– Please stop posting your Haruhi episode order theory lists. Nobody actually knows the full breakdown of the episode order because somebody never bothered to make it official. Plus nobody can predict the future, not even me. How about some discussion on the episodes that we do have?
– While you’re at it stop telling me that “The God Empress” (or whatever name you want to call Haruhi) is back with a caption from the show as some sort of required proof. It’s like this you see…..I know already okay *gasp* . Tell me what you think about it, I’m all ears, but not that it happened because we’ve been past that point for about a month.
– Enough with the character marriage list thing from 2ch and trying to analyze it as a source of scientifically confirmed data. We might like to believe that these character marriage lists were based in some kind of forethought on the otaku’s part, but let’s just get real for a second here now, they are popularity polls. On the girl’s side you have the popular shonen characters and on the men’s side you have the popular moe characters. It’s a snapshot of a singular point in time, an uncontrolled study and very likely not even a proper cross section of the otaku population at that. In short fun times, but please just stop trying to attach any sort of significance to it.
– Please stop telling me how hot Megan Fox is when splayed out over the hood of a car. I’ve seen the picture, I get the idea here, but if all I cared about when watching my crappy incoherent over the top action blockbuster movie was a girl’s breasts then I would get myself a poster. Though in all honesty I’ve gotta level here, I find Megan Fox entirely unattractive. Shocking I suppose….
– Please stop trying to convince me that x company is trolling you, are the biggest trolls, whatever. Companies make boneheaded marketing decisions all the time, shit happens, doesn’t mean they’re out there pulling a 4chan on you. If they have a term for what they are doing (and by god I really hope they do and it’s as awesome as the one I’m about to come up with) then it’s probably some kind of business jargon and not netspeak, so let’s start calling what it is. Telecommunication Restriction Operations Limiting Liability In Necessary Groups.
– Please stop telling me that I need to read the source material for an adapation to truly appreciate a given show. If the show has something to prove I’m sure it can do it on it’s own without the help of its source work. After all that’s the point of an adaptation, to transfer the content from one medium to another in a manner that makes the media content itself workable within that new context, be it a movie, a TV show, an audio drama, a game, or whatever. If I need to know the source material before watching something then something has obviously gone wrong in this adaptation process.
– Finally please stop telling me that x show should be granted immunity from my analysis because it is what it is. No duh a show is what it is, I’d be kind of bewildered if it wasn’t and I’m sure the fabric of space and time would rip apart from the resulting contradiction of realities, but more importantly and since I digress I’ll just say that it’s kind of beside the point. A show being something doesn’t necessarily mean I find it entirely good at being that something, nor does it mean that I afford it an immediate dismissal either. Taking things as they come and evaluating them on those grounds with an injection of personal preference (and a handful of media courses), that’s how I prefer to look at shows. I’m no expert critic of course, but I do what I can and if I’ve misevaluated what a show is trying to be then by all means let me know, but do it make it convincing and be sure to show that you’ve put at least as much thought into the framework of said show as I have….preferrably more.
That is all.
When Anime Past Meets Present 
Wow, what brought this about? 🙂
Also, Kaioh Kaioh Kaioh, if you’re not even passably familiar with who the God Emperor of Mankind is (seriously, here: http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/The_Emperor), then you’ve no ide just why some of us who are both anime watchers AND Warhammer 40k players tongue-and-cheekly attach the appelation to Haruhi. It’s all in fun, though as with all things related to 40k, it’s also grimdark fun.
Nothing to say about the rest though, since I can’t even browse imageboards with my connection (my ISP has something against 2ch and 4ch haha), so no comments on memes I have no idea of.
All anime fans are literally children. News at 11.
@Myssa Rei: It’s Straight Up Saturdays, the feature where I just let it all hang out. As for God Emperor, I always tend to think of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_emperor_of_dune
Oh yeah, my stand on being familiar with the source material of an adaptation rather than just watching the adaptation itself in a vacuum is this rather akin to my utter UTTER hate of the Dead Author school of Literary Criticism (which asks someone to review a work as is, without taking into consideration context or background), in that there wouldn’t BE an adaptation without the source material, and without the actual source material to compare to, one cannot judge how an adaptation actual fares with regards to faithfulness, either verbatim or in thought.
Kaioh: Ah, Atreides. Sorry to disabuse you of the notion though, but the cracks people make about the God Emperor are ALMOST always about 40k’s God Emperor. Seriously. Plus you don’t get Latin in Dune (while we get that in SPADES in 40k), which makes incomprehensible ramblings masked in archaic tone hard to do. Haha.
Hmm, sorry, had a short session of being chewed out by my supervisor, haha. Anyway, given the line of study I’m pursuing, it’s been impressed upon me (or rather hammered into me by my professors) that one cannot really watch or read (and by extension, criticize) a work of fiction, print or otherwise, on its own, without properly knowing some of the following: the school of thought of the writer, the era the work was written in and the prevailing opinions of the time, the writer’s contemporaries, THEIR schools of thinking (which really influences their works) and whether it was in contention to that the creator holds.
It’s not much of a stretch to apply this way of thinking when it comes to adaptations. Although it’s not always viable (I mean really, you don’t see me rummaging around in Jinbochou looking for back-issues of the Irresponsible Captain Tylor books, do you?), I like having SOME background if and when I watch a series, though it doesn’t necessarily has to come BEFORE I actually watch it (for example, I watched ARIA the Natural first before I got acquainted with Kozue Amano’s manga). It gives me some context to work with, at least with regards to the execution of the adaptation, and gives me a measure of how faithful an adaptation truly is, with regards to Frame-for-Frame/Word-for-Word faithfulness or ‘Faithfulness of INTENT/Spirit’.
It’s one of the reasons why, despite the fact that I find Jun Maeda’s style of writing heavy-handed (to put it mildly), I can’t honestly say that I dislike the adaptations of his works, like CLANNAD or KANON, PRECISELY since I know a) the medium they were adapted from, b) the writing style of the creator, b) the inherent limitations of trans-medium adaptation. I mean, honestly, turning something inherently non-linear to a linear narrative AND HAVING IT MAKE SENSE is no small feat.
@Myssa Rei: Well I mean there was the ending to Clannad and all which sparked a huge debate (though not OMG IS LELOUCH ALIVE OR DEAD?!!!! levels) and divided some of the viewers right at the finish line. I think there the context of the source material actually did come into play in a big way, but more served to highlight something that was missing in the adaptation. Namely the idea that there was a timeloop going on, or so I’ve been told by people that played through all of the game on every conceivable route.
Don’t get me started on all of those theories that popped up to try to rationalize the animes ending either. Oh lordy lordy lordy, I’ll take the bizarre trend of posting Haruhi episode order theory lists all over anime forums and blogs over those any place any time.
Kaioh: I can state an even better example – GONZO’s Count of Monte Cristo. The transposition of the story into the far future aside, someone who was familiar with the novel would some of the additions and twists jarring (Peppo and Franz’s seeming mancrush on his best friend, the protagonist are egregious examples). You’d be surprised though that my father, who despite being well-read never actually perused the novel, found the Gonzo adaptation riveting and intriguing.
Having read both the novel AND seen the anime, I’m in a better position to comment on the fact that, oh, GONZO seemed to have done the novel better in many aspects, such at presenting just how much a master manipulator Edmund Dantes was, and how TWISTED the count had become because of his need for vengeance, whereas the source material seemed to present him as, well, Superman.
As for CLANNAD, well, that did lead to some amusing Wild Mass Guessing – though honestly, given the Slice of Life vibe of CLANNAD, really, how WOULD you explain that the protagonist was Dead To Begin With? – while the rest of us game players just sagely nodded our heads and smiled.
I can never understand why people complain about stuff not being a cut-and-paste of the source material – a book is a book and a book can’t be a movie without some drastic changes. Its a completely different medium. The prime example of this would probably be Kubrick’s version of Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange” – the source material is essentially similar but they end up completely different because a straight adaptation of Burgess’ novel would not make as strong of a point Kubrick wanted to make.
As I said at the start, anime fans are literally children. Anything different from their holy milquetoast original source matieral and they cry foul. I’d rather see if the direction can, well, “adapt” the source material into a TV anime show. An example right now would be Valkyria Chronicles where, while it a pretty bad show, the story has been made a whole lot more interesting by focusing less on Galia’s beatdown on the USSR but on the relationships and the (silly) politics. Not surprisingly, people who have a raging hard-on for the military industrial complex aren’t happy about the changes.
HAHAHAHAHA IT’S POINTLESS TO TRY TO DEMAND ANYTHING OF THE INTERNET HAHAHAHAHAHA.
@anonymous: Simplified priorities maybe? It’s easier to just say that any change from the source is auto-bad and be dismissive rather than to sit down and consider if it’s hurting the story.
From what I know of Kubrick he didn’t compromise. If he didn’t like the way a project was going or was asked to make changes by producers then he would sooner abandon it rather than have his vision of something tampered. That’s just the way it had to be with him.
One last thing though, I can think of an example where critics have almost unanimously agreed that overwhelming faithfulness to recreating a source book shot for shot ended up hurting a movie. Watchmen. Many critics panned the director for what they saw as making the movie look like a sequence of comic book frames in motion rather than trying to take advantage of what the motion picture offers as a medium in terms of vision and creativity in the 21st century. There’s such a thing as playing it to safe after all.
@omisyth: Saying please is being demanding now?
Please blog Kanamemo. That is all.
PS: http://www.starchild.co.jp/special/kanamemo/
Just in case.
Hah-hah-hah!!! Yes!!! I’m not the only one!!! I think Megan Fox is unattractive too!!!! (It also helps that I have a girlfriend who, to me, is beautiful beyond words, but even before I met her, I still thought Megan Fox looked weird.)