up in all the right ways so I'm excited to see where this goes.