|
- HOME
- Archive for To Aru Kagaku no Railgun.
Turns out J.C. Staff saves money by just changing the backgrounds.
One might assume Mikoto in To Aru Kagaku no Railgun would use a Yen coin to do her razzmatazz. But inspired to see how much money she was wasting with each shot, I took a closer look (larger PNG screenshot) and it does not appear to be a Japanese coin at all. If you know what this is and can actually verify your claim with some supporting evidence, fax me a picture or something, please.
Update: Mystery solved:
The coin doesn't seem to be a direct copy of real world currency, as the text on the back side seems to be written in engrish. Something to the effect of "Trap of arrest". The crown on the one face looks like the "Queen Victoria Crown", which can be found on some English and Australian coins, but none that I've seen match the coin from the show exactly.
-Richard
Ha ha. Trap of arrest.
Niku explains:
It is a game coin from an arcade. Here is a quote from Volume 1 Prologue: The Tale of the Illusion Killer Boy — The Imagine-Breaker.
"Her hand went into her skirt pocket, and took out a coin- one from an amusement parlour game."
Man, that reads like erotic fan fiction. No wonder the original novels are so popular.
@omonomono concurs:
i thought she used arcade tokens.
Posted in To Aru Kagaku no Railgun | Tags: Detectives, J.C. Staff, Twitter, Viewer Mail | Permanent Link
The Hustler.
The preseason buzz for spring 2013 seemed fairly pessimistic. (Sort of seems that way more often than not lately.) Thankfully, this quarter is shaping out to be pretty decent, at least through the first third of the cour. I guess I was looking forward to Death Billiards from the name alone—turns out it's another excellent Anime Mirai short movie, by the way—and that show about giants eating people, and the second season of Railgun, so it's not as if I believed spring 2013 would be a total write-off. It turns out there are at least a couple of gems and one shiny rock to admire.
(more…)
Posted in Death Billiards, Dokidoki! Precure, Gundam SEED Destiny, Hataraku Maou-sama!, Kakumeiki Valvrave, Season Summary, Shingeki no Kyojin, Straight Title Robot Anime, Suisei no Gargantia, To Aru Kagaku no Railgun | Tags: Anime Mirai, baseball, Giant Robots, Literature, Manga, Retroactive Continuity, Season Introduction, Shounen Jive, Spoilers, Spring 2013, Sunrise, tsundere, war | Permanent Link
Shiny Chariot's Magical Festa is a tough act to follow.
Overall, the spring 2013 season was a little bit of a letdown considering it started fairly strong. (I can sort of prove it too.) From a subjective standpoint, it probably felt worse because the start of the season coincided with the release of Little Witch Academia and Death Billiards which are both excellent short films, although not part of the spring 2013 anime season itself. As you can probably predict, both the best show and the worst show I watched were pretty consistent episode to episode.
(more…)
Posted in BEST GIRL, Dokidoki! Precure, Hataraku Maou-sama!, Kakumeiki Valvrave, Little Witch Academia, Season Summary, Shingeki no Kyojin, Straight Title Robot Anime, To Aru Kagaku no Railgun | Tags: Anime Mirai, Giant Robots, Gundam, Harem Comedy, Haruka Tomatsu, J.C. Staff, Mahou Shoujo, Mecha, Movies and OVAs, Rape, Season Conclusion, Sequels, Sex, So bad it's good, Spoilers, Spring 2013, Studio Trigger, Sunrise, war, War Is All Hell | Permanent Link
Woofies.
To Aru Kagaku no Railgun S (A Certain Scientific Railgun S) and Inu to Hasami wa Tsukaiyō (Dog and Scissors) don't have much in common except they're both at the bottom of the list of shows I'm watching this season and they both have characters with hime cuts. Oh, and pets.
"Hi. I'm done with my stupid bullshit so the rest of the show
can be about you playing baseball and mahjong."
RailgunS is pretty terrible because it's so contrived. I do feel it is unfair to lambaste the show for its plot holes since most shows reveal pretty sizable plot holes after even cursory inspections, but Railgun S takes itself so seriously that I sort of feel it has it coming. The most egregious examples involve keeping Kuroko on the bench for nearly two solid cours because her teleportation ability would speed the plot along too quickly.
BEST GIRL.
To me, the most damning aspect of this second season of Railgun is that it actually improved after introducing the odious Touma to heroically solve Misaka's little problem. And watch over a kitten. To be fair, viewers looking for a show that is neither pretentious nor too low-brow yet still punctuated by periodic action scenes with satisfyingly serious slugfests will probably find a fair amount of material to enjoy in Railgun S as long as they're not too critical of Misaka's martyr complex or Accelerator's ludicrous villain voice. Me, I'm just watching it for SATEN SATEN SATEN and her easygoing BEST GIRL ways. Now with baseball shirts, variable hairstyles, Internet mahjong, and casual cooking!
It's not quite yet okay if it's you.
Exin asks:
Have you seen [Inu to Hasami wa Tsukaiyou] yet? I saw the advertisement on yourube [sic] before it started, watched an episode and found it refreshingly nice.
Get a room.
Indeed, I am watching and enjoying Dog & Scissors even though it is pretty awful in an Akikan! sort of way (albeit without Grape's horrible voice). This is one of those shows any reasonable viewer is forced to acknowledge as "objectively bad" although it can still be entertaining in a stupid sort of way. It really does have far too many flat-chest jokes and dog-abuse jokes. There's also a lot more foreshadowed bestiality than I was expecting.
Relax. She's only looking for her underwear.
If I have to conclude that Dog and Scissors is "objectively bad, subjectively bad," I think I have to categorize Railgun S as "objectively good, subjectively bad." Anyone who fears his reputation may be damaged by the type of anime he watches will likely loathe both To Aru Kagaku no Railgun S and Inu to Hasami wa Tsukaiyō. However, anime sophomores (i.e., ones who are neither neophytes nor jaded, seasoned, middle-aged veterans) will likely be able to find something to enjoy in RailgunS. On the other hand, the only people likely to enjoy Dog & Scissors are probably either the aforementioned neophytes or the elderly set of anime fans—the poor bastards who have been watching too long and seen too much to still be angry young men—so long their tastes have wrapped around enough and granted them the ability to enjoy just about anything.
Posted in BEST GIRL, Inu to Hasami wa Tsukaiyou, Season Summary, To Aru Kagaku no Railgun S, Viewer Mail | Tags: Hair, Hime Cut, Inoue Marina, J.C. Staff, Season Introduction, Summer 2013 | Permanent Link
I couldn't think of a gouda cheese pun to use for this caption.
Summer 2013: Silver Spoon [1-11] > Uchouten Kazoku [1-13] > Symphogear G [1-13] > Love Lab [1-13] > Genshiken Nidaime [1-13] > Prisma☆Illya [1-10] > C3-bu [1-13] > Turning Girls [1-7] > Detective Conan (701-711) > DokiDoki! Precure (23-34) > RailgunS [13-24] > Dog & Scissors [1-12].
These two are pretty upset even though Yoshino's not pregnant.
Dropped: Gatchaman Crowds (1-9) > Servant x Service (1-3) > Kiniro Mosaic (1-4) > Kitakubu Katsudou Kiroku (1-2) > Gen'ei o Kakeru Taiyou: Il Sole Penetra le Illusioni (1-3) > Chou Jigen Game Neptume The Animation (1) > High School DxD NEW (1-4) > Futari wa Milky Holmes (1-2). WORSE THAN COSPRAYERS: Shingeki no Kyojin (13.5-14).
This chart started out as a joke, but has grown kinda out of control. Of course, the whole ranking anime thing started out as a joke too, and then suddenly five years went by.
Yoshino makes me want to eat smoked cheese more than Churuya ever did.
Gin no Saji (Silver Spoon) was easily the best summer 2013 series that I watched. It was consistently entertaining and I was impressed with how Hachiken's character developed over the show's 11 episodes. Even the quandary with "Pork Bowl" ended up much better than I expected. That was the plot point I had the most reservations about, but I'm quite pleased with how Silver Spoon resolved it.
Five will get you tengu he's going to trash the joint.
Uchouten Kazoku (The Eccentric Family) stands out among the summer 2013 shows for being intelligent about idiots and being strange while feeling familiar. The focus is on tanuki family dynamics, but it turns out the problems fuzzball shapeshifters have with their families aren't too different than those experienced by humans, except perhaps tanuki aren't as quick to embrace Shakespearean revenge tragedies. To be fair, all I really learned about tanuki is that they are dumbasses and that they are easily panicked, but maybe that's all anyone needs to know about tanuki.
Tall-collar service.
More importantly, I learned Mamiko can knock 'em dead better than ever. Her work as Benten was transcendent. I've never wanted to be a decrepit old man more. In fact, thanks mostly to Noto Mamiko's superb work, but also because Benten herself is such straight-up trouble, I'm nominating Suzuki Satomi for 2013 Girl of the Year. I'd also like to mention that Nakahara Mai is better than ever, although I encourage her to take more parts like her role in Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita and and fewer roles as young boys.
The Shimogamo matriarch is lucky so many dudes wanted to do her tanuki-style.
Senki Zesshou Symphogear G: In the Distance, That Day, When the Star Became Music... had a great ending. Basically, if you didn't like that final episode then you just don't like anime. That said, the show itself did have a few issues. First of all, Dr. Ver's comically evil persona never seemed particularly threatening, except for maybe when we learned he wanted to make babies with Maria. Second, Maria herself turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. I certainly was not expecting her to spend most of the show crying. I guess it's a good thing there's not going to be a follow-up cour devoted to her efforts at repopulating the planet, because she'd probably cry the entire time then too.
Listen, sugar, either go back to whaling on some deadbeats
or help me repopulate the planet, but get to work.
Sorry, Maria really needed to focus more on tearing shit up and coming up with new cape-fu moves instead of all the moping she did. Still, I'll ignore a lot of faults when a show spends most of its time focusing on mahou shoujo whaling on each other while singing. Shirabe and Kirika were endearing even though their fights lost a lot of impact because there was no danger of anyone getting hurt. Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS already demonstrated that providing lots of collateral damage is not a substitute for emotional resonance.
The fan service in Prisma☆Illya gets out of control.
I've already written about the endings to Love Lab, Genshiken Nidaime, and Fate/kaleid liner Prisma☆Illya.
Oh, hey, it's Evangelion's Train of Despair.
Tokurei Sochi Dantai Stella Jo-Gakuin Koutou-ka C3-Bu spent too much time on Yura taking all the fun out of a game, but that was sort of the point. In a way, C3-bu felt as if Gainax wanted to stretch out a Gainax ending as far as they could. Technically, C3-bu did have a Gainax ending, but then they went ahead and made another episode that seemed to contain material I'd usually expect in a standalone OVA. Maybe that's the way it was originally planned, but someone figured at the last minute that it probably wouldn't sell or something.
I finished watching Turning Girls weeks ago.
Ran shows off her crazy metabolism again.
I fell behind on Detective Conan but managed to catch up by the time I finally got this thing written. As for Meitantei Conan itself, it's still a reliable control for comparing shows season-to-season. It does need more Kazuha, though. I was concerned maybe her prolonged absence was related to Miyamura Yuko's longer commuting requirements. (She moved to Australia a few years ago.) I'm not sure if that's a factor, but it appears autumn 2013 starts off with at least four Heiji (with Kazuha in tow) episodes to follow the two that finished up the summer 2013 season. I'm certainly in favor of a six-episode block of Kazuha episodes, but I'm curious if they would have been spaced out instead if Miyamura Yuko still lived in Japan.
Relax, yo. Cure Rosetta has got this.
DokiDoki! Precure did two notable things during the summer 2013 cour. One, it introduced a sass-talking Kugimiya Rie Cure. Two, it raised the stakes in the all-singing, all-dancing 3DCG ED wars. Aside from that, DokiDoki! is turning out to be one of the less interesting Pretty Cure generations, although episode 34 did have some rad Cure Rosetta beatdowns.
This made no sense, but I'll allow it.
To Aru Kagaku no Railgun S needed more SATEN, but I'm glad it found excuses to trot her out in different hairstyles and various street clothes. The ending of the series was rather ridiculous with its casualty-free battle between espers and drones. I guess I was pleased to see SATEN behind the controls of a giant robot, though. P.S. Spoilers.
I already covered Dog and Scissors.
I won't revisit the shows I dropped except to say I also dropped Gatchaman Crowds. This one comes as a bit of a surprise because it seemed so promising after a strong start. However, I was unable to take the villain seriously and never cared what he did. I also did not sympathize with Rui at all nor had any interest in his reasons for crossdressing. The turning point was the episode where Rui is mercilessly beaten for what ended up being a hilariously long time and I realized I had absolutely no emotional investment in any of the characters and was only still watching to see how long Hajime could prolong her violently upbeat attitude. I fell behind after that, and once I learned how disappointed other fans were with the series finale, I decided to simply quit watching altogether.
Hey, sweetie, eyes on the God damn road.
This season summary is a lot more piecemeal than previous ones, but I kinda get the feeling the amount of time required to compile these things does not expand linearly with the number of additional shows watched. Maybe the one I write three months from now for the autumn 2013 shows will be a lot more cohesive and contain greater detail and not be dragged out over several weeks. At least, maybe it will be that way if I continue to watch only three shows. I've got up to 10 I might consider, but I can't see following more than seven for the time being.
Posted in BEST GIRL, Chou Jigen Game Neptume The Animation, Detective Conan, Dokidoki! Precure, Fate/kaleid liner Prisma☆Illya, Futari wa Milky Holmes, Gatchaman Crowds, Gen'ei o Kakeru Taiyou: Il Sole Penetra le Illusioni, Genshiken Nidaime, Gin no Saji, High School DxD, Inu to Hasami wa Tsukaiyou, Kiniro Mosaic, Kitakubu Katsudou Kiroku, Love Lab, Season Summary, Senki Zesshou Symphogear G, Servant x Service, Shingeki no Kyojin, To Aru Kagaku no Railgun S, Tokurei Sochi Dantai Stella Jo-Gakuin Kōtō-ka C3-Bu, Turning Girls, Uchouten Kazoku, WORSE THAN COSPRAYERS | Tags: Detectives, Dropped Shows, Gainax, Gainax Ending, Giant Robots, Girl of the Year, Girl of the Year 2013, Girls With Guns, Hair, Kugimiya Rie, Mahou Shoujo, Mamikore, Miyamura Yuko, OP ED, Season Conclusion, Sex, Summer 2013 | Permanent Link
As always, no wagering.
I started these Girl of the Year awards in 2009 mostly as a goof. Then I kept doing doing it every year and now I can't stop. Can I still pass judgment in a fair and balanced manner even though I watched relatively few shows in 2013? What if I refuse to accept nominations for girls from shows I haven't seen? Not to worry. This contest has always been rigged. Actually, it's not so much a competition as it is an exhibition.
(more…)
Posted in BEST GIRL, Gatchaman Crowds, Pretty Cure All Stars New Stage, Smile Precure!, To Aru Kagaku no Railgun S | Tags: Built for Sin, Characters in Need of Better Shows, Dropped Shows, Girl of the Year, Girl of the Year 2013, Hair, J.C. Staff, Mahou Shoujo, Mamikore, OP ED, Top Fuel Genki | Permanent Link
SATEN constantly looks as if she needs a haircut, but she apparently never gets one.
There is no end to the amount of bitching I could do about Toaru Kagaku no Railgun T (A Certain Scientific Railgun T) and the Index universe as a whole. Seriously, though, it is mostly bad. Like, wall-to-wall bad. Nevertheless, I fully intend to watch both cours of Railgun 3 even though Railgun 2 was not nearly as good as Railgun 1, and it's been so long since I've seen Railgun 1 that I have to question if I would even like it as much now as I did then. (I bought the Blu-rays anyway. Still unopened.)
I'm also not 100-percent sure I remember why Kuroko is in a wheelchair.
What I do know is that I still really like SATEN even though my reasons for liking her are entirely superficial. Here is a numbered list:
- SATEN has excellent hair. Like, for real. This is straight-up one of the biggest reasons.
- She's voiced by Itō Kanae, who typically uses a much more normal-sounding voice than you usually find in anime. Or at least it sounds normal to me.
- I get to continue writing SATEN Ruiko's surname in all capital letters (you know, like, on the Twitter) even though I've entirely forgotten why I started doing that in the first place. In any case, I've done it too long now to stop.
- As the only character in the main Railgun cast without superpowers, the distinction makes her the special one, I guess. I'm at least under the impression this is a big part of the reason why other SATEN fans like her—especially other SATEN fans who probably don't care about my first three reasons.
That's it. That's my list. You thought there would be five reasons, right? Because five is an honorary round number, eh. Fuck you, no it's not. Four reasons are all I need. And really I only needed the first two. SATEN's hair and Ito Kanae are wonderful.
Posted in To Aru Kagaku no Railgun T | Tags: DVDs and Blu-ray discs, Hair, Hime Cut, J.C. Staff, Kanae Ito, Light Novels, Season Introduction, Sequels, Wheelchairs, Winter 2020 | Permanent Link
|
|