As it says on the tin, this is a blog that will cover entertainment and my personal opinions on the subjects at hand.
Author: Tiberius
Here, you will find a variety of opinions in anything and everything concerning entertainment. Movies, games, animation, music, TV; if it's a form of entertainment consumed by many, I may have written about it or I plan to do so in the future. Unless otherwise specified, expect weekly updates each Friday.
I haven’t forgotten about this month’s release of the latest chapter. Just spent the last two days studying it and organizing my thoughts so far. Based on what I saw of this chapter, we have more exposition of what we saw in the first two chapters followed by a last-minute twist.
Of the things introduced and explained in the chapter, Boruto expands on what the Uzuhiko technique. The basics are that it’s tied to the planet’s rotation. If hit with the Jutsu, the afflicted will be hit with a semi-permanent sense of “the spins,” so to speak. It can run for as long as the Jutsu caster (read: Boruto) desires, or until the afflicted (read: Code) dies — and this new teenage Boruto seems to be happy with the latter.
A technique that causes whoever’s hit by it to nearly infinitely spin in some manner… that sounds familiar…
Honestly, not the first time the franchise made a JoJo reference.
So let’s backtrack a bit in regard to the Rasengan. So far we have the following users:
Jiraiya
Minato Namikaze
Konohamaru Sarutobi
Naruto Uzumaki
Boruto Uzumaki
Sasuke Uchiha*
Kakashi Hatake
For Sasuke, he used it as a demonstration before asking Boruto if he could develop it himself. After that, he went through an intense and heated training session from Konohamaru before revealing to Sasuke the results of admittedly three days of training. Before him, Naruto worked on the Jutsu with Jiraiya’s guidance for little over a week, and before him, Minato developed the Jutsu over the course of three years.
Furthermore, Minato’s direct legacy has accidentally or deliberately put their own spin on the Jutsu, no pun intended. Naruto developed the Rasenshuriken, a powerful Jutsu that was unfortunately shelved as a double-edged sword, at least until the Akatsuki brought Pain to the Leaf Village.
For Boruto, the first of several variants had come in the form of the Vanishing Rasengan, though he didn’t acknowledge it until he, Sasuke, and the Gokage fought Momoshiki in the other dimension.
So this Jutsu keeps Code immobile yet conscious to answer a question on Boruto’s mind: the location and status of the Ten Tails. Keep this nugget in mind, it’ll be important toward the end. Just as the interrogation gets moving, Leaf ninja respond to the rogue ninja in their village, among the responding party is the object of Boruto’s vengeance: Kawaki. Speaking of Kawaki, he was in contact with Shikamaru who gives him the go-ahead for a kill order, but the opportunity is missed when Code summons a claw grime to escape through.
Earlier I wrote that Boruto was asking about whether Code knew the location and status of the Ten Tails. Out of concern for the safety of the world? Well, let me clarify: the tone of voice suggested by the panel was less of a desperation and concern and more of a boast, as if to say that after 2.5 years of training and keeping an eye out for Code, Boruto is finally one step ahead. This is where that twist comes in: before Code could get away, Boruto planted a mechanical toad on Code’s person.
Kawaki lost his chance to deliver the final blow and will most likely blame Boruto for allowing him to run off, but the last panel reveals why he allowed him to get away. Observe:
So now we wait for the week of November 20 to learn how this happened to the Ten Tails. Was it Boruto’s doing? Borushiki? Did he learn it from Sasuke? However we get to that answer it will likely be over the course of the next few months. As far as this chapter goes, it steadily creeps back into the trickle down expositional method that seems to be more emblematic of Kishimoto than Kodachi who seemed to employ what I believe was a healthy zigzag pattern of storytelling.
Clearly, I’d like to see more of this from the succeeding chapters, but it’ll probably be until at least January or February when we get more of these types of answers, and while this is largely fantasy, some of the answers to be revealed may ironically be less fantastical than whatever theories are out there proposing. But we’ll get them soon enough.
The topic of VTubers is somewhat old hat as of writing this so nothing I write will be new, but my posts since the beginning have mostly always been like that so structurally, nothing’s changing. As for the topic itself, others have mentioned VTubers in the past before and more succinctly so I won’t go into the history as much here. But in case you’re curious on what VTubers are, Gigguk is down below to catch you up to speed. Granted, the video is from October 2020, but all things considered the landscape hasn’t changed all that much.
Channel: Gigguk
All in all, there’s some debate over the beginning of VTubing, but it’s widely accepted that the VTuber Kizuna Ai is the one to spread the idea and popularize it worldwide. Kizuna Ai debuted in November 2016, and many more have followed, mostly of Japanese origin though several from outside Japan, notably the U.S. and U.K. have had their own similar debuts. It wasn’t until 2020, that I was exposed to many of the VTubers mentioned in the video above and the talent agencies (known as tarentos in Japan) that host them and these days many of the notable and newer ones have in some manner populated my feed.
Call me paranoid and nonsensical, but I’d never had that much trust in a machine or any such program. The irony to this was that when I was in Army boot camp initially, I was set for a military occupational specialty (MOS) that would’ve had me working with telecoms networking at the time and here I am with a man vs. technology complex. It’s not all that special, humans have always looked at the strange and foreign with suspicion, but for me it’s just irrational. When I was 16, I binged all the Terminator movies in the lead up to the great disappointment known as Terminator: Genisys and I’ve always chalked that up to the reason I look at new tech with the stink eye.
Nowadays, I don’t really mind the direction AI tech is going since most of the time we’re merely putting in silly prompts and in my case, general history questions. Could we one day mess around and find out Skynet style? Who knows? We’ve got to wait and see. For my exposure to VTubers, it wasn’t around 2019 going into ’20 that I’d gotten more exposure, mostly by proxy through the Trash Taste Podcast when the boys invited VTuber Mori Calliope to the show.
Channel: Trash Taste
And it wouldn’t be the only time a VTuber appeared on the podcast or even individually with the boys on their own channels. Speaking of Kizuna Ai, Joey had her on his channel a few years ago. Gigguk did a few rare collabs with the likes of Hime Hajime, and followers of CDawgVA, the thickest Welsh boy, are very familiar with his dear friend Ironmouse and the pathetic VTuber Rainhoe. These are all jokes, of course. Check them all out when you have the time.
I’d say that VTubers like these helped introduce me to others in my feed as well as the talent agencies that host them. As explained by Gigguk in the first video here, some of the appeal of VTubers comes from the personality themselves and/or the associated lore, other times there’s something unique that comes with VTubers especially in the realm of video gaming where you’ll find a lot of them, and the rest of the time they’re recounting humorous or embarrassing stories or otherwise screwing around. No matter how many clips I find in my feed, this one of VTuber Amano Pikamee making a JoJo reference is always a personal favorite of mine.
Channel: Giobun
But even outside the realm of traditional entertainment, sometimes YouTubers outside Japan have jumped aboard the trend themselves for a variety of reasons and purposes. Back in April, I recommended the YouTube channel Rev Says Desu for his commentary on controversies in and around the anime community, notably in online forums like Twitter. Rev himself uses a VTuber model in his videos and often due to the nature of the content within his videos, he’s normally subject to demonetization at the least and harassment at the most, largely because many of the people he puts on blast from Twitter are a minority of firebrands. Most of Twitter isn’t like that I’m aware, but this is more of a problem of popular and social media giving a lot of power to people who demonstrate that they shouldn’t have it. An age-old bugbear that should’ve been exterminated years ago.
On a more lighthearted note, the messing around, joke around, fun type of VTuber is the kind that has its appeal the world over and has inspired individuals outside Japan as well as English language options being made available for Japan-based VTubers, including but not limited to those associated with the Nijisanji and/or Hololive agencies, sometimes spawning collabs and memes especially in forums like r/Animemes or its sister forum r/goodanimemes. For a while, Gawr Gura and Watson Amelia were featured quite a bit in these subs as one example.
Creator: phdpigeon
And there’s lots more fanart and such to go around.
For my mileage, I’ve come to accept that VTubers are another arm of Japanese pop culture jumping ship and spreading to the rest of the world and rapidly. As Gigguk had mentioned in the above video, some would argue that it’s a fad, a passing fancy, but 2024 is down the street and we still have VTubers debuting these days long after Kizuna Ai helped break the mold, most likely with aid from pioneers from years before. Whatever comes after VTubers I think it’ll be a while before we see it.
This week’s recommendation is a channel known as The4thSnake.
I’ve mentioned this channel on other posts before. This channel is dedicated mainly to fighting games, their lore, and individual plot points, but takes it a step further by mentioning the plots of specific characters over the course of a series’ timeline, clarifying messy plot points, among other stuff. The4thSnake specializes in Mortal Kombat lore and collabs loads of times with another channel I’ve mentioned before: TrueUnderDawgGaming. And since Mortal Kombat 1 has been out for about a month at this point, both of them are set to capitalize on the new lore brought about by this latest installment of Mortal Kombat.
I close off this weekend threefold dive on a depressing note about a company that I have an interesting relationship with. Not interesting in a negative way, more like in the sense that I found out about the company by proxy, but didn’t dedicate myself to watching it regularly until I discovered a series that really grabbed me. Notably, this one:
To elaborate further, I recall in early 2013 hearing about Dead Space 3 and at the time, I used to binge watch the YouTube channel TheRadBrad as my one and only source of gameplay on that specific game. Later in the year, I came back to play catch-ups on my way into the 10th grade and at the time, ads on YouTube weren’t as problematic as they are today. One of those ads was about a bunch of geeks from a channel called Achievement Hunter dressing one of their kids up in a suit full of screens and monitors to mimic the Internet.
This ad ran for quite some time, but I remember furiously mashing the mouse on the Skip Ad button because I needed, needed to watch more footage of this Dead Space 3 gameplay. I hadn’t thought about that ad ever since and I think when I tried looking for it on the Rooster Teeth website, I couldn’t find anything on it, but over the years, I’d be further exposed to Rooster Teeth by proxy, from old Achievement Hunter guides and references to what was then the game with the Guinness World Record for Most F-bombs Dropped.
It lost this record to Grand Theft Auto V by a mountainous margin, by the way. By 2018, I was in community college and a subscriber of WatchMojo.com, one of their videos being published during the New Year being that of a video about online animated shows that were worth a watch, the runner-up as I recall being the anime-style series RWBY spearheaded by the late Monty Oum.
In my research years ago, I’d learned that the martial artist and cinematographer had credits in machinima (not that one) after choreographing a video known as Haloid, a blend of elements from Halo and elements from Metroid including their star characters, Master Chief and Samus respectively.
He sneak-peeked the last series he would ever work on on Rooster Teeth’s main channel in November 2012, debuted its first episode in Fall of 2013 and continued to work on the series until sadly losing his life due to an allergic reaction during a standard medical procedure in February 2015, after which RT vowed to pick up the slack and keep the show going. In the beginning, the CGI used to make the show was imperfect but the fighting choreography was stellar and spectacular. I remember hearing from a different WatchMojo.com video that when Bruce Lee was on camera, the studios had to slow it down to capture his moves, and I remember rewatching scenes like that whenever I came across Monty Oum’s work on either RWBY or Rooster Teeth’s other flagship series, Red vs Blue.
Following Oum’s death, RWBY’s animation started to look crisper, but at the cost of the plot. When I tried looking for evidence of trouble under the hood for RWBY, I couldn’t find a lot of information that was still available after all this time. The controversies around just RWBY are enough for their own blog post that I may make in the future, but from what I remember and have read in forums, creatives at RWBY or just in Rooster Teeth would pitch ideas only for others to steal and discredit them later on. The accusations are serious and outside of Twitlongers and written descriptions of the associated actions, there’s not a lot of physical evidence that is guaranteed to stay up with a history of slamming legitimate critics and trolls indiscriminately, but that’s getting ahead of the game. Still, it sets the tone for what’s going to be covered in this post. I’ve covered how I discovered and eventually subscribed to Rooster Teeth; here comes the part where I unearth the parts that drove me away from them, and for many watching, the story may sound somewhat familiar.
Long time fans of RT may recall when Levar Burton’s daughter Mica Burton joined the Achievement Hunter boys for a short time and appeared so far in about two episodes, a Minecraft Let’s Play and an Off Topic Podcast episode.
During the podcast appearance, I believe she brought forth a criticism leveraged against her, but in a display of the Streisand effect, further criticism and harassment followed. In April 2018, she moved back to LA to continue a career in acting, for a long time, it was speculated that fan backlash caused her to leave, but both Mica and her father pointed the finger at RT for failing to defend her during this time.
Sometime later in December 2018, Machinima’s (yes, that one) old assets and Rooster Teeth merged into Otter Media which was then bought out by Warner Bros. When companies merge, often that means that multiple people in similar roles at different companies are now in those same roles at one company and so the summer of 2019 brought layoffs to Rooster Teeth Productions with some of the Achievement Hunter crew on the chopping block as well. About 50 people were axed by September of that year and the following month, after riding the waves of success with Rooster Teeth original shorts and skits earlier that year, the company came down and hard.
One of the original founders, Burnie Burns, announced that he and his then-fiancé, Ashley, were off to start anew in Australia, technically making him the second figure to be absent from RT content except for RVB, the other being a man I always referred to as the Ghost of RT with how little he showed up, Jason Saldaña.
Then again, r/roosterteeth explained that Jason’s not the kind of guy to get in front of the camera like that, being present in only two skits to date, while the rest of his work is either voiced or far away from RT. And fair enough, founding a company doesn’t mean being its face, and I think Jason is one of the only few free of any RT-related controversies, unless this is his testimony:
Channel: Rooster Teeth
The controversies, however, would further mount. I said yesterday that 2020 would be forgotten due to all that went wrong that year though that was in the context of a manga that debuted that year. In this context, a lot went wrong for Rooster Teeth and then some. During the summer BLM protests, the company and much of the entertainment industry as a whole in the West vowed to make changes and have conversations about racism after witnessing then-Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin kneel on George Floyd’s neck after nearly nine minutes, Rooster Teeth being one of them.
After this, the company seemed to be on a right track, quickly amending this injustice after heeding comments made by the Burtons before and former member Fiona Nova at the time, but trouble was still brewing behind the scenes. Rooster Teeth hasn’t had the best approach to handling criticism before or since. During one Off Topic Podcast episode in June 2020, they used to go by the internet-wide mantra of “don’t feed the trolls,” only to go back on this and fight them hard which some believe led to the adverse effect of two of their members being exposed for unsavory behavior, Ryan Haywood of Achievement Hunter and Adam Kovic of Funhaus, another RT production.
This was exposed in October 2020 when Kovic was fired for what I think was trespassing, though his transgressions were lumped in with Ryan Haywood’s behavior which was even worse. Over the years, it had been found out through doxing on 4chan that he was grooming several AH fans, some of whom were under the age of consent. Many of them came out and recounted being threatened into silence and in late October 2020, AH’s Jack Pattillo and Michael Jones issued a statement that Ryan was gone from the company for good. Any and all instances of his history at the company were scrubbed, save for archives from the last decade, his Twitch channel was axed in January of 2021 and that was seemingly the end of that save for a brief return to the Internet the first week of January.
That being said, scrubbing the company of unscrupulous personalities while keeping good people in seemed to be especially hard in the years since. Not exactly limited to RT as a whole (as attested by r/Army among others), but of all the places to have nepotism and favoritism, a production company with as of yet incomplete series is one of the worst places to have it. Away from the behind the scenes controversies that are causing people to leave, some shows are tanking or were ruined by executive meddling. Their show, gen:LOCK hit the ground running in the first season, but the second season makes Seven Deadly Sins season 3 look like a Spielberg production.
Channel: Mrcheese
And wouldn’t you know it, behind the scenes drama had an adverse effect on the production of this series while others either went on silent hiatus or were canned without our knowledge. RWBY still has no news behind, the series Recorded by Arizal has been silent since January 2021 (which was one series I was really looking forward to), and Nomad of Nowhere from a few years before that only has one season, but was set up for a few more to follow.
Now, most studios behind a lot of our favorite series and movies have had behind the scenes setbacks before, and only a few of the productions have been muddled or ruined by bad decisions from on high. But RT’s acquisition and shifting of hands and responsibilities seems to be a case of ruinous overstretching, and axing many decent series only to see a good series start strong and end badly.
So the problems that have kept me from any such RT-related content comes from:
the failure of the staff to take care of their members
behind the scenes controversies
firing or letting the wrong people go (see: Vic Mignogna)
putting the wrong people in positions of power; and
letting the wrong people head delicate projects (see: Gray Haddock)
They did get a success boost during the pandemic focusing on their several podcasts, some of which I listened to at the time, but it seems that those may be the last few reliable sources of income with recent videos failing to garner the same views as they had in the early-to-mid 2010s while the ones that do are trounced with an abysmal like-to-dislike ratio visible only to those who use the addons.
Several YouTubers have made videos on RT’s decline and possible downfall which seems more and more likely now that they’ve been moving their popular series onto their website, citing ad revenue issues. I read one comment under a Clownfish TV video that claimed that much of what’s been going on with Rooster Teeth has also happened to Machinima about a decade ago.
If that is the case, then it serves as a lesson for what the people can do to avoid this next time if RT goes under. It just crossed the 20-year mark since its founding and while I was there mainly for RWBY and Achievement Hunter, I wouldn’t have minded the changes made if they were consistent and kept up with the tempo of the company based on what I’d seen since. New personalities with their own comedic takes and such can keep things new and fresh and even produce their own talents within or without the talent, as seen with the Red Web podcast or the game show Chump. So it’s not like RT can’t attract talent; rather the people they have to answer to above them appear to be chasing short-term trends hoping for long-term benefits and it’s anyone’s guess really as to whether that means good or bad things for a project.
As for the future of RT, that’s up in the air. The personalities that left in the years prior have found their success in other ventures, and I believe the ones still there will be able to stay afloat wherever they end up. They’ve got repertoires of content that would make for a better revival of G4TV for example instead of what we got last year, but it’ll be a hard day for much of the long-time personalities and the diehard fans and the shows they love. It’ll take a hell of a miracle to bring them back up to speed if it still can. If you want a channel that covers Rooster Teeth more concisely, I personally recommend this channel: TheSneezingMonkey for more details.
If you’ve been following this blog since the beginning, you may recall months ago when I wrote about a manga where select people get random powers of negation, as in what would normally happen to someone else doesn’t happen to the negator themselves. Lots of luck? This person gets none. Mortal? Not gonna happen. Approachable? There’s a literal barrier that keeps you from getting close. This manga is known as Undead Unluck. Created by Yoshifumi Tozuka on January 20, 2020 (the events since, my god), it’s up to 18 volumes as of writing this with 11 currently translated for an international audience. It was recently picked up for an anime adaptation in August 2022, and it’s first episode debuted on October 7, 2023 on Hulu with weekly releases to follow.
It’s too early to tell whether it’ll run for 12-13 episodes or 24-26 episodes, so this post will be a first impression of the first episode and whenever the first season ends, I’ll review it in bulk with comparisons to the manga. If the title, didn’t give it away, I’m gonna spoil episode 1. So go watch the first episode if you haven’t already, then come back when you’re all caught up.
Speaking of which, the first episode is already markedly different from the first chapter. Being early 2020, no one could predict the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic then. On a side note: I first read about it in December 2019 and said to myself, “That’s unfortunate, but as long as it stays there [in Wuhan], we have nothing to worry about.” My words were delicious, thanks for asking.
Anyway, no one knew about the pandemic’s global impact in January, news was still getting out back then, and I bring this up because the manga starts in August 2020, deep into the pandemic with lockdown and travel restrictions in place across the world. This is reflected in the anime as the first scene shows the protagonist Fuuko Izumo set to self-delete from atop a trainline with only Andy, a.k.a. Undead watching from the other side. In the manga, she was surrounded by bystanders who were attempting to bring her back to safety but were stopped when she produced a knife.
Andy still walks into the blade and touches Fuuko’s face hoping to catch some of her Unluck ability, and like clockwork, the platform collapses beneath him, causing him to fall onto an incoming train. In the manga, they show the disruption of service due to the fall, but the anime skips past that and immediately shows Undead sprouting a new body from his head.
In the anime, members of an antagonistic agency (revealed later in the manga, I won’t spoil too much) show up to apprehend Undead, but he takes Fuuko with him and flees. In the manga, with the world still being populated, a civilian witness attempts to alert the cops on an out-of-context scenario involving a naked man and a young woman in public (honestly, much of the manga is just “Out of Context” the series; it’s unbelievable).
In both the manga and the anime, Undead and Fuuko stop at a building rooftop with Undead dangling Fuuko over the edge until she explains her Unluck ability. She explains it and although it was given a single page in the manga, the anime elaborated further on this. It starts with scenes alternating between Fuuko’s last connection with her parents before the accident, and scenes from the romance manga she was reading.
The anime had introduced them early, but by this point in the manga, after being saved from an accidental slip and fall from the rooftop, the antagonistic agency, represented by men in black suits observes their target making a run for it to an abandoned site. At the site, Fuuko’s jacket snags and she loses her beanie which kept her hair under wraps for years since no hairdresser or stylist could cut it without dropping dead. At the same time, Undead is maintaining as much skin contact with Fuuko while he cuts her hair so that he can test a few hypotheses, mainly is the impact influenced by duration or surface area?
Well, he doesn’t really get that answer since this agency of black suits tracks him down to his hideout and lops off his head. They put the head in a container and handcuff Fuuko, but the Unluck comes in clutch to save the two as one of the black suits gets zapped. Undead regenerates everything below the neck and removes the card he keeps in his head as a restrictor of sorts to cut them all down to size. Between the manga and the anime, this scene is a mix of gore and action.
The main guy in a black suit holds Fuuko at sword-point and threatens to behead her too if Undead doesn’t surrender his own head. Neither of them agree to that and when Fuuko breaks free and kisses Undead on the cheek, a meteorite decimates the abandoned hospital. With just a single cell of him left, Undead regenerates full and takes the black suit’s sword as a keepsake. Putting two and two together, he realizes that neither duration nor surface area have anything to do with the Unluck reciprocated and that it may be more connected to feelings of affection. Working with that as the going hypothesis, Undead, now christened “Andy” as a play on words (works better in Japanese) by Fuuko, half-jokingly proposes that they’ll both get their desired death if they have sex… which Fuuko is clearly not keen on as they both just met. And that’s where chapter 1/episode 1 leaves off.
For my impression, I say that if follows the manga as best as it can with a few nods to real life changes. Then again, for obvious reasons, the COVID pandemic and probably by extension the year 2020 aren’t going to be referenced very heavily in media unless it’ll be for alternate changes to reflect real life or for an alternate timeline of sorts. I liked what they did in just the first episode. This being, David Production, the people who brought us JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, I didn’t worry all that much about how it would look or turn out.
This studio tends to live up to their reputation and they made Undead Unluck look pretty good for the beginning. I didn’t think they’d expand further on the origin of Fuuko’s Unluck ability with the plane explosion, but from a narrative standpoint, it’s cool to see what we’re expecting going forward. The same goes for the scenes of Fuuko’s romance manga. This is connected to the plot many chapters into the manga, but without spoiling this again, DP seems to be playing the long game of adaptation with the foreshadowing in just this episode and likely more to follow.
If the anime is 1-cour running for 12 or 13 episodes, then the last episode should air on December 23 or 30 of this year. Alternatively, if it’s 2-cour running for 24 or 26 episodes then it should wrap up its first season by either March 16 or March 30, 2024. Whichever of those comes first, I’ll save a spot in my schedule for that and cover it in a post in the future.
Call me biased in favor of the series, but I’m glad to see something I cheerlead for in the beginning get one of its dues and I hope I can say the same for The Elusive Samurai when it releases in 2024.
Tomorrow I’ll be covering a media company that is on a slow and steady decline. Stay tuned. Here’s a hint:
Normally, I have one topic ready to go every Friday and planned on several weeks in advance. This week and into the weekend, I want to try something different, something special. A lot has occurred both in real life and the entertainment sector that may become old and stale if I add them to the empty spaces on my planner document (which goes into March 2024 as of writing this), so for today, I’ll cover my thoughts on animation today, tomorrow October 14, I will cover an anime adaptation that I’d been looking forward to personally, and on Sunday, October 15, I’ll cover the misfortunes of a company that, honestly, feels like it’s been on life support for a while now, each with sneak peeks at the end. Unlike this one, no YouTube recommended channels will be featured for those posts–just this one. Now to begin proper.
Since I was a kid, I remember part of my day was complete or going expressly well when I could turn on the TV after speeding through my homework and catching up on my favorite cartoons. Funny enough, a lot of what I liked at the time is now remembered as genuinely creepy and weird. Observe:
And it wasn’t just this one. Courage the Cowardly Dog, Invader Zim, The Secret Show, Kappa Mikey, Martin Mystery, and several other shows that I was always convinced I was the only one watching. The draw for me, aside from a series of moving drawings, was that a lot of them were so unique. They had their own art styles, plots, some of them were spearheaded by comic book artists, such as in the case of Invader Zim’s creator Jhonen Vasquez and Kaput and Zosky creator Lewis Trondheim.
They also had an air of black comedy embedded in the structure of the series, often based on works published prior. When these shows were picked up by Nickelodeon or its sister network Nicktoons, they were often marketed towards children, though often needed to keep the darker elements under wraps to avoid censorship. Still, a lot of stuff got through the cracks. Like this scene: [content warning].
And this wouldn’t be the only time, shockingly, that someone’s organs were outside them.
For all the flack cartoons have gotten for being “childish” and “immature,” it’s easy to forget that the pioneers of old like Disney, Warner Bros. and MGM had darker themes in a lot of their old cartoons. Never mind the modern day creepypastas featuring Mickey Mouse and co.; think about how many old cartoons had gun violence in them. Where else do you think we get this meme template?
I bring this all up, not so much to rant about cartoons getting soft, but more so to contextualize why I think animation and cartoons have become something of a laughingstock in the West. Ridiculous violence and anthropomorphic animals aside, it’s not like this was all western animation studios were throwing out since the 1960s onwards.
Think about comic book adaptations, like all those of Batman or Spider-Man or the X-Men. All of those comics and many successors trusted their audience, no matter how young they could’ve been, to understand the complicated themes and plot points within. For one such example, the YouTube channel, Shady Doorags, frequently covers animation and animated shows and their many mature themes. Even shows that had a high child and preteen audience like Teen Titans was covered several times, and this episode he covered earlier this year seems to have been one of the more mature ones in the series.
When referring to mature animated shows retroactively, there’s now a distinction between a show that’s mature and a show that’s adult. King of the Hill, The Boondocks, Black Dynamite, and Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy and American Dad are all mature and handle maturity in different ways, through satire, social commentary, the politics within certain hot-button issues (especially if those issues are still front and center today), or some combination of all these.
By stark contrast, some recent animated shows go straight for the fences without the maturity or class of some of the older shows. I need more fingers to count the themes in a South Park or King of the Hill episode, but I’d struggle for something like that show Fairview or Legends of Chamberlain Heights among others. The same goes for maligned reboots of well-beloved properties. You probably know about the 2016 reboot of Powerpuff Girls or Teen Titans Go! or worse Velma, or if not, you know them all by their sour reputations among fans of the original properties.
Whenever I look into the main sources of criticism, similar talking points come about. Lazy art-styles, crude and purposeless humor, mean-spirited humor, a grave misunderstanding of the subject matter, and often the worst of the criticism relates to pandering. Pandering to a demographic that had a hissy fit on social media; pandering to an underrepresented demographic, likely because that specific demographic is literally extremely few in number; pandering to demographics that suffer from an advanced case of white savior complex. The types that won’t really watch the property, but will lie on the internet to look more virtuous than the person they’re arguing with over the keyboard, even if they’re talking to someone who has volunteered before in the past.
Altogether, it brings back problems animation and fans of animation were certain they’d dealt with years prior and this new generation of animators seem to be fighting an old battle. I’m looking in from the outside, but some of the recent shows coming out don’t do burgeoning animators any favors, especially if you’re familiar with what Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are responsible for. Sometimes I only know about it because channels like Clownfish TV have experience and expertise on their design philosophy.
When I started conceptualizing this topic, at first I was going to write from the standpoint of award shows, but then I remembered some of the shows I mentioned in this post in passing have gotten recognition from awards boards in the past and even now so if there’s a group of people I’m asking or nearly begging to respect animation, it may be the studios that greenlight them and some of the animators that work on them. From my old high school art class, I remember learning of the philosophy of knowing the rules before breaking them, as in, learn how to draw before you put your own spin on things, and this rings true for all of animation. There’s a stark difference between Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry and the Pink Panther/The Inspector art-wise, and even animator-wise. Walt Disney and Friz Freleng were not the same people, but they both learned to draw somehow.
And this is true of today’s animators. You know the old saying: Rome wasn’t built in a day. It takes a lot of skill, craft, and imagination to make a disciplined practice look so undisciplined. Think about how radically different medieval music is compared to Black Sabbath. And for animation, there was a lot of respect for the creators of this:
And the studios that brought us animations like this:
The simple and obvious solution for modern day animators is multifaceted, though to take an example from the military would be to look at who’s at the top of the chain of command. I would never doubt the capabilities of a studio today since most of the time they’re only doing what they’re told; rather my efforts would be better focused on the people they answer to. Clownfish TV mentions names like Disney’s pair of Bobs, Chapek and Iger, as well as investors ignorantly chasing lightning bolts with an open mason jar, confident that it’ll hit the bottle and not them.
Then again, if we’re looking at the investor angle, as risky as it is to put your eggs on an untapped market, it’s equally risky to go for the diminished returns for obvious reasons. Call it the centrist approach, but why not blend the two together? Put a few eggs in the new and unforeseen while keeping the rest in safety boxes, only moving when things go consistently south. If the new thing fails, you still have some pennies, and when the old things lose favor, you can pull out before you lose everything. Oversimplified solution? Well, again I’m no expert. It’s just something I could see myself doing if given the resources to do so.
For this week’s recommendation, I bring you to the channel sydsnap.
The channel, run by Sydney Maneetapho (née Poniewaz), covers anime and manga, but a more adult-oriented type variety of each, namely hentai. Sydney often recommends some of her own favorite series often for the sake of some guilty pleasure, but also because between all the exposure and nudity, some of the authors and artists behind these hentai have credits writing manga for general audiences, such as in the case with the author of Don’t Toy with Me, Nagatoro-san. She’s even interviewed several names in the adult entertainment industry, like retired porn actress, Kaho Shibuya, or active porn actress, June Lovejoy. If you’re looking for some recommendations or would like to learn more about topics of this nature, most of sydsnap’s videos cover this in detail or alternatively, a donation can be made to her associated Patreon page to get past the censors.
I will return tomorrow with an impression of a long-awaited adaptation.
Regular readers know the nature of this blog: obscure, unheard of, niche unsung series; and occasionally something popular that’s ongoing. Following that trend, I bring to you a manga that not only had a small fanbase for its duration, but was also cancelled before it could spread its wings and take proper flight: Black Torch by Tsuyoshi Takaki
I caught onto this quite early in 2017. It’s first chapter was included in a manga published by Viz Media about upcoming series at the time, and fun fact: this same manga showcase series had the first chapter of Demon Slayer in it.
Black Torch is about a young man named Jiro Azuma, a street punk who has the gift of Eliza Thornberry — talking to animals. One day, he meats a Mononoke taking the form of a black cat called Rago who tells him (with a cynical tone) that there are many more Mononoke like him who exist to cause chaos in the world. One of them mortally wounds Jiro and Rago possesses the boy, bringing him back to life and they defeat the Mononoke that killed him, only for he and Rago to be subdued by a special operations unit trained in shinobi martial arts for the purpose of tracking and eliminating evil Mononoke.
There’s some nuance to the plot. In Japanese folklore, Mononoke are perceived the same way as demons here in the West; wicked creatures who lurk in the dark and take possession of the innocent. The concept is similar in Japan, though in Black Torch, as seen in Rago and one or two other characters, not all Mononoke are pure evil. And for Rago’s case, well, he’s a cat and I think cat owners can relate to this aspect.
So let’s rewind and assess that for a bit. A demon that takes the shape of a household pet takes possession of an adolescent after he dies in a violent manner, and both the demon and the young man are recruited into a special division of demon hunters whose mission is to destroy the evil demons, sometimes working with the good ones or those not powerful enough to be a world-ending threat. Where have I heard that plot before?
You can chalk this up more so to coincidence than an outright ripoff of sorts. Black Torch ran for five volumes between December 2016 and March 2018. CSM debuted December 2018 and is still running today. No doubt you’ve seen what the community regards as season 1 of the anime. I know I did. 12 different ending themes; imagine being the accountant for MAPPA.
It’s easy to make it look like I’m jealous that a manga that tried this first failed while another one succeeded, but delving deeper into the Black Torch manga reveals why. It was more than just the framework of the manga. Yonks ago, I learned that a dispute between Takaki and the publisher were why his manga was axed so early in its run. In my research for this post, I found that online discourse has its own opinions for why the manga suffered. In animanga spaces around forums like Reddit, some believe that it was trying to copy Bleach but was about a decade late and a yen short. Others thought it was a case of style over substance. And a third opinion, by this blog called Tower City Media Video, proclaims that the second biggest killer was pacing. I’d like to go over these points, though I won’t be talking about the publication issue since most of the time that stuff is handled away from public eyes, presumably to keep the press from ruining an ongoing process.
It’s not like there’s no market for edgy manga. Bleach, Tokyo Ghoul, Chainsaw Man and even Black Torch have that approach among others, but they all do it differently. Chainsaw Man does it by having the protagonist be an orphan with missing limbs thanks to his deadbeat dad’s irresponsible debt to the Yakuza, and when the boy can’t make a dent in that he’s chopped into pieces until best boy Pochita possesses and revives those pieces. Black Torch goes more for a rug pull of sorts. Jiro lives with his grandfather who generally has the strength of other old men in manga like Golden Kamuy’s Youichirou the Manslayer or Naruto’s Third Hokage. In fact, there’s a scene in the manga where Jiro is forced to fight his grandfather who plans to kill him and then end his own life for failing to protect his grandson from the Mononoke as well as letting a Mononoke possess him, only to walk it back as a test of conviction when Jiro fights back just as hard, as explained by this Screen Rant article.
As for style over substance, this one is a bit of a stretch for me personally. There’s no shortage of good looking series that don’t have a lot beneath the surface, but that’s not a problem I recall from Black Torch in particular. Really, without the space needed to take flight, the hints that there was a deeper story than we realize are mostly lost. I mentioned earlier that it shows that this unit of shinobi is willing to work with some of the Mononoke so long as they’re harmless, but that may also hint at a sort of mutual exchange between unlikely partners. But now that the manga’s been long cancelled, who knows whether that’s the case?
The final one by Tower City Media about turtle pacing was something I didn’t notice at first, but after reading that article and looking back, if the manga could’ve done better to pick up the pace, it probably wouldn’t have been cancelled so soon, if at all. Rago the cat isn’t the only animal Jiro talks with. In the beginning, he used to have a dog that he often spoke with while washing her, and I recall in the third volume that while he was traipsing about the woods, he spoke with a snake.
I joke, but Orochimaru wouldn’t look all that out of place in a manga like this.
If any of these points are true or there’s another factor contributing to Black Torch’s cancellation, then what may have helped Takaki would’ve been to trim the fat, get a move on with the pacing, and add more character to the characters. Jiro Azuma does well enough to make himself interesting, but he couldn’t carry the manga by himself, and going back to coincidences between Black Torch and Chainsaw Man, both had their own version of the super serious stoic type, but thankfully for CSM, Aki wasn’t copy-pasted twelve times over.
For all of Black Torch’s faults, it was at least able to end with a whimper as opposed to a bang. At least it didn’t run around like a headless chicken trying to end with an overdue bang. When I bought the manga during college, Viz charged $10 per volume up from $8 from around 15 years ago, and at five volumes, $50 plus tax is cheap for a cancelled series compared to the 20-something box sets of Demon Slayer or the 72 volumes in triplicate box sets for the Naruto manga. But of course, if you want the story that did it better, it’s not too late to catch up on Chainsaw Man.
It’s a month divisible by 2 and for this month’s recommendation is Escapist Magazine.
Beginning as a video game journalism site by Nick Calandra in 2005, The Escapist has branched out into general media with classic series like Yahtzee Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation, Jim Sterling’s Jimquisition, Movie Bob’s the Big Picture and many more. Although they have a YouTube channel (linked above), they also have a website where their series are hosted before being made public on YouTube.
Back into the fold with a manga that I genuinely tried to research reviews for but this time I came up short. Google helps with pages of individual reviews on different sites, but video reviews are what’s lacking. A quick search on YouTube (as of this writing) brings me to about seven or eight videos that don’t really have a great audience number collectively, only a few cracking a thousand views, at least on English YouTube; Japanese YT has more to talk about it seems. On the one hand, I want to see that change, but on the other hand, the subject matter of what I’m about to talk about in this post may highlight why this is for the best.
The manga I bring to you is called Rokudenashi Blues, known alternatively as Good For Nothing Blues.
I’ve made a small mention of this manga in earlier post (can’t remember which one), but here I’d like to elaborate on what it’s about. Created by Masanori Morita, it ran from May 1988 to February 1997 in Shueisha, spawned several OVAs, a couple of films and TV dramas with the most recent one listed having run for the summer of 2011 in Japan on the Nippon TV network.
It’s about a highschooler named Taison Maeda, a bullheaded delinquent who dreams of becoming a world-class boxer, racking up a gnarly fight count along the way. In Japan from around the late 1970s to the early 90s, the delinquent subculture is more of a lifestyle than an indicator of anything more sinister; it’s not like Japanese delinquents have ties to the Yakuza or anything else organized crime-like. Some do or did, but they’d be the outlier, not the standard. For an idea of what a delinquent is in media, look no further than Jotaro Kujo or Yusuke Urameshi.
The first discernable aspect of the delinquent is to compare them to any other student. The delinquent’s hair is loose, long, messy, or sometimes combed into a pompadour; their uniforms are loose-fitting and scruffy with unfastened buttons, and in some cases they’re elaborately decorated with kanji or any other lettering or symbolism. I’m not sure if there’s a meaning behind it; some depictions I can see relate to luck or strength, so that might be a theme with select individuals who partake.
It should also be highlighted that it wasn’t exclusively a boys thing to engage in delinquent culture — girls did it too. In contrast with their more studious counterparts, girl delinquents, or sukeban, wore longer skirts, down to the ankle, and also tended to have their hair as messy as their male counterparts. Of all the examples of a sukeban in media, the best example comes from the movie Sukeban Deka, a Shoujo manga that has climbed to popularity thanks to its live-action adaptation.
If this aesthetic looks familiar, there was a bit of a crossover between the greasers of the 1950s in the US and the punks of the 70s and 80s in the US, UK, and Australia. So keep this in mind when you come across Japanese media from the 80s or 90s; it’s a classic. Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, delinquents have fallen to the wayside while gyarus and by extension the kogal has taken over with media featuring the subculture still slated for release in the near future.
But I think nostalgia will either bring the delinquent back, or put the archetype side-by-side with the gyaru.
In Rokudenashi Blues, the protagonist Maeda and at times his friends, Katsuji and Yoneji clash with rivals first within the school and then in different parts of the Tokyo Metropolis as the series progresses, sort of like the huge fight between different middle schools in Mob Psycho 100.
The clashes with these numbskulls are weekly, if not daily, and the popularity of the delinquent’s outfit makes it easy to lose among the scuffle, but in both a character design and personality sense, there’s a few that stand out from the mold: Wajima and Hatanaka.
Wajima’s designed to be a physically imposing character. Think of your typical brawler or weightlifter body type from a beat ’em up video game. He leads one of the groups known as the Cheer Squad in the school and these guys have fought with Maeda and co. at times. Personality-wise, he’s as bullheaded and shortsighted as Maeda, at least in the beginning. I’m still reading the manga so it remains to be seen how he grows as a character.
Another one who mirrors Maeda in looks, but succeeds him in overall intelligence would be Yutaro Hatanaka. These two have clashing goals and in classic Shonen Jump fashion, he’s set up as the rival to Maeda, but unlike him, Hatanaka has a clear plan that he can recite with steps toward his final goal. Basically, what I’m saying is, he seems to be more studious and articulate with his thoughts, though when it’s time to play rough he can do it in stride. He’s a bit like Sasuke though far less brooding and more laidback compared to the energetic Maeda. It also remains to be seen how he grows over the course of the manga. I have a few ideas on the trajectory, but I want to see the surprise for myself.
The art style of the manga may also be familiar to fans of Fist of the North Star/Hokuto no Ken, and the reason for that is because the mangaka, Masanori Morita, previously worked as an assistant for the creator of Fist of the North Star, Tetsuo Hara.
This art style became the face of 1980s action manga with several mangaka taking elements from Hara’s magnum opus. It was a ground breaking inspiration for many creators over the years and according to some accounts serves as the main inspiration for characters like Jonathan Joestar and Dio Brando. Several more characters of this caliber would follow over the years, but it’s hard to say how many were developed in a vacuum or took on the shape of Kenshiro in some capacity.
I stumbled upon this manga after I remembered an article that mentioned other underrated series a few years ago and went to explore some of those suggestions for myself. In fact, on another blog, I talked about one of those series after watching it from start to finish on YouTube; it was the series House of Five Leaves/Sarai-ya Go You by Natsume Ono.
I plan on redoing it on this blog one day as I wasn’t all that proud of what I said in the last one.
Even if you’re not one for boxing or sports in general, I still give Rokudenashi Blues a solid recommendation. It’s got a lot of heart and it’s not exactly the most complex sports manga ever, but the manga focuses more so on the characters and their lives as they go (read: brawl) through school and later, as I’ve been told, through other schools. I may return with an update once I’m finished with the manga, though that’s not a fixed and consistent schedule so it remains to be seen.
Mortal Kombat 1 released on September 19, 2023 and continues with the new continuity left over from the last game MK11. For a recap, MK 2011 (MK9) retold the story of the first three arcade games but with twists. MK X can be considered a divergent timeline than what was seen in Mortal Kombat 4 and Deadly Alliance. MK 11 is what I personally consider a joining together of Deception and Armageddon, and the new game goes full circle.
I had the pleasure of watching the YouTube channel MKIceAndFire play the game from start to finish, I believe with a review copy. I won’t spoil too much for the game, but continuing the trend of reboots, rehashes, and retcons like a late 2010s Marvel or DC Comic there are some changes that I welcome and some I think could’ve been done better. Of those I won’t change: Fire God Liu Kang.
From 1992 to 2023, seeing this franchise evolve over the years is amazing as a fan, so in celebration, I thought today I’d take a look at the franchise’s attempts at spinoffs; and I exclusively mean spinoffs, so updates like Ultimate MK3, Mortal Kombat Gold, or MK vs DC don’t count as most of these are laid out the same as their main contemporaries and don’t do anything different from the others or if they do, not enough.
Video games spawning spinoffs and spiritual successors is a time-honored tradition. Sleeping Dogs succeeds True Crime, the BioShock series to System Shock, and several others. Generally focusing on individual characters or inventing something new comes easy to video games and Mortal Kombat does that in spades, many times over. The first success coming from 2004’s Deception.
By himself, Shujinko’s journey across the realms to gather the Kamidogu though (spoiler) under false pretenses is a solid and interesting story to follow. The boy who dreamt of great things. As an addition to the MK franchise, his story definitely stands out while also adhering to age-old kung fu cinema tropes like that of the wise old foolish master. A combining of the old and new, though he’s currently limited to the 3D era with few references beyond that.
Fortunately, there’s a spinoff that by all accounts is considered perfect. Fluidic combat, leveling abilities, a reimagining of the characters, and a great big tournament with traversable realms, along with a co-operative mode. It’s MK: Shaolin Monks.
With all that had occurred in the franchise’s history, I like to think of this game itself along with the Konquest modes of Deception and Armageddon as culminations of what worked in the past coupled with new ideas that carried these games in particular to new heights. Having said that and considering the title of this post, it’s not hard to see the struggles endured by the franchise.
With even some main games struggling at the first hurdle, some of the updated versions helped somewhat to pick up the slack and can thus be forgiven for their faults. Few games age as well as some others. For spinoffs, though, Ed Boon and John Tobias seemingly had a desire to branch out beyond the main Mortal Kombat tournament or reimagine it somehow. The ideas they had were interesting, but the execution wasn’t what it could’ve been.
Starting with the first of these, the 1997 spinoff featuring the failed Mythologies series.
The Development section of the game’s Wikipedia page states that John Tobias wanted Mythologies to be a separate series, not dissimilar from the multiple series within the Sonic or Mario franchises. The reason for this was to better flesh out and develop the individual stories of the characters far exceeding the limits of the character endings and bios. The people at Midway chose Sub-Zero as their candidate and went with a side-scrolling platformer, also not unlike the more family friendlier video games of the era, or even Castlevania.
Unfortunately for Midway, the results of these efforts were executed poorly. If they were perfect, then the shape of the Mortal Kombat franchise as of now would be different. For their efforts, Mythologies failed at what it set out to do. Awful graphics for the time (and even now), frustrating controls, confusing layout, and uninspired enemy designs, and a difficult loop instead of a curve put this game below the bottom of the barrel.
Probably would’ve been better to spend more time in the oven. That same development section of the Wikipedia article explained that the team working on this game was much smaller and the techniques used a whole bunch of green screen and overlays. Not saying that more cooks in the kitchen would’ve produced a better meal, but if the size of the dev team was the culprit than a few more hands would’ve helped. Or if not that, then the old ways that worked for the other games were still available.
Could Mythologies have been made better? Perhaps. Whatever the defining factor is that gave us the Mythologies of this timeline than whatever another timeline got, I can’t say with certainty. As a positive for that game though, the costumes and set design were true to the original character designs and it’s cool to see someone loved Quan Chi’s appearance in MK4 enough to make that his alternate costume going forward. Observe.
Not to be deterred by one failure, the alchemists of Midway sought to try again some three years later with a worse attempt at a spinoff: Mortal Kombat: Special Forces. The specter of video game development hell would have it out for Midway at this stage it seemed. The moderately-sized dev team behind MK Mythologies was unlucky, but according to this game’s Wikipedia article and this article by Gaming Bolt, the development of the game was way more trouble for subpar returns.
Comparing MK4 from 1997 to Deadly Alliance from 2002 shows that for the former, the transition to 3D was neither easy nor pretty while the latter made use of what was learned the first time around to produce a better looking product. But MK4 is a game the old heads of Midway are at least somewhat proud of for not breaking too much and experimenting with a new trend at the time. Special Forces is infamous for being so maligned that Ed Boon hasn’t acknowledged it since its 2000 release on the almost retired PlayStation and for good reasons.
The technology at the time was well outside the dev team’s scope and experience, given how much of a chore it was just to get MK4 and the subsequent Gold up and running. As for what gameplay consisted of, it was quite ambitious at the time. An action-adventure beat ’em up with a revolving door of abilities and even weapons at the player’s disposal sounded way too good to be true for a 2000 game and it unfortunately was. These difficulties mounted with distressed developers jumping ship and leaving new folks with a mess to sort through.
Of these departures was John Tobias himself. One of the two men who brought us this franchise needed to dip out and take a much needed breather, and with news of this during the dev cycle, rumors abound that Special Forces was set to be cancelled soon. But the remaining devs continued forth in this perilous journey to bring the game out and their efforts sadly did go to waste.
Never mind cooking with a missing number of cooks; this is what happens when some of the cooks leave and new cooks fill their shoes without filling them in on what they’re finishing. Needless to say, ugly graphics, bad controls, a convoluted story, and last-minute changes to who the protagonist was supposed to be, the wider MK community has little love for this game and those who are joining but don’t know about this game, take it from those who do, you’re not missing much. Deadly Alliance has more bang for your buck.
I’d already said above that Shaolin Monks was perfection as far as spinoffs go and for a while I didn’t realize that it was also supposed to have a sequel. I tried looking into this more and for games that get canned for XYZ, many of those that don’t see the light of day at least have footage for the public to gaze upon. Like Eight Days, or Sonic X-Treme or Scalebound to name a few. In my research, I’d found that a developer known as Paradox Studios (not the makers of Europa Universalis or Hearts of Iron) were supposed to spearhead a sequel focusing on Scorpion and Sub-Zero with the working subtitle of Fire & Ice.
It would’ve been loosely based on the Mortal Kombat II ending to Scorpion’s arcade run where to atone for killing Sub-Zero’s brother, he vows to protect him as a savior and guardian. If you’ve played any of the recent Mortal Kombat games, there are several nods to this in a few select endings. My personal favorite being guest character Spawn’s from MK11.
Credit: MKIceAndFire
All things considered, the great focus paid to Sub-Zero and Scorpion culminating in an almost game that was canned on the drawing board makes it seem as though Fire & Ice was the one that got away. The reasons behind the cancellation had to do with Paradox Studios suffering from financial woes, as explained in this article from Game Informer. The most they could do was a concept level and character design before the project was tossed out with the bath water.
Still, the concept resonated enough for Ed Boon et al to keep referencing it some 15 years after the project’s premature death and for fans to produce a bevy of fanart and fanfics over what the story could’ve been about. Perhaps it could’ve been something like what Mythologies would’ve been with the fleshing out of other character stories; maybe the two would combine to beat down on Quan Chi only for him to be saved by one of the Brothers of Shadow or even Shinnok himself. The sky was the limit back then, and it still is. For all its faults, Armageddon was onto something with the character customization, something that made a comeback in MK11 with the different loadouts for each character.
Since the reboot in 2011, NetherRealm Studios (probably with insistence from WB Games) has been focusing on the main plot with nothing to show for a side plot to explore aside from the associated comics that most folks probably won’t realize are being released until they do some more digging. I’m hesitant to say that WB Games won’t allow a new Fire & Ice; while backwards compatibility is off the table for them, it’d help me greatly if I knew what their game plans were before I say anything. And with studios so tightlipped about projects and pitches, speculation is the best we can do until a statement is made.
I promised myself that I’d release more Boruto-related news on or after the day of release and to live up to that promise, I have one for September. Sticking with the monthly schedule of its previous part, Vortex released one on September 20, with the third chapter releasing the week of October 20. From what I’ve read, it’s sticking with the drip-feed/cliffhanger method of storytelling not seen since Dragon Ball Z.
In that regard, Omnipotence is still in effect, and like select Boruto fans and many critics who at least try to read the series, I stand with them in voicing a flaw that sites like CBR and Screen Rant seem to be ignoring. There are several minor details that eagle-eyed viewers can’t help but consider that average readers don’t. Under Sasuke’s mentorship, Boruto was given his old scarred headband which now has the new scar given by Kawaki prior to the Omnipotence. Kawaki himself has been confirmed by Amado and Team Konohamaru to be genetically enhanced with the Scientific Ninja Tools, all from Kara’s (read: Isshiki’s) dime. When the Omnipotence happened, everything we knew about them had been reversed as far as those affected by it are concerned with only Sumire and Sarada learning the truth, so why does the village accept that Kawaki–an Uzumaki–doesn’t have the headband while Boruto the “Traitor” has it?
The Vortex manga explained the first time around that Omnipotence gradually does that, but doesn’t specify how that becomes working from the fumes of “trust me bro.” Even Himawari isn’t so sure about the situation.
Credit: @hinatahyugamzng
Then again, I might be jumping the gun expecting an explanation yesterday. Amado lore dumped on the audience over the course of a few chapters and that may just be what’s going on next. Be that as it may, everything that’s been established up to now is a reversal makes the circumstances all so tenuous. Boruto didn’t mind Mitsuki calling him the sun all the time, but Kawaki takes notice asks him to knock it off. Boruto grew up with an entire village expecting the best and the most of him, but Kawaki was born a vessel, used and seen as such until Naruto showed himself to be the only caregiver to actually give care to the boy who needed it the most.
Whatever happens, the village is gonna be rightly confused when their preconceptions about Boruto are challenged.
For Chapter 2, Code recovered from getting a face full of Boruto’s foot in the last chapter whereupon the latter advised Sarada to help out the rest of the village by taking out Code’s claw grimes while he and Boruto had a talk about the Ten Tails. Along the way, we also learn that Boruto claims responsibility for scarring Code’s eye and while he admits there would be no issue in killing him, but the information he has on the Ten Tails and the Chakra Fruit is too precious to resort to that. As for individual shinobi’s performance, as far as we know, Hima’s lessons came straight from Inojin, Shikadai, and Cho-Cho and we mostly have scenes of her training in action so far. The new generation of Ino-Shika-Cho surely has kept up its regimen as well; their parents wouldn’t let that slide especially with two mutually deadly enemies nipping at the heels of the village leadership.
We haven’t seen anyone else emphasize proof of concept though. Sarada got to use her clan’s trademark Fireball Jutsu and herself use Chidori on some claw grimes, but that’s about it. From what I remember, spamming Chidori puts undue strain on the shinobi, something she’d never be able to surpass even with her Mangekyou Sharingan and a curse mark like that of her father’s would be out of the question. On the flip side, Boruto seems to have learned swordsmanship quite well, downing several grimes himself in no time.
Actually, having Googled a reference picture just now, I was brought to a post on the Naruto subreddit about other swordsmen/kenjutsu users in the Narutoverse, among them Orochimaru.
We’re likely to see more of Boruto’s moves in the coming chapters, so we’ll likely see some more posts between the Naruto and Boruto subreddits or even Twitter comparing the fighting styles across all of those who’ve used it over the course of the series. For my definition, I’m not counting the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist because all of their swords are abnormally shaped and mostly make use of Chakra in some form or another. We’ve also hardly seen individual members wield anything close to a normal sword long enough to try something fancy against an enemy. So I doubt we’ll see a comparison to this guy.
Code’s grimes have been shown to use the same transportation technique that he uses: traversal through the claw markings, not necessarily limited to a nonliving object. The latter chapters of Boruto original boasted a grime count of six figures, equal to the number of enemies deployed on the shinobi during the Fourth Shinobi War–and most of them were made of the dead and reanimated.
This time around, Code’s crusade is even more faceless, an amalgamation of beings made from an imprisoned Ten Tails from another dimension. Which reminds me; in the movie, the DLC for Ultimate Ninja Storm 4, and even the anime, it was shown that Sasuke was on a mission before to investigate anything Ohtsutsuki related, including Kaguya’s old temple where he was ambushed by Momoshiki and Kinshiki.
His absence for the first two chapters might be in some way related to that. Before the timeskip, Sarada only asked that he help Boruto and get him to safety, never specifying what else would happen, but the Uchihas trust each other dearly so whatever was up Sasuke’s arsenal (it’s a long list of jutsu, combined with all the other stuff might not have seen) would have been partly passed on to Boruto over the course of those three years.
Credit: u/BarlasLewis
Now that they’re both outcast cyclopes, they can connect even better than Naruto and Jiraiya did. I’ve only got speculation for what Sasuke taught him and where they trained, but one thing that closed off the chapter was the new technique Rasengan Uzuhiko or Rasengan Vortex. It’s not uncommon to joke that Rasengan is the number one technique Naruto defaults to, but the twist this time is that the swirl engulfs Boruto’s body than just the palm of his hand.
It might be in some way related to the sparingly-used Vanishing Rasengan. In the anime and the game, Boruto showed off the new technique to Sasuke who began unimpressed, but before he could close off his honest thoughts, Boruto through the miniature Rasengan at a tree where it dissipated… or so you think because a few seconds later the impact was seen on a nearby tree.
It was explained later that the Lightning Release had an affect on the shape and impact of the Rasengan itself. Further working with speculation in this case, Boruto might’ve convinced to some degree that he’s the one who can use the jutsu like that of Naruto and Minato before him, enough for Sasuke to take full advantage of that and enhance what exists while throwing in something new.
Gotta wait till October to see what the Vortex looks like, but for something we have data on now that the chapter’s out, it looks like Boruto TBV is hot on the heels of another popular manga.
Never thought I’d see the day where a somewhat new series would catch up to an established quarter-century long manga series. If you’re curious what was in third place, it’s Chainsaw Man.
I was originally gonna rattle off some of my favorite movies and what I liked about them, but I thought I’d get more mileage out of listing off my history with the medium, so I’ll go with that. I may list off some of my favorite movies recently or movie genres by the end, so look forward to that.
Getting to the topic of how my taste in movies developed, like all things, will be complicated. The history of that even more so, but to the best that I can remember, funny enough, it began with my mom and her siblings. The area of the Bronx that I grew up in had several local theaters in the 1960s and 70s, many of them are abandoned or were torn down in favor of a retail store or local pharmacy, but some that have stayed have significantly minimized their presence or reach. There might have been a trend in the 80s and 90s concerning access to cinema, probably with access to VCRs going stronger than an ox at this time, or some major movie distributor like AMC getting a huge boost, but I can’t say for certain whether any of these were the case. But if I ask my mom or aunts, they might say that it was.
Whatever the answer is to this chicken-or-egg scenario, it did mean that VHS tapes would be made in surplus over the years until they fell out of fashion with the rise of DVDs by 2002, only for those now to be seen as obsolete thanks to digital releases, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
For context, I was born in 1998, and, according to Legacy Box, VHS lost popularity around 2002-03. Some of the first movies I’d watched were formatted for a VCR and one of those happened to be a movie adaptation of a certain yellow sponge who lives in a tropical fruit.
Since it came out in 2004, I’m not entirely certain how it got to my house. I’m pretty sure an older relative of mine got it for me, but it’s been so long and whatever VCRs we still have these days is likely no longer compatible with modern TVs now. I’m confident that VHS releases of beloved movies of yesteryear have since become collector’s items due to the rarity, even at the time of release.
The SpongeBob movie certainly got some out of me as a kid, but at that time, anything animated was my bread and butter and seeing the porous cube for an extended adventure was a ginormous win. For other animated movies, I definitely remember watching a certain pair of movies as a kid. The first one was about an Inuit man who learned the hard way of what it’s like to disturb nature and lives his life as a bear as penance.
And I would only go on to continue watching Disney animated features of this making because that’s what Mortimer Mouse does best. He and Jimmy Carter may be the most prolific nonagenarians at work. Brother Bear was on DVD, and thus still compatible with modern TVs. Even back then, there were fewer problems regarding DVD players than there were with VHS tapes, so rewatching some of my favorite scenes from Ursa Fraternity was damn easy.
The second one was about a superpowered family juggling life between saving the day and the boring parts of Americana that get glorified for the sake of a joke on TV.
Also a 2004 release but on DVD, this was my go-to when the adults were busy watching MTV or BET sitcoms and movies, and I watched this movie a disturbing number of times because I was an only child and my options for entertainment, though present, were limited. Cell phones weren’t necessary in the early-to-mid 2000s and no good parent would let a child out after dark unless they genuinely knew what they were doing. I could go to the park, though that often meant waiting on my mom to take me there even though it was down the block from where I lived. So TV and video games for the rest of my childhood.
Between all of these, a reasonable conclusion to jump to would be that from a parenting standpoint, the movies I was allowed to watch at around 4 or 5 years old didn’t fall outside of established parental guidelines and from a child’s standpoint, heroes and villains here, monster fights there, save the day, get the girl, the classic Superman formula.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, because my mom was single at the time and my grandma hadn’t retired until 2004, this meant leaving me in either my grandma’s care or that of a neighbor who comparatively had three children and was seen as the go-to for some of the other neighbor kids. So 6-year-old, only child me often had to spend time with some of these kids who were not very far from their immediate siblings. So that was neat.
In line with that pattern, it might be because a lot of these kids were somewhat older, but for whatever reason, if I wasn’t witnessing MTV devolve in real time, I was watching a slasher movie. Of the ones I was unfortunate to see at a young age, the one about the masked machete wielder stuck with me for an uncomfortably long time. His collaboration with a sweater-wearing burn victim from the nightmare realm did me no favors, though there was a reason for me why the machete wielder was the worst of those two.
The other slashers and horrors were largely forgettable, but every goddamn time something reminded me of Jason Voorhees, I’d get mental images of a grizzly slaying. And why Jason? Why not Michael Myers, or Freddy Krueger, or Predator, or the Aliens from Alien? For me, it was because Jason and by extension Michael were so calm and collected. They walked into frame with a clear vision and a creativity only a psychopath could appreciate. Their flare for the gory and incorrect ways to use a lawn ornament and the fact that either one of them could do so much with just so little made it even more dramatic than it probably was. If they didn’t use their powers for nefarious purposes, they might be the first people to thrive in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. I’m pretty sure they’d be tailormade for the first part of The Last of Us 2 since that part of the game starts in a Wyoming winter and Max Brooks of World War Z fame wrote that in such a scenario the coldest climates are ironically the hottest spots on earth.
Needless to say, I didn’t start appreciating Jason or Michael until I was around 16 and part of that was because on reflection, so many horror movies at the time telegraphed and prioritized their jump scares over their stories that the money that should’ve gone to the screenwriter and storyboard artist went to the pockets of the soundtrack composers, and every time the brass section went nuts during a jump scare, the composers would need to run back to the store to get a new safe to hold all that cash. It was annoying!
Cliffordlonghead (YouTube), Nickelodeon, Viacom
Friday the 13th, Halloween and others did that as well, but not every five minutes. I think one day I’ll dedicate my research to the history of film scores.
By the time I was 15 or 16, trips to the theater fell to the wayside, reflecting a growing trend of home streaming and home video releases as Blockbuster shuttered its brick and mortar stores while Netflix thrived online, especially with shows like Breaking Bad being made available for streaming on the platform in the years following its airing on AMC, as well as many Netflix originals, short lifespans notwithstanding.
Followers of this blog can remember how clear and precise my words were when I admitted to emulating and pirating certain video games. What I didn’t mention until now was that it didn’t start with video games. I remember watching 300 on pirate sites in anticipation for the 2014 follow-up. And about a year later, after watching The Terminator on YouTube on a probably now deleted account, I heard through the grapevine that a fifth Terminator was releasing soon and when I later watched the trailers myself, I vowed to pirate it sometime in the future.
I avoided major spoilers for Terminator: Genisys while pirating online or catching the others on TV and by the time I saw the fifth one by way of piracy, my opinions on the fifth Terminator movie are thus:
I paid for nothing and still felt robbed. Okay, let’s dial it back. The first two movies and somewhat the third all did well enough to prepare you for what was to come about the prophecy about SkyNet launching on August 29, 1997 and the immediate aftermath that subsequent releases felt like they were written into a narrow corner and had to dig themselves out with a spoon and crossed fingers.
If I were to rate the series having only seen the movies, my opinions on them all are this:
The Terminator (1984): Fantastic. 4.5/5
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991): Also fantastic, like the original. 5/5
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003): Interesting take on the premise. 3.2/5
Terminator: Salvation (2009): Memorable only because of Christian Bale’s temper tantrum on set. Otherwise, missing crucial elements. 2.3/5
Terminator: Genisys (2015): Nice that you’ve got Arnie back, but are we still on the same timeline as Salvation or what? 2/5
My opinions on Genisys isn’t isolated either; other critics and viewers thought much the same. Call it for what it is, but if 2014 was starving for good games, 2015 was starving for good movies. Or rather, I remember more bad movies getting the adverts than I do the good or better movies largely because many of the studio heads were losing faith in these potential box office bombs. It might have cost the studios some dough, but from my perspective, being nose deep in the novel Black Mass in anticipation for its movie adaptation that year, it’s a good thing I spent that year invested in my own interests instead of following trends or I would’ve been even more disappointed with Fifty Shades of Grey.
This was a better film to have Dakota Johnson’s and Johnny Depp’s names on compared to what else they were in that year.
The latter half of the 2010s became the era of the Crazy News Segment and it was around that time I decided that Facebook wasn’t my style. Retreating into the movies at this time slowed down as I was dedicating myself to community college and whatnot, but I was still watching movies. The newer stuff coming out was putting me to sleep, so I went to some classics.
In my latter years of high school and all through college, I’d entertained the idea of joining the Army and thought I’d get a general idea of that through movies. Good idea? Bad idea? Well, the movies I’d watched that came to mind for me as quintessential war movies were centered around either of the two World Wars or Vietnam. I’m still searching for a good Korean War movie though.
In the U.S., copyrights are good for at least 75 years, and with the copyright long expired on one of these by the time I was able to watch it, technically, it wasn’t piracy. As I recall, this particular film and similar were archived online. If this is the case every time a movie gets that old, then as time goes on, whenever I want to watch an old movie, I have a beeline.
This movie was an adaptation of a diary of a German WWI vet, and as of 2022 was the first of about three so far.
World War I movies, I feel, have been muted by the clearer battle lines of its deadlier successor. You have villains, heroes, and a happy ending, hence why numerous intellectual properties in the decades since the end of World War II have looked on to the Nazis and the Wehrmacht as the perfect archetype for a villainous force of nature. Allow me to complain somewhat, but there were other armies of equal or worse brutality to look at for a template. Not saying you can’t keep using the Nazis or their 10,000 paramilitaries for reference if you want; just that it pays to look elsewhere from time to time. Consider your options.
And speaking of movies about the deadlier successor, an impromptu reconnaissance platoon sent into France to ship the sole survivor of the Normandy landings out of a family of five brothers back home, complete with a perilous journey through the occupied north.
And for better or worse, veterans of all strides who would otherwise take their stories with them to the grave were motivated to share them by proxy after watching the movie. It’s a fact.
In the case with Vietnam War movies, the diplomacy of the war itself at the time leads me to believe that it was a sign of things to come. Light my on the pyre for this, but experiences with guerilla fighting in Indochina probably would’ve helped to better inform post-9/11 warfighting policies in the Middle East if we stopped looking at things the same way we looked at World War II. False equivalency, you say? I do still have a point. Accounts from the French experience leading up to occupation by Germany in WWII draw toward the conclusion that if France had realized Round 2 would be a different fight, they would’ve been able to stave off occupation or at least better liberate themselves than in our timeline.
Similarly, U.S. military history has a gap between the fall of Saigon and the Gulf War that probably reminds folks of the current recruiting crisis the DoD doesn’t need as it’s the second time there’s been a military shortfall at home. In my eyes, the Vietnam-era movies serve a purpose and have important lessons that only now we seem to be adhering to–that is to say know your enemy and yourself; set and understand your goals; and one of the biggest lessons from the jungles of former French Indochina, make sure the populace is on your side. No one wants to be sent to fight in a country they can’t find on a map only to lose and come back and get harassed for what they were forced to do.
As for movies I’ve seen about the conflict itself, there are two that stand out that you probably know about. One was about a rogue special forces field grade who needed to be taken out and the other was about the most sympathetic of McNamara’s Misfits for the first half while also criticizing the nature of warfare in general in the second half.
As told by retired SEAL Commander Jocko Willink in this video, if a servicemember commits a crime overseas or goes rogue in-country/while deployed, their punishment is determined mostly by rank and performance prior to the crime. For example, if a private or private first class is under scrutiny, they could face any combination of forfeiture of pay, reduction in rank, imprisonment, or for severe crimes, execution for conduct unbecoming. Higher ranking enlisted soldiers may face that as well, but so far the highest ranking enlisted soldier I know of that has ever faced such a penalty was the 10th Sergeant Major of the Army Gene McKinney, and he wasn’t even reduced by that much. Below Sergeant Major of the Army is command sergeant major, and below that is either first sergeant or master sergeant depending.
Officers like that of Colonel Kurtz are in command of a large number of servicemembers, generally brigades. Being that high up in a chain of command with that much time in service (over 20 years avg.), he would’ve been captured and interrogated for what he’d done and any penalties would likely come from whoever was the Secretary of Defense at the time.
Now for that one about a McNamara-grade recruit…
In my experience in basic training, FMJ was the one to get the most love out of the trainees because we saw ourselves in those starry-eyed virgin recruits even if events depicted were exaggerated. R. Lee Ermey’s portrayal of a Marine DI was exaggerated for drama’s sake, and in the Army we didn’t have footlockers, and compared to the men who would be sent to Vietnam, our drills were, due to several factors, fairly lenient with us. That said, we still got the dog crap smoked out of us because the good idea fairy visited our battle buddy that day; or we learned to lock our lockers and secure our stuff when half of it was across the bay and other half was under my battle buddy’s bed in pieces.
That being said, looking at GySgt. Hartman’s conduct as a drill instructor, he would likely have been investigated for inciting hazing against Pvt. Leonard Lawrence/Gomer Pyle. Similarly, for how the boot camp section of the movie ends, even though those Marines were graduating and whatnot, the precursor to the NCIS would’ve gotten word of crimes in the barracks like a [spoiler warning] murder-suicide, especially if an SNCO like Gunny Hartman was involved in some way. With an even hand, after the dead are laid to rest, the whole platoon could forget about ever getting to Vietnam, though at this point in history, stuff was getting swatted to the wayside because the war effort was more important.
Fast-forward to Bush Jr. in Iraq boosting numbers for the 2007 surge and a round of stop-loss orders and most of those who were deployed at the time need three sets of hands to count the number of people who got in despite being previously disqualified for moral or medical reasons. Bonus points if the moral waivers offended in uniform. How do I know this? The Military subreddit among others holds the answers.
Above all, war films showed me that there’s always a gray zone even in the darkest moments in our lives or in history. Not everything has an easy answer.
Sorry if things got serious at the end there. Let’s take it back a few notches. My favorite film genres? Right now, it’s the war films since I clearly had more to say about them in this post. My Army brain isn’t gonna look at them the same way again, but for what it’s worth, the experiences from basic training to duty station to deployment to discharge are military-wide. Retired servicemembers from different ends of the political aisle will feel a connection because at one point they were clowns in the same circus. From this genre: Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan, Patton, and for atmosphere a Soviet Belarusian film called Come and See.
For something more humorous, comedies obviously work, but the talent lies with the writing and the characters. Done well, and I can see myself going back to a classic I enjoyed. Done poorly, and I’m praying to God, Lord Buddha, and Tom Selleck’s mustache that the writers of the god-awful “comedy” I was forced to watch walk into a door. From this genre: Identity Thief, Fargo, The Mask, History of the World, and Spaceballs.
And for action/adventure, my video game brain has been hardwired to expect a Point A to Point B plot with a clear goal and character arc. I don’t always get that, but when I do, my butt’s in the chair, my eyes are on the screen, and if I like what it opens with, I reserve judgment until the credits roll. If I don’t like it, I’m nitpicking from start to finish. From this genre: Red and Red 2, The Terminator until the third movie, London Has Fallen (kinda), RoboCop uncensored, and I want to put a martial arts film in here, but I haven’t seen any as of late. Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury will serve as a placeholder for now.
This was late, I know. We were having issues with our cable, and I was summoned to try to fix it until we phoned it in to the service provider. Hopefully, next week’s post will be on time.
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