Live Blog: Elfen Lied, episode 1, Begegnung: Encounter

There is a severed arm on the floor and a prisoner in some sort of large mask/helmet that looks Predator-ish being held in a giant metal birdcage thing.   

Whoops, somehow the guard let her telekinetically tear his arm off and levitate his keys and…now he’s dismembered. Holy shit, that’s a lot of blood. 

Silly administrative womenfolk having chatty workplace conversation in a cafeteria. Apparently she’s a foolish woman who requires notes to remember how to take the garbage out and serve coffee. Harrumph.   

More guards with machine guns come running as a loudspeaker announces shut down. Due, I’m assuming, to the assorted and sundry decapitated heads/arms/torsos that are flying everywhere DUDE SHE JUST KILLED A GUY WITH A PEN…holy shit, that is A LOT of blood.  Also, she’s naked now. There is no reason for it, they just like drawing her naked. ( Even later, when she’s given clothes, she apparently likes to pull her shirt over and flash an impressive tata. Dude, it’s lazy writing if you can’t even bother to come up with some sort of story to go along with the fact that you like to draw boobs. )

 
(I am 4m 54s into this episode)
 

  
Naked redhead in a mask ain’t impressed with your firepower. How insulting to your manhood. 

  
I think this is severed head number eight. I assume this is how the voice actor will be named in the credits. Also, this is the head of the silly woman who can’t make coffee. They introduced a character for the sole purpose of showing her as an ineffectual giggler and cutting her head off. Lame. 

Now we’re aboveground in a normal people place and some chick named Yuka missed her cousin Kohta at the train station but finds him by their old childhood haunt and drags him to look at the ocean. Not sure why she thought it would be fun as some serious foreshadowing of a tragic event immediately pops up in a flashback of him being rude to his adorably big-eyed little sister as she tries to show him the seashells she picked up. 

  

Whoop, that’s all for calm; naked-telekinetic-psychopathic-murder-chick walks up onto the beach towards them from out of the ocean. 

Um, apparently the bad lady Lucy has cat-like ears. Not like she hears really well, but actual, physical cat-like ears. She doesn’t seem so murder-happy now, they’re just gonna go ahead and take her home. 

  
She just keeps running around saying ‘Nyu’ and now she just peed all over the floor and I can’t stop laughing. 

Back to the Bloodbath Bunker for cryptic statements:  

and an introduction to the government mandated sadist who will be sent to hunt Lucy down and shoot her dead. Cos evil’s not evil if someone with a title and a clipboard and prolly wearing glasses says nah, brah, you’re cool.    

Back aboveground, and more flashbacks of a day at the beach. We find out Kohta’s little sister died of ‘a disease’ and he pulls out a pink sea shell, his only momento from their last happy time together. You get one second to ‘aw’ for the feels and then…DUN DUN DUNNNN…

  
Kohta freaks DAFUQ out and Nyo (they’ve decided to call her by the strange cat noise she makes) heads for the hills, while Yuki tries to chill erryone out and says she prolly just did it cos looking at it made him sad. 

Jump to a military paddy wagon full of soldiers on their way to find the cat-eared-floor-pissing-murdering-telekinetic-Lucy-Nyo. The machismo is so thick I’m surprised they’re not actually talking with their dicks.   

So, that’s episode 1. I got high praise infused recommendations for this one and I was looking forward to starting it. I must say that I didn’t really get drawn into the story too much. I really love anime/manga, and I have zero issues with gore, violence, nudity, sex, etc. IF IT SERVES THE STORY. Like, dude, you’re working within an animated medium which means you can create whatever you want to make it all come together.  Bums me out when they just flash the sex and violence with no meat. 

Update: I decided to start Tokyo Ghoul instead, and I am IN LOVE with it so far…

Weekend Media Warrior Mash UP

It’s not often that I have a significant amount of time to myself on the weekends (or ever), and it’s amazing how many hours there are to fill with whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you want. Not only did I get out of the house (being as it was over 1 degree out and most of the snow had melted) and have some interesting conversations with people that I don’t actually live with, I also…

Watched:

Fairy Tale
This is an anime series I found on Netflix, the creator of which claims Tolkien as an influence. Shock that this was why I watched the first episode. I haven’t watched anime in a long ass time, honestly because I haven’t been in the mood to read subtitles. I laughed my ass off at this show, because it was so ridiculous and wonderful that I remembered why I love the broad spectrum of what the genre encompasses. The basic premise is that the cast of characters live in a world where magic is common, if not commonplace. You can actually go to shops and buy little magical doohickeys, but if you want to join one of the real wizard guilds you have to be able to perform without trinkets. Most of it was just silly, but there was a scene where a Celestial Wizard conjures an Aquarian water spirit that turns out to just be a straight snotty bitch that was really great.

Adventure Time
I’ve seen so many gif-sets of this show that made me laugh that I finally broke down and watched the first episode. Um…it’s bizarre, and sweet and funny, and the voices of the characters that I heard in my head in no way, shape or form resemble the actual voices on the show. That actually threw me to such a degree that I kept missing bits of the super important story line and had to rewind to figure out why Princess Bubblegum’s De-Corpsifier (don’t even know how to go about spellchecking that one) didn’t work as she had planned.

Tai Chi Man
I hadn’t heard of this movie before, but I’m always interested in martial arts movies and figured I’d give it a shot. The cool thing about tai-chi is that, once you master the sequences, if you speed them up you’ve got a hell of a time distinguishing it from the more martial of the arts. Anyway, this is a movie about that 😉 Keanu Reeves directed it, and while he’s in it, he’s not the star. It’s enjoyable to see him as a bad guy, though, as he’s usually the affable idiot. The movie is a straight forward take on the student / master relationship, going down the wrong path and then finding your way home. I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure I know anyone I would recommend it to.

The Matrix
So, after watching Keanu fighting in an all black outfit in the previous movie, I had a hankering to have a marathon of all three Matrix in a row. That was before I remembered they were almost as long as the LOTR movies. So I settled for buying it on Amazon for $7.99, making the bargain with myself that I would pack my lunch every day this week because budgets aint a joke, son. I loved it as much as I always have, and it’s awesome that in all this time the movie hasn’t dimmed for me in the slightest. The soundtrack is fantastic, Trinity & Neo are still young and hot, and Morpheus still makes me feel like there’s a ghost in the machine.

Read:

Mockingjay – Suzanne Collins
This one was a re-read, and just served to remind me of why I dislike the movies so much. They’re shallow and clean, nowhere near gritty enough. There’s no powerful emotional punch, you don’t get the time to grow to give a shit about the characters. Too slapdash, too pointedly marking out the parts where you’re supposed to care. The books are no nonsense, sharp quick words with a sharp quick point. The movies are all rounded edges. Of course, to make the movies they way that I think they should be made would alienate a large portion of the younger audience, but I still believe they could have done much better.

Looking for Alaska – John Green
So, I’m not sure how to describe John Green’s writing, other than to say that I don’t think there’s many people who feel middle of the road about him. I would think that people either think he can’t put a word out of place or that he’s writing just to sound pretty. Personally, I love his beautifully worded beats upon the breast of humanity. This one hit a personal chord on a couple different levels, but the narrator’s voice also had just a whisper of Holden Caulfield in it, which for me is a lovely whisper.

Blahblahblah, so there. A weekend was had by all, and now it’s Monday, and I think this is my way of trying to remember how lovely the days off felt 🙂

** I don’t know what in the hell is going on with the bold / italic whatnot, but I can’t fix it, ha **