Yakusoku No Neverland 2

Even though the first season of Promised Neverland wasn’t flawless I enjoyed it a lot and was genuinely curious what’s going to happen next. It was obvious that we’d get a sequel, but because it still was a matter of “when” — I bought and read a couple of volumes of the original manga. Confession time — I didn’t especially like where the story was headed and still pretty sure that even if the second season had followed the source material closely it still would’ve resulted in an average show. Nonetheless, what we did get was a hot mess.

Yakusoku No Neverland 2 consists of a bunch of plot devices barely attached to each other with scotch tape. The kids are attacked by monsters? Good guys show up in time to save the day. They are running away from the armed squads sent by the farms? No worries, something will get in the way. Miraculous drug? Check. Miraculous anti-drug? Check. Need to get back to the farm? Oh, we accidentally have all the blueprints and whatnot. The main character is dying? Weeeell… it’s becoming awkward but ughh… we have a cure. There’s no logic behind events in this anime, everything just happens.

The entire utopic idea of “demons and humans should be friends, actually it’s just been a huge 1000-year long misunderstanding or an Evil Scheme of the Evil Demon Nobles, and if we just hug each other and talk everything over — it’ll solve all the problems in no time”, promoted by Emma and silently supported by pretty much all other characters, is laughable. Yet, it’s the main plan. Which somehow succeeded because why not? Sonju mentions that whereas he doesn’t eat kids from the farms he’d want to hunt and eat those who’d live “in the wild” — let’s just forget about this, he’s a good guy in our books, we shouldn’t complicate things too much. Everything related to the characters or plot in the second season is dumbed down.

Again, I read a couple of volumes of the manga and skimmed the rest of the original plot, and I find it’s hard to believe that it would’ve been a masterpiece but this anime, the anime I can’t recall a single strong, emotional, memorable scene from, was definitely a let-down. The only silver lining I can think of is that we won’t need to wait for another season anymore =)

Kaiba

For a few weeks I’d been watching various garbage shows, like Mayo Chiki and the second season of Seitokai Yakuindomo (although, to be completely honest, I consider the latter to be more of an overlooked masterpiece than a trash comedy for perverts, and I’m willing to die on that hill), mainly because it was too めんどくさい to try out something more serious. Well, two or three harem anime in a row can also be too much, so instead of continuing with, I don’t know, Love Hina, I spent a bunch of evenings in the surreal world of Kaiba.

Kaiba is a weird anime and I’m not talking about its not-so-standard visual. After all, if you know who Masaaki Yuasa is you probably know what to expect from his shows. What’s weird is that Kaiba had potential to show a compelling and reasonably logical story but ended up being messy and all-over-the-place. From the very beginning this anime highlights one key component of its world-building — that memories can be stored and transferred from one body to another. This one assumption should be enough to create an interesting plot. Kaiba’s main plot line though is… questionable and, as I mentioned, messy. Granted, I may be dumb and just didn’t realize and appreciate how deep the story of a dude who wakes up without memories and turns out to be the king is. It’s possible. However, nothing in this tale involving One Mind Society, the king himself, his clones and the plant devouring memories grabbed my attention and made me want more of it. The opposite! By the 9th maybe episode I’d gotten pretty bored and had basically to force myself to finish this anime.

Sometimes though Kaiba shined. In the first several, pretty much standalone, episodes, introducing us to the world, this anime could be beautifully depressing. It showed stories you’d expect to see in such circumstances — about people selling their bodies to help their families, about people saving up to buy a body for someone precious to them, but despite being predictable it still was touching. I half-expected the entire anime to be like that — Kaiba travels from one planet to another, changes bodies and yeah, encounters various people and their personal tragedies. Sadly it wasn’t the case.

Kaiba is an unusual anime but in my opinion not the strongest one made by Yuasa. It’s not as radically artsy as Nakojirou Sou; it’s not as streamlined as Eizokuen; it’s not as interesting and wholesome as The Tatami Galaxy or The Night is Short, Walk On Girl. This is a decent anime but my expectations were higher.

And remember, if you ever feel swayed by temptations again, just repeat “Eris pads her chest”. Holy words indeed =)

Hadn’t bought any figures for a while but this time I couldn’t resist and now I have my own useless goddess.

I’ve been living in Canada for about 4 years and it’s probably a shame that only recently I got familiar with the work of the “controversial” UoT professor Jordan Peterson. I mean I heard of him and knew, approximately, who he is and why he all of a sudden became a public figure but I never had much desire to read his books or listen to his interviews — not because I think he’s a terrible person or something but, firstly, I’m just quite suspicious of all books on self-improvement and, secondly, I suspected that in a lot of his interviews and Q&A panels the hosts would act in bad faith and I’m not up to this kind of entertainment.

However, one day I decided to broaden my horizons and try reading a non-fiction book and Peterson’s “12 Rules For Life” looked like a perfect option — something completely opposite of what I normally read. I still haven’t finished the book though =) Whereas the 12 rules themselves are adequate and Peterson’s writing turned out to be much smoother and easier to digest than I feared — regular detours in search of religious parallels still make me take breaks. Hopefully one day I’ll make it =)

Anyway, out of curiosity I watched an interview with Peterson on youtube and although I made a mistake of picking a recent one (an interview with a person who’s been and probably is severely ill may be not the best starting point) I still liked the way he spoke. As someone whose spoken English is questionable (not that my writing was much better heh) I really enjoy listening to people who convey their thoughts clearly at the same time using relatively complex and colorful vocabulary. That gives me sort of a goal — “I want to be able to talk about dicks like Moist Cr1TiKaL” =) Professor Peterson doesn’t talk about cocks or anime (or maybe he does and I just didn’t see it yet) but after that first interview I went down the rabbit hole and checked out a bunch of others, from 2-3 years ago. I wouldn’t say that any of them turned my world upside down, except that it has temporarily changed my youtube feed, but it’s also not something I’m going to regret. Ah, one more note — I’m surprised that he did so well for a few years before breaking down, considering the amount of hostility towards him =)

The most interesting thing I found reading spoilers to the last Evangelion movie yesterday is that meme from 4chan =) Not that there was much to debate…

P.S. Luckily, I don’t care much about Eva movies. I’m going to check out 3.0+1.0 when it comes out here, but I like the TV way too much, so it’s hard to see the entire Rebuild thing as something more than a high-budget fanfic.