The Gaming Den

After enjoying the hell out of the original Rurouni Kenshin, where he runs around and fucking murders aristocrats as a pro-democracy street warrior, I was sickened and offended when they turned it into a kid-friendly no-killing show with cute kids in it who are conspicuously not murdered in snow. Could not watch.

-Username17

Frank, how could a show about a samuraironin who doesn't even know how to hold a sword possibly be good?

FrankTrollman wrote:After enjoying the hell out of the original Rurouni Kenshin, where he runs around and fucking murders aristocrats as a pro-democracy street warrior, I was sickened and offended when they turned it into a kid-friendly no-killing show with cute kids in it who are conspicuously not murdered in snow. Could not watch.

-Username17

That was the Toonami edited show, shown after school. Believe me, you were missing out on some of the harsher parts. People die on screen. Sometimes they die pretty hard. Some of the villains can be pretty creative about it, too. One of them was fighting and being repeatedly accused of feeding on others. So what does he do the first chance he gets? Bites an actual chunk out of his opponent's shoulder, chew, and swallow and say something to effect of 'There. See? Now will you shut up about it?"

But I'd still recommend skipping the episodes from 13 to 27 and just starting in on episode 28.

IIRC beef jerky man was a cool BBEG. I'm willing to admit that his duel with Kenshin actually rocked me.

FrankTrollman wrote:After enjoying the hell out of the original Rurouni Kenshin, where he runs around and fucking murders aristocrats as a pro-democracy street warrior, I was sickened and offended when they turned it into a kid-friendly no-killing show with cute kids in it who are conspicuously not murdered in snow. Could not watch.

-Username17

Explain yourself, Frank.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:After enjoying the hell out of the original Rurouni Kenshin, where he runs around and fucking murders aristocrats as a pro-democracy street warrior, I was sickened and offended when they turned it into a kid-friendly no-killing show with cute kids in it who are conspicuously not murdered in snow. Could not watch.

-Username17

Explain yourself, Frank.

Sure.

Imagine for the moment that your introduction to Kenshin had been Samurai X: Trust and Betrayal. And you get to watch severed limbs flying everywhere and people making hard choices about whether it's better to fight for the advancement of society or to avenge loved ones and whether new relationships matter more than dead relatives. You know, awesome shit.


Then you find out that there's a whole fucking series of this shit, you pop the tape in... and the main character is a shitty Ranma clone who does non-lethal damage with a fucking katana and has to do special cartoony training sequences in order to best a series of gimmick fighters. Like... Ranma... but without the hilarious transgender comedy or talking pandas.

DO NOT WANT.

Maj wrote:

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:If you are going by the old racial divisions (Caucasian, Mongoloid, Negroid, etc) then your friend from Vladivostok would be mongoloid because Russians aren't Caucasian.

However, most people have dropped those divisions for being stupid.

If she is mongoloid, then the divisions are stupid. She looks like what I'd call "white."

I'd say only partially. Those racial deliniations are still occasionally used in art, because there are demonstrable differences in bone structure, leading to different facial structures. She definitely has at least some mongaloid bone structure in her face, but it's mixed with caucasian.

Maj wrote:

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:If you are going by the old racial divisions (Caucasian, Mongoloid, Negroid, etc) then your friend from Vladivostok would be mongoloid because Russians aren't Caucasian.

However, most people have dropped those divisions for being stupid.

If she is mongoloid, then the divisions are stupid. She looks like what I'd call "white."

Yeah, the Divisions are in fact stupid and no one uses them anymore. "Caucasian" specifically excludes Russians and includes the northern part of Africa. It was based on a geographical feature and not culture, bone structure, ancestry, or anything else.

Considering that the different human phenotypes are more alike to each other than different siblings in a litter of kittens, I'm not sure that it's productive to really "type" anyone. Except for your college rivals, because the rivals of your college are dinks, amirite?

However, geographically and culturally, your friend could be considered Asian. In western civ at college, the one thing the teacher repeatedly said was that Russians weren't "western" no matter how white they were, and certain cultures like the ancient Egyptians and modern Japanese ARE western nations no matter how not-white they were.

Count Arioch the 28th wrote: Yeah, the Divisions are in fact stupid and no one uses them anymore. "Caucasian" specifically excludes Russians and includes the northern part of Africa. It was based on a geographical feature and not culture, bone structure, ancestry, or anything else.

except there are differing bone structures that appear in specific geographic locales.

Prak_Anima wrote:

Count Arioch the 28th wrote: Yeah, the Divisions are in fact stupid and no one uses them anymore. "Caucasian" specifically excludes Russians and includes the northern part of Africa. It was based on a geographical feature and not culture, bone structure, ancestry, or anything else.

except there are differing bone structures that appear in specific geographic locales.

That doesn't address my point in any way. At all.

the race names "caucasion", "mongaloid" and "negroid" are used to refer to the different facial structures in art, at least.

Prak_Anima wrote:the race names "caucasion", "mongaloid" and "negroid" are used to refer to the different facial structures in art, at least.

And in anthropology, the divisions are considered arbitrary, DON'T refer to any sort of common feature, and have been abandoned long ago by reputable anthropologists.

If artists have taken the terms and applied them differently than their original meanings, that's not really the concern of anyone who isn't an artist. This is my last word on the subject, I don't have the energy to argue with anyone right now.

my point is that there's a use of the terms that isn't stupid

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I'd say that Dragonball Z got the biggest shaft in terms of an anime adaptation; it ranks significantly worse than even anime adaptations of Seikon no Qwaser and Berserk in how badly it was handled. If you read the manga of that series Dragonball Z is actually really fast-paced and exciting and Goku actually, you know, still uses martial arts (he used beams a lot in the anime, esp. fillers and movies, because they're cheaper to animate). It still doesn't get rid of the dumber elements of Z like the beefcake and the large ensemble cast being reduced to about 3-4 important people and the shooing out of comedy, but it's much more tolerable.

But on the bright side, at least we have DBZ Abridged, right?

FrankTrollman wrote:After enjoying the hell out of the original Rurouni Kenshin, where he runs around and fucking murders aristocrats as a pro-democracy street warrior, I was sickened and offended when they turned it into a kid-friendly no-killing show with cute kids in it who are conspicuously not murdered in snow. Could not watch.

The fact that Rurouni Kenshin was shitty and retarded even before taking the existance of the original into account really didn't help the situation. Talk about grinding salt into the wound. Whenever you're watching an anime and saying to yourself "this isn't even as good as Inuyasha", it's time to change the channel.

My anime recommendations? If you're looking for a wacky anime comedy, download Yakitate! Japan. You'll have to download it, because it hasn't been released outside of Japan - fansub only, kids! And if you want to watch an anime that takes a good, long look at how awful humanity really is, check out Now and Then, Here and There. If you saw Grave Of The Fireflies and said to yourself "if only this movie was made into a series and jam-packed with human suffering and war atrocities", well, this is the anime that you've been waiting for!

FrankTrollman wrote:

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

DO NOT WANT.

While I realize the original post included lots more words, for whatever reason, the exchange and usage of smilies made me laugh. A lot.

CA wrote:Yeah, the Divisions are in fact stupid and no one uses them anymore.

I'm too stupid to adhere to them anyway. Half the time, I fail to identify the fact that someone isn't "white." And of those screw ups, about half the people think it's cool that I'm retarded and can't figure out that they're of some different heritage, and the other half is offended that I haven't singled out their culture as different and cool.

CA wrote:However, geographically and culturally, your friend could be considered Asian. In western civ at college, the one thing the teacher repeatedly said was that Russians weren't "western" no matter how white they were, and certain cultures like the ancient Egyptians and modern Japanese ARE western nations no matter how not-white they were.

See, my Western Civ class didn't. Russia was settled by Swedes and Slavs, putting them in the distinctly western part of the world. Egypt was only western until Islam.

FrankTrollman wrote:




DO NOT WANT.

Who are you and what are you doing on Frank's account?

Wait, did you just say Kenshin was worse than Inuyasha? Seriously? I rate Inuyasha on the bottom and Kenshin somewhere near the middle if not a little lower.

"Grave of the fireflies" was a movie that i've never been able to finish. it tears me up way too much. it's great but I just can't do it.

edit: fixing tags from other posts.

I rate Inuyasha slightly higher because at first it seemed like it was going to be a nice little gothic Warring States period piece with a fantastical twist. So it held my interest up until, oh, Koga appeared and I realized that Rumiko Takahashi decided than rather than going with her original idea that got me hooked she'd make it into DBZ for girls.

I don't think Kenshin was all that awful, esp. compared to all of the other tripe out there, but Inuyasha especially blazes my balls because it feels like I was bait and switched.

@Heath Robinson -- Thanks for the explanation.

Tuatha de turiing (Cyber-Sidhe) -- I don't know if I should be amused/impressed/rocked/annoyed by that.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I rate Inuyasha slightly higher because at first it seemed like it was going to be a nice little gothic Warring States period piece with a fantastical twist. So it held my interest up until, oh, Koga appeared and I realized that Rumiko Takahashi decided than rather than going with her original idea that got me hooked she'd make it into DBZ for girls.

I don't think Kenshin was all that awful, esp. compared to all of the other tripe out there, but Inuyasha especially blazes my balls because it feels like I was bait and switched.

+1 except my thought process for inuyasha was more of a realization that absolutely nothing I cared about was going to actually change. At least in Kenshin (my introduction was the actual anime though I did find the movies more interesting) you at least saw characters change as the story progressed. In inuyasha the red coated jackass is STILL a red coated jackass in exactly the same fashion all the way up until I stopped watching it. Kenshin was almost pressured into killing a guy as soon as an able swordsman appeared.

Dammit, Youtube has purged some of the videos.

But I'll do my best to lay it out.

The OVA Frank saw was there was a background to Kenshin's past, showing where he came from and what he used to be. In the beginning of the series, he's goofy...but he's happy. He feels like that he could live his life like this, doing some good in the world, and not having to worry about his past. Except his past catches up with them. A couple people find out, and then word gets around and he gets increasingly unable to maintain the normal life he'd much prefer.

Then, in the arc I really, really, like, it turns out another of the manslayers from the Revolution is planning to crash Japan's government and take control himself, and institute a rule of absolute power and demand life go to pure chaos and survival of the fittest.

To keep the peace, Kenshin decides he might be willing to kill this guy, if he has to. I mean, Shishio (the villain) actually and vocally cares nothing for ordinary people and considers them worthless. This is bad news for the vast majority of the population--they'll really just be fodder. If someone stronger killed them, it's their fault for being weak.

Now, I know Frank saw an edit of the series because, really, there's people getting killed onscreen in the first five minutes of the show. And at more times than I can count throughout the series.

But the series won't be as dark as the OVA, because it's a TV series. The OVAs get more production values and tend to be more extreme. But even with the occasional discretion shot, Kenshin still stabs a dude in the actual face in a flashback, the only time I've seen an actual sword-stab in the face in any medium.

Also, Shishio gets mega-props for being so secure in his villain status, he has this seventeen-year-old kid as his right-hand man:

But what really gets me is that when the show wants to, it does some really awesome cinematography. Not all the time, mind. But in one episode, one of Kenshin's old enemies is looking for him in an official guise, and you, the viewer, knows he's an enemy, but he stands at the threshhold of the dojo, with a shot of his feet just outside the door's groove. When invited in, he steps over. There's other little details like that that help with the mood and lead the viewer in thinking things like "Oh god, he's in there with them now, he can kill them all when he wants to, and they wouldn't even know who he was."

I admit it has some flaws. Some are really egregious but they aren't widespread, not really. And a lot better than Sasuke being "I'll kill you all!" all the fucking time. There's two particular episodes that're massively unsatisfying and I like to think don't actually exist. But, the good parts redeem the series for me.

Cynic wrote:Wait, did you just say Kenshin was worse than Inuyasha? Seriously? I rate Inuyasha on the bottom and Kenshin somewhere near the middle if not a little lower.

Oh yeah. Kenshin was basically watching a retired 30th level character effortlessly pwning anyone that threatens his hippie commune. At least InuYasha has *some* pretense of dramatic tension, even if we know that he's going to win in the end.

Cynic wrote:"Grave of the fireflies" was a movie that i've never been able to finish. it tears me up way too much. it's great but I just can't do it.

Then I would definitely recommend that you check out Yakitate! Japan instead of Now & Then, Here & There.

Maria Holic is not exactly the most complex thing out there, but I find it hilarious. Like, really.

Superman: The Animated Series is pretty nifty, too.

It's not as good as Batman (but then, you need to get into things like Avatar to make that claim) but it's still hours of solid entertainment. There aren't really any story arcs aside from the times Darkseid shows up, but that show is still great. The Mr. Mxyzptlk and Lobo episodes are some of the funniest things you will ever see on television, period.

The Max Fleischer Superman cartoons are also worth watching, as long as you don't take it too seriously. It's entertaining, in a vaguely disturbing way, to watch Superman punch out mummies and Rocketeers. I wouldn't say that they're 'must-see' or even 'good'; they're sort of like the Looney Tunes cartoons from the 40s to 70s; they're worth stopping what you're doing to watch and genuinely interesting even beyond the historical curiousity value (unlike, say, Mighty Mouse), but don't go out of your way to seek them out or anything. The theme tune is worth listening to at least once, however, because it fucken rules.


If you still haven't gotten your fill of Western Superhero cartoons after Avatar/JLU/Superman/Batman you can also watch the Spider-Man and X-Men (the first one, I haven't seen X-Men: Evolution) cartoons. Unfortunately, storytelling for SMCs were just barely getting out of the experimental phases at this point; so these shows hang uncomfortably in that territory between 'average' and 'good'. I wouldn't recommend these shows to anyone who wasn't already interested in superhero cartoons, unlike I would with Batman and Avatar.