ablackenedrose

I tried to make progress in the King's Quest remake. I didn't get much of anywhere apart from finding a bowl, but I got a good laugh out of the various ways to die and the enthusiastically deadpan descriptions.

Completed the first two chapters of the original Neverwinter Nights. Interesting enough plot, I suppose, though my investment in finding out what the "People of the Eye" are up to is pretty much what's pulling me through a lot of the combat (it's not bad, but it does get fairly grind-y after a while).

Just finished the fourth episode of Ergo Proxy, a show I've never heard of before today and am quickly growing to like quite a lot.

Color of the End, Witch Hat Atelier and Drifting Dragons.

I think a lot of the trends we're seeing now in entertainment in the west really got started a few years earlier than 2020 and have just kicked up notch after notch since (a process only accelerated, as you note, by COVID lockdowns).

I'd like to just see the rest of Claymore adapted.

Currently watching Red Dwarf for the first time - quite a riot.

Been nice to find at least one dude who makes 40K-themed music without AI.

While not always true, heroes are frequently defined as much by the villains they clash with as anything else, and the villain and their machinations frequently serve as the thing that grounds the journey of the hero and makes it feel like a journey rather than aimless wandering, the villain's defeat often being the ultimate goal. Guts' whole story in Berserk is centered around his desire to get revenge on Griffith for destroying the Band of the Hawk. Midoriya's becoming the "greatest hero in the world" is inexorably intertwined with his conflict with Tomura Shigaraki and the latter's desire to tear the world down. Amuro Ray's legendarily messy rivalry with Char Aznable remains one of the most famous in the medium of anime to this day. Put shortly, I'd pick the villain.

I know I watched the first few episodes of this, but fell off. Might need to revisit. I do recall liking the impression the story gave me that there was essentially a battle anime going on well away from the main protagonist that he was barely aware of. Always had a fondness for the trope of "There's a high-stakes plot in the setting that the actual protagonist doesn't know/care about".

Which is quite a shame; I don't care much for Discord's general function and layout, and it's terrible for any sort of digital preservation of online discussion.

Finished up season 1 of Clevatess. Enjoyable enough, though it certainly felt rather gratuitous in a lot of areas. I was also rather disappointed at the titular character assuming a humanoid form, as monstrous leads in anime are wont to do. Season 2 has started off taking a direction I distinctly dislike, and I doubt I'll continue unless this direction cuts off within a few episodes. Moving on to Wash it All Away and Agents of the Four Seasons.

Tried and failed to chain my way through the first chapter of Ikaruga. Still can't do it, but I'm slowly getting better at it.

I wonder if I could talk my local movie theater into printing this on ticket stubs.

It's become significantly more accessible, and by that I mean it's easier to find and watch. At least where I lived, anime used to be the kind of thing you had to specifically seek out on television schedules (often at weird hours), go digging through video/DVD rentals for, or figure out how to use torrents and file-sharing services, etc. Now, there are numerous streaming services that offer anime as part of the package, and of course entire services exist almost exclusively to stream anime. Finding relatively reasonably-priced Blu-Rays is as simple as opening Amazon. In effect, anime consumption has become a lot more normalized and mainstream, though I'm not sure if the greater accessibility is the cause, effect or both. While I sometimes nostalgically pine for the days of frantically watching fansubbed anime in three parts on YouTube (because there was a sizable chance it would be copyright struck sooner than later), if more widespread acceptance of anime means newer generations don't have the experience of being shamed for liking it, I'd say that's worth it. What really spells it out is when I was buying some manga in my local major bookstore recently. Time was, said bookstore chain had maybe one shelf for manga volumes, and you were seen as "weird" for buying it (I actually had a clerk comment once "Shouldn't you be reading real books?"). Nowadays there's two full aisles for manga and light novels. The clerk (an elderly woman) had a Frieren pin and eagerly asked for recommendations for new anime, while another, younger clerk gushed about how much she loved Witch Hat Atelier. No way in the world would that have happened even a dozen years ago.

Started up The Color of the End, which as of writing has three volumes out in English. Seems to take a decent amount of influence from BLAME!, what with the advanced-yet-desolate urban sci-fi setting and highly decompressed visual style. Quite enjoying thus far.

Living in Florida, I'm fortunate enough to have a decent number of cons to potentially attend, though the only one I consistently attend is Metrocon over in Tampa.

Honor and Devotion, inspired by Space Marine 2.

On one hand, I was entirely unaware of this, and on the other, I am not surprised in the slightest. Nothing done with this IP can shock me after they made a fully Hollywood film out of it, frankly.

I enjoyed it well enough, but I'll warn you it's quite a violent story. It also has a tendency to jump around quite a bit following numerous characters, none of which I can really call morally "good" without some qualification. That said, the influence of the Mahabharata is evident and gives it a rather different feeling to the many European-inspired fantasy worlds to be found in western fantasy literature, and the plot and character work overall is fairly solid. It's a somewhat cautious recommendation from me.

I've already finished the first Mistborn trilogy and am planning to get to Wax and Wayne at some point. I did read the first three books of Stormlight Archive, but that was back in 2018; eight years on, I've forgotten enough of the series to necessitate a full reread just to read Rhythm of War and Wind and Truth and I'll confess that I just don't feel up to it. (The fractured response of the fanbase to Wind and Truth doesn't help, either.) Personally, I'm just starting up Grave Empire. I've had a thing for fantasy settings undergoing industrialization since playing Dishonored however many years ago, so the book's blurb was practically catnip to me.

Huh, wasn't aware Elantris had sequels planned. Always took it for a one-off. Might pencil in some time for those when they release...

I read quite a lot (currently at 35 books read this year, a bit of a slump). I'll give almost anything a try and enjoy works from a broad variety of genres, but I'm particularly partial to dark/epic fantasy, science fiction (I'll take any level of hardness) and supernatural horror.

Blazing heat and high humidity, though that's nothing new for this time of year, nor is the few days of thunderstorms the weather stations claim we have coming down over the next few days.

For me, it's characters - above all else, you have to make me care about your characters, and that goes for every single genre of anime. They can be wonderful people, they can be terrible people, they can be laser-focused on a single objective or just living their day-to-day lives, but an anime absolutely must get me to want to watch those characters do their thing, whatever that "thing" is. You can have all the grand conflicts you want going on, all the wild powers you can imagine or the most incredible animation ever put to screen, but if I don't care about the characters caught up in those conflicts or wielding those powers or who are so lovingly animated, I'm not going to stick around.