BillyClark

Why the world should care about the far right’s rise in Germany

What are we reusing headlines from the 1930s now?

I would like to take this moment to talk about the absolutely ridiculous plot device called the White Tower.

Why imprison somebody out in the woods instead of like in a special place in some other building? It’s hard for me to think of a lore-friendly in-universe answer that makes any sense. I think it’s out in the woods with no guards simply because that makes it easier for Wilfried to commit this crime.

Only the Aub’s family can enter? How does Veronica get her food? They’re not going to waste mana teleporting things back and forth. If they have an attendant doing it, one of the Aub’s family would need to go there every time to open the door. And hauling food out into the forest several times a day sounds like a hellish job. If an attendant is doing it, they need to be escorted by the Aub’s family, but it would be even weirder for the Aub’s family to do it themselves.

When Georgine visited Veronica, Veronica looked well-groomed. As a noble, that means that she has an attendant grooming her. But again, that runs into the same problem. How do they get in? Who’s letting them in?

This is all a lot of to-do just to have some weird prison in the middle of nowhere. If you can have all of these rules about who can enter on a building way out there, then you can have the same rules on a closer building, where it’s not such a hassle for somebody from the Aub’s family to go open the door when needed.

Realistically, the blame lies less on Wilfried than on Veronica and Sylvester, who raised him poorly. But you’re right. Usually, when the Aub sucks, everybody else pays for it, and that didn’t happen here.

Another person who doesn’t get the punishment he deserves is Oswald, who didn’t really even show up in this episode. He’s Wilfried’s head attendant. Earlier, we heard that Wilfried’s attendants are always chasing after him, but where were they in this episode? Letting him run free around nobles of all factions? Ridiculous. Oswald should have been instantly fired for allowing this to happen, at the very least.

The pace of this season is either 1000 miles an hour or walking pace. In the past, they cram-packed shitloads into a single episode, and now they spent an entire episode on Wilfried’s white tower shenanigans. And they previously spent an entire episode on Georgine’s visit. These are two of the most important events to progress character and plot, but they are not action-packed like you’d expect from an anime.

So, my guess is that the author, Miya Kazuki, or somebody else who deeply cares about this story has made some stipulations about which events need to be given the most time. It’s good that they were able to spend at least a little time here, but I wish they could have spent a little time on all of the other fairly important moments in the rest of this arc. But I also understand that they probably want to rush this arc, because if they can get a next season, I think that’s where the anime would probably have the best chance of catching on.

And since no review this season is complete without me shitting on the animation, I’ll point one thing out. There’s one scene where they shoot a deer with a bow and arrow, which would be fine, but the arrow hits it in the stomach area and it immediately drops dead. No, that is not how that works.

At least the animators were able to make Rozemyne very slightly taller than Charlotte, which is an important detail to Rozemyne, who is always shorter than everybody else.

No big surprises this episode. We finally got to learn the reason that the Heavy Knight is the best class, because you can fight with it like normal until you hit 40% HP, and then you can consume 20% of your HP to qualify for the game’s highest risk, highest reward upgrade without risking actually dying each time. So, he becomes a defensive class that does as much damage and is as fast as the most offensive class. It does seem stupidly overpowered.

It also feels like the balance is weird if the most offensive class only does 115% more damage than the most defensive class. But being 115% faster seems like it would be huge.

Also, I go on enough about Elymas making dumb decisions. I didn’t see any real dumb decisions in this episode. I still stand by my statement that it was dumb to antagonize Malice. She’ll probably kill his father to become head of the house and then come after him as soon as possible. But that decision was last episode.

This episode, all I can say is that his thanking his father for raising him actually felt like a smart decision. I mean, logically, it seems his father would have abided by the agreement to leave him alone, regardless, but it seems like a good idea to try to be on good terms with such a powerful lord… even if he’s not long for this world because Malice will probably kill him pretty soon.

If his father… was he called Aizen? If Aizen was smart, he’d be looking at Malice as an enemy right now, because he’s the only thing in the path of her obsession. But we learned in the last episode (and I guess somewhat in the first episode) that Aizen is not the least bit smart and even his own butler looks down on him for his stupidity.

At any rate, all of my curiosity about the basic ideas behind this anime has now been satisfied. I’m confused that there’s another episode this season. It feels like if this anime keeps going, it will end up following the classic DBZ path. “I’m losing a fight against a better enemy. This lets me unlock my next superpower.” Rinse and repeat.

I couldn’t finish the article due to my getting incensed about the blatant racism, which is unusual for me to actually get upset.

A few things that stood out:

They called this “democracy in action” or something. But it was just a symbolic vote that didn’t do anything.

Second, they said they were tired of “illegal immigrants.” So they’re taking it out on asylum seekers and refugees, who are legally there?

Third, it’s a former military base, so it sounds like it wasn’t being used. So there’s this place that can house over 1000 people sitting unused and thousands who need housing during their legal asylum process. And they’re upset that refugees aren’t being distributed equally everywhere. Well, other places don’t always have tons of unused space available.

How stupid do you have to be to not understand that you can’t choose where to find existing housing that is unused?

These were the things that bothered me up until the point that they started crying about feeling safe around refugees simply because they come from foreign countries.

Some of the writing in this series betrays some very human emotions. Like, logically, Georgine should be angriest at her mother Veronica. Sylvester didn’t really do anything other than being spoiled by Veronica. But it is very natural to be angriest at the person who takes what you believe to be yours. It also doesn’t make much logical sense that Georgine, who is now first wife of a major duchy, would be interested in stealing a backwater foundation, but it’s very natural for a human to be obsessed with the thing they felt was taken from them. It’s so refreshing to have antagonists, who you can at least understand their motivations.

I do have one major complaint about the animation in this episode. The net that Ferdinand used during the hunt is supposed to be a transformation of his schtappe. It’s not some spell that he’s casting out of his hand that causes a net to appear. It’s supposed to be similar to a fishing net, what I’d call a “casting net”. You throw it and it spreads out in a big circle, but you have a rope that you keep in your hand that goes to the center of the net, and when you pull the rope, the net grabs whatever is inside into a pouch so you can draw it back towards yourself.

The reason this is important in this episode is that Ferdinand is supposed to have caused all of those feybeasts to explode through the rope. If you could just make a net appear around anything and then cause the insides to explode, that would be stupidly overpowered. If it’s a weapon that has a somewhat limited range and that actually needs skill to use, and could be defended against, then it’s more reasonable. Ferdinand had to send his mana down the rope that he was still holding in his hand, so it’s also something that is only possible for a person with archnoble levels of mana.

Finally, an episode that doesn’t force you to skip forward most of the time.

Elymas continues to be plagued by his own stupidity, but it seems like the anime finally gives us an explanation for his stupidity. It’s genetic. His entire family is as dumb as rocks. Even the family butler looks down on everybody in the family for their stupidity.

Elymas wasn’t absurdly stupid in this episode. He just made the sort of average stupid decision many of us would make in the heat of the moment by agreeing to fight Malice, but the most likely outcomes for him are bad. The only good outcome I can see is if his father sees his power and reinstalls Elymas as the head of the family. But Elymas thinks that is not an option and that he’s going to be done with the Edvaughn family after this.

So, possibility 1: Elymas loses. Malice obviously kills him or at least maims him permanently. Clearly a bad outcome.

Possibility 2: Elymas wins. Is Malice really going to abide by their agreement when she becomes head of the family? No. Her obsession will only grow because he’s defeated her. Elymas gets nothing except more pressure. The same goes if Elymas doesn’t clearly win, but his father is forced to stop the match and say that he’s shown his power. This is a bad outcome.

Possibility 3: Elymas kills Malice. This works well if Elymas returns as head of the family, but he’s claimed he’s done with the family. So, all he’s done is killed the next lord. He’d probably be executed. Bad outcome.

Possibility 4: Elymas ruins Malice. I guess this is the other possibly marginally good outcome. His victory either scars her physically or mentally so that she’s afraid of him. It seems like she’d be sending assassins after him until she gets him. Not as clearly a good or bad outcome, but it’s not an outcome that I’d be going for in his situation.

So, overall, I think Elymas’s decision to fight was a rather stupid one. The probable outcomes are pretty bad, and he’s immediately exposing the skillbook that he just purchased. I’m sure it will all work out for him, but I don’t think he should expect that it will all work out for him. It’s like he made a decision that relies on plot armor to be a good decision.

That “article” is just a link to a 25 minute video. I’m not going to wade through a 25 minute video to find out what points they make.

But let’s get real… The first thing people compare when they go from ICE to EV is how it affects their everyday lives. And immediately, plugging something in when you get home is far easier than going to a gas station.

Most drivers need short range vehicles for daily commutes. EV is just the far superior answer.

That’s the first thing that everybody notices when they get their first EV. Once, I had to use an ICE rental car, and it just felt so silly going to the gas station.

Those are smaller parts of bigger pictures. They make more sense if you get the context of the rest of the picture.

If you zoom in enough on a pointillism piece, it will just be a colored dot. Anybody can make a dot. It takes basically zero skill. But when you look at the dot in the context of everything else, it becomes more clear that it’s not just a dot, but a dot in service of a greater vision.

This is the type of episode I’ve been wanting this entire season. This episode feels like the anime took a moment to just breathe. Some people might complain that even this episode did too much, but I think it’s reasonable, considering the rest of the season.

I wonder if they rushed through so much other stuff in other episodes just so that they could give Georgine’s visit more time to push the plot forwards.

One thing I liked about this episode is that, at the beginning, Georgine, talking about Rozemyne, insults Sylvester’s bad parenting, especially his laziness, leaving her to be raised by Ferdinand. And then, at the end of the episode, Georgine is proven right, but it was Wilfried. Wilfried was indeed raised extremely poorly, and that’s why he made the mistake in saying his farewells to Georgine, and the underlying reason for that is very related to Sylvester’s attitude about leaving all of his work to other people.

This type of thing is so important to good storytelling. The protagonists are not perfect, and sometimes they’re extremely flawed. The antagonists are fully fleshed out, thinking individuals. Sometimes, when you really think about a well-written story, you realize that literally the only reason the protagonists are seen as the good guys is that the story is written from their perspective, and that if the story was written from the opposite perspective, you’d believe the other side was the good guys.

But actually showing everyone independently connecting those dots would slow the story to a crawl, so I don’t mind the shortcut.

One alternative that doesn’t slow things down much is they’re taken into a private meeting room and the whole conversation happens in private. Then, when they’re coming out of the room, the entire guild quiets down, and are looking at them with greedy eyes, and maybe the MCs project and think to themselves, “They know we made a lot of money.”

Or, they leave the guild after the private meeting, and when they’re in the restaurant afterwards, that asshole adventurer comes up to them and makes an ass of himself in an even worse place, and tells them that everybody in the guild knows they defeated the dungeon and made a lot of money.

Anyways, I’m not really a writer. It’s a lot easier to throw out ideas than it is to write the scenes using the ideas. Like you said, I also can’t really blame the anime for doing it the way they did. I just personally don’t like the trope. I don’t think I’m precisely their target audience.

I dislike the trope where the hero goes into the guild and everybody learns too much about them because their conversation with the receptionist is overheard by everybody.

Like, everybody had to hear that they earned 10,000,000 gold just from the bounty and that they didn’t think it was that much?

I get it that probably the bounty was public knowledge, and probably everybody would learn through gossip that Elymas’s team defeated the dungeon, and that this is just an easy way to add drama, but I don’t think story writing is supposed to be just easy and cliches. Good fantasy story writing is predicated on a believable world that’s been lovingly and carefully crafted, but the guild here is just so hard to believe even in the context of that world.

And speaking of easy and cliched writing, Malice is suddenly obsessed with Elymas? That makes zero sense to me, at least only watching the anime. If she was really that obsessed, why wouldn’t she have killed him rather than letting him leave home at the very beginning of the anime? The moment she let him go, he’s much harder to kill because, for example, first she has to find him.

Good story writing gives the viewer or reader reasons why something might happen. It’s not enough for the first episode to say that Malice is crazy and hates Elymas. That’s different from being obsessed with him after she’s already taken everything from him and exiled him. The viewer or reader needs to understand characters well enough to understand their actions. The fact that she already let him go needs to be explained.

But again, this episode had a part that I really enjoyed, which was the negotiation with the shop owner. And just to compare it to those other two parts, it feels like a consistent and realistic part of the world, and you had previously gotten a great glimpse of how all of the characters involved would act. It was just fun and lovely. Whoever wrote that scene has the ability to write really well. I don’t understand how there is such a huge difference in quality, scene to scene.

Zhang [her team manager] admitted to violating labour laws but insisted that the issue had nothing to do with the company.

Is that distinction actually important in China? Most places, it’s the company’s responsibility to train managers to try to keep them from breaking labor laws.

According to labour law, if an employer insults or physically punishes employees, the responsible personnel may face detention for up to 15 days.

“Zhang should be detained for 15 days,” insisted an online observer.

“The young lady should recognise that no job is more important than her health,” remarked another.

Sheesh.

The recap in this episode was like 9 minutes long. That’s too long.

And then, the fight itself was crazy stretched out. It was two attacks with zero counter attacks, but it lasted most of the rest of the episode.

I think the thing that bothers me the most about this anime is the way that Elymas seems to be unable to use his common sense or any knowledge that he gained from living in that world for his entire life, and he purely makes his choices based on his knowledge of the game. It’s hard to fathom that his entire life in that world made no difference to him from the entire time since he got his class to this episode, and that has made him act inconceivably stupid, I guess.

So, the fact that he’s starting to overcome this weird mental block that doesn’t really make much sense in the first place, well, it’s a good sign for this anime. Elymas has actually realized that he’s not just playing a game, and it’s not completely governed by game rules. I have no idea how he didn’t realize it up to this point, but at least he’s there now.

This episode was too rushed.

I don’t greatly disagree with some of the overall plot decisions they made, such as combining two different Damuel scenes into one. And some of the specifics about how they gathered the egg.

But they changed the way Ferdinand fought the lizard creatures, which is actually a relatively important but minor plot point from Rozemyne’s perspective. I think this was done this way because the episode was cramming too much stuff in, and so they didn’t have time to show the correct scene. But the important thing is that, after this episode, Rozemyne now has slightly different knowledge compared to the LN. I’m guessing they’re planning to just let this go.

And they ignored a lot of the religious stuff, like how they had to go collect the egg on a certain day, or what Liedenshaft’s wrath would be. Rozemyne at this point is supposed to be pondering the difference between the religious view and what might be called a scientific view.

They did get a lot of the emotional stuff between Damuel and Brigitte pretty correct.

I think they did a kind of a shit job with the Effons and the Effon hunt. They’re supposed to be headbanging trees that initially seem to be singing death metal or something, but when you approach them, it turns out it’s just horrible screaming.

Also, the part where Rozemyne attacked the Nanseb showed her swinging her mana knife way too hard. She’s putting her mana into it, so it just goes through like a hot knife through butter, and she knows it. With that blade and her enormous mana in it, she won’t have trouble cutting almost anything. What’s shown in the anime looks far too dangerous for the sorts of things that she’s allowed to do.

Wonderful, thanks for looking that up.

I remember learning about that bug years after the OS came out, and not being too surprised that it was never fixed.

Windows 95 crashed so often that you’d basically have to specifically do nothing with the machine to ever get that crash. And even then, you’d just assume that it was crashing like Windows 95 always did anyway.

So you’d be unlikely to see or recognize that bug unless you were specifically testing for uptime issues.

Also note that government NEEDS stability, which Linux very much wasn’t until recently (and arguably still isnt); this is why Windows has starting becoming a liability.

I was using Linux in the late 90s when my Linux machine would run for months, only being rebooted when I decided to do a kernel upgrade, and meanwhile everybody was running Windows 95, one of the least stable OSes that I’ve ever used. It literally had a counter baked into the OS that caused a crash if you ran it for a certain amount of days, I think 30. If stability was so important, they’d have switched to Linux back then.

Even in the late 90s, the UI was decent enough as long as you had a decent administrator. I don’t think casual users could be expected to set up Linux back then, but that’s not a government type of use case.

It makes sense that emojis are controlled similar to votes, since they’re basically a type of vote.

Several thoughts.

1. Imagine you have cancer and you’re working through it on your spouse’s Disney healthcare, but you also need to work full-time to make ends meet. You might be forced to quit your job or only do part-time hours so that you can continue on the better health insurance. Forcing people into this sort of financial dilemma is… well, I think the most accurate term is “evil.”
2. As they said in the article, this affects lower income employees more. If you’re a high income employee at Disney, maybe you don’t need your spouse to work. So, this will disproportionately remove lower income people from their insurance, while higher income people receive twice the healthcare benefits. This makes very little sense.
3. This is more evidence that the very concept of tying workplace to healthcare is madness. In the end, universal healthcare is just the optimal solution.

Why don’t we already have universal, single-payer healthcare? Let’s not forget that it’s the corporations and ultra-wealthy people who have the most sway in our government. Look, here’s Disney bitching and moaning about how awful and expensive it is to offer adequate healthcare for their employees. So obviously, you’d think they should just support universal healthcare and be done with all of this healthcare expense.

But the truth is that they don’t want to. They want to tie healthcare to the company because smaller companies often have worse healthcare packages because they have less negotiating power, and this is a way of enslaving people. Tying them to one company so that they can never leave. But also, make it as cheap as possible in the meantime. Reduce benefits just enough so that they constantly suffer but can’t afford to leave. They want to have it both ways. Employees not getting enough benefits as well as getting enough benefits that they can’t afford to leave.

This is entirely inhumane.