Gubaba

Imagine walking into 7-11, and seeing these:

That confused me...did they put poison in her drink? When? And did she know it was poisoned?

I have read them. Your interpretation is not my interpretation.

Now THAT was a hell of an episode! The "Adama Maneuver" was exhilarating, and the Pegasus send-off was pretty damn awesome, too. Much as this show is not about mecha porn, it's nice to see it occasionally, and that was mecha porn at its most pornish. Nice to see that most people made it out alive, as well...although Kara getting played about "her daughter" pissed me off, since I got played as well. (Quick! Time to go back and edit my previous post so that it seems like I wasn't fooled! ) Still a lot of story threads remaining open...most of them involving Hera. And I'm guessing that sometime, Sharon's going to have to find out that Adama DID lie to her. And I wonder where Baltar's going to go...I hope not on some ridiculous elevated chair on a Base Star, with a light strategically placed under his face in order to make him look evil...

Finished Exodus Part I. Proceeding to Part II immediately.

Mm, it's not so much the wroship that I think is the problem...it's that anyone who professes to "get" Eva is probably completely bonkers (and I include myself in that statement). Plus, you've got too many people saying that THEIR view of Eva is correct, and everyone else is wrong, you've got the Rei vs. Asuka (vs. Mari) shippers, you've got blinded idiots saying that Eva is flawless, you've got other blinded idiots saying it's worthless... Really, merely putting the series up on a pedestal...? That's the LEAST of the sins of Eva fandom.

Lord almighty...you guys are saying that the third episode is the one with the cliffhanger...? 'Cause episode two was pretty harrowing. (Strangely, I'm not at all concerned for the well-being of Roslin and Tom Zarek, but very concerned for Cally. The fact that they superimposed the machine-gun fire sound effect over the shot of her running probably had a lot to do with that, however.) Kara's child is something I really should have seen coming, and her ambivalence was played well. Incidentally, I'm enormously grateful they haven't played the usual sci-fi trick of making the children magically grow up in a matter of hours. But yeah...lots of quotable lines here, from Tigh's "We're on the side of the demons" speech to Sharon asking Adama how he knows he can trust her, and his response: "I don't. But that's what trust is." Good stuff. Season 3 so far is a very different show than the previous two seasons, and I like that. Watching the original series, it's clear how easy it is to slip into a rote formula, and it was only through the addition of angels and devils and the fascist "Eastern Alliance" that shook the series out of its predictable doldrums (and a little over half a season in, no less! How would the original have survived if it had been picked up for a second or a third season?). Here, we've got all the same characters we had before, but thrust into different roles and different relationships than they had in the last season. And while I wouldn't call the last couple of episodes "heaps of fun!" or "HUGELY ENTERTAINING!", there is a certain gusto that comes out of taking a good cast with good writers and directors, and shaking everything up. Watching Tigh become steely and hard and cruel, and Tyrol become a concerned family man, and Kara become a mother, and Baltar become merely pathetic...well, there's a certain joy to it.

Eva, unfortunately, has been afflicted with a very bad case of fandumb, which is another reason why I usually try to avoid Eva discussions. I'm guilty of it too, though...so I can't really point any fingers.

Fair enough. As I said, I don't think the basic plot of Eva is terribly "deep" or original; the first half of the show (and a bit beyond) are little more (to me) than just a damn good update of the traditional super robot show plotline. It's only in the last couple of episodes that everything gets VERY weird and VERY arty...and still, it's more the techniques used for telling the story than the story itself. The philosophy and religious history can be interesting, and a lot of people turn to it first if they didn't understand what they just saw, but I think it's ultimately irrelevant. It's window dressing, and it's evocative, but reading the Dead Sea Scrolls won't give anyone a better grasp on Eva. I dunno. I think the show's detractors go a little far in dismissing the show's appeal and importance, but I think the fans often go too far in making it seem profound (hell, some idiot ON THIS VERY THREAD just posted something about postmodern literature! Talk about idiotic!). But for those (like me) who enjoy experimental and avant garde stuff, Eva is compelling on a number of levels. To reect it as pretentious just because it's not up one's alley seems a little rash. (To be honest, though, I still find it's enormous popularity to be...improbable? Baffling? I mean, I like experimental films and books. I like giant robots. I've studied the Bible and various gnostic and kabbalistic tests; I've studied Frued and Jung. I've gone through crippling depression. I had an obnoxious, red-haired girlfriend for a while who shared a birthday with Asuka. I sometimes feel like the show was created specifically FOR ME. I just can't figure out why anyone else likes it so much. )

Good luck finding them there...they're put out by Tokyo Pop, made for western audiences and English-only. *sigh* No, that's "She-Bop."

Great ideas! Me, I want a twelve-part OVA about the daily life of the Pinpoint Barrier Girls. Or a movie about Yot-chan's trials and tribulations as he becomes Nyan-Nyan's manager, and turns it into a galaxy-wide chain.

Funnily enough, I'm usually quiet around its non-fans, since they can be rabid as well (which is why I just recommended that air- stop watching the show, rather than trying to get into a discussion with him about it). In fact, I usually try to avoid getting into in-depth Eva discussions AT ALL, because it's non-fans all say the same thing, and the really hardcore fans (like myself) tend not to agree on much beyond the general specifics (and sometimes not even on that). But I'm getting sick of translating Macross Christmas songs, so I'll bite. I'd like to ask what you mean by "pretentious." Or at least, please give me other examples of works that you consider to be pretentious.

There IS no strict deifnition, and an author like William S. Burroughs has very little in common with, say, Don DeLillo or E.L. Doctorow. But I'd say if you read Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, any collection of Robert Coover short stories, Tha Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll, and Empire of the Senseless by Kathy Acker, you'll have a pretty clear notion of what it is and isn't. You'll still find it hard to explain to your roommate, however.

Not really...most of the stuff that got cut out involved the Macross traveling to various parts of the world, all of which got completely destroyed by the end of the episode. Hell, the omni-directional barrier overload even blew up the moon!

Why is that bad, or not something to be desired? One of the things that Eva did towards the end was bring post-modern storytelling* into a giant robot show. As such, a fragmented narrative, unsolved mysteries, reminders that the viewer is WATCHING A SHOW, not experiencing reality...these are all par for the course. The basic plot of Eva is simple, as is the same as every super robot show from Mazinger Z on down: someone is attacking earth using monsters of the week, and a kid has to pilot a robot built by his father to defeat them. It's simple, it's straightforward, it's normal. However, it doesn't deliver the usual climax, veering instead to devote more time to the psychological states of the characters. Now, both endings are "experimental" for a giant robot cartoon, but similar experiments had been done in other forms of fiction for many, many decades. Have you read Gravity's Rainbow? In a lot of ways, it's very similar: characters slowly uncovering a massive conspiracy, lots of clues as to the nature of the conspiracy and the identity of the conspiracists, many of them contradicting other clues...and by the end, it barely matters. It may even be just in the characters' imaginations. What it DOES TO THE CHARACTERS is more important that what it actually is. Of course, none of Eva's imitators realized this, and figured the way to be "like Eva" was to have weak, spineless main characters and stories that make no sense. Which, needless to say, is missing the point. *Now, "post-modern" is one of those buzzwords that gets thrown around a lot, usually incorrectly. I mean it in the strict sense of experimental fiction post-WWII, of the style of, say, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, William Gaddis, or William S. Burroughs; Roland Barthes' idea of the "writerly text" (as opposed to the traditional "readerly text") is what I have in mind here.

Meet me over at the Eva thread and I'll give you a reply of sorts.

Like I said, my DVD Provider is good. I asked her about Razor last week. She said, "Oh yeah, I have the uncut version, but I'm not going to give it to you until you finish Season 3." I think a lot of it was that Season 3 was where she started, and she had to kind of feel her way backwards, so wants me to watch it in the "proper" order, because she didn't...if that makes sense. Finished episode 1 last night. I'll probably watch 2 (and maybe 3) this evening. I kind of want to watch episode 2 right now, but I've got some Macross translating to do (I'm finishing up the Christmas album now).

No,you're a double doodyhead with extra doody! So, you don't like a particular anime, and it's one that a lot of other people like. Big deal. You don't win any prizes for liking it, nor do you get thrown in jail if you don't. It's probably my all-time favorite anime, but I feel remarkably un-messianic about it. If someone doesn't like it, I don't try to make them like it. If after 20 episodes, you still don't like it, it's just not your thing.

You never noticed it? It's there every episode! They even make a plot point of it when Sivil attacks Milia's office.

Well now...THAT was a bit of whiplash. I tried to finish the original series before this weekend, since I knew I'd be seeing my DVD provider today. I didn't make it., mostly because I didn't realize that "Greetings from Earth" was two hours long. (It, as always, wasn't very good, but at least it had the saving grace of being really f*cking weird. From the discussion of bacteria and contamination that ended up going nowhere, to the "nod, nod, wink wink, it's EARTH! No wait, it's not," to the song and dance number done by the "comical" androids, it was full of surprises...which is welcome enough relief, I guess). Anyway, four episodes left. Guess I'll rent it again next weekend. So...going from the pristine, gleaming world of the original Galactica to the grimy, unpleasant surface of New Caprica. As I said...a bit of whiplash there. And then, today, my DVD provider brought me Season 3 of the new series, with STRICT instructions to watch the webisodes first. So I did. They were adequate, I suppose. Clearly just a prelude to episode 1 of Season 3. And they did a pretty good job of telling a single story in three-minute increments. But I felt like I must have accidentally skipped some when I started watching the first episode. Tigh in dentention? Missing an eye? ("It looked like a hard-boiled egg." Ewww...) I have to hand it to them...Season 2 ended on an extraordinarily grim note, with the promise of very bad things happening, and many more to come. Season 3 begins by letting it play out, and things seem very bleak indeed. What the Cylons hope to accomplish is the mystery I'm REALLY curious about now. The end of Season 2 implied that they had decided to leave humanity alone, until they suddenly arrived. Lucy Lawless here mentioned that this is their plan for coexisting with mankind. But...there has to be more to the Cylon plan than subjugating humanity and impregnating Starbuck. Lee's pudginess was unexpected, and kind of sad. I liked how Starbuck's room is a replica of...Starbuck's room. I also wonder how many Cylons she's "killed." One a day? For four months? I also like how they somehow managed to create an atmosphere where I really do feel like almost no one is safe, that almost any character could be killed at any time. As such, I find it easier to list the characters I'm NOT worried about than the ones that I am...Adama, Lee, Starbuck, and Baltar. Somehow, I think they'll all be fine survive. Eveyone else seems...expendable somehow. Especially Gaeta...I'm POSITIVE they'll find out about his espionage. And of course...shocking ending. A season ago, I would've been glad that Baltar wasn't there, because, as horrible as he was, as much as he did little things that sabotaged the Galactica and its mission...he was still likable; funny, even. But now, he just seems pathetic and useless (of course, I'm also basing this on the end of Season 2, since he was barely in this episode). Anyway, good start. I'm looking forward to seeing where this is going.

k i been tryin to read ur messages and i can't cuz your not using punctuation u no how tuff it is to red something wout coreect punctuation its not ez its not all on seto wat u said bout macross everytin ur talkin bout is rt macross is very diffrint you want a mecha show wout music watch gundam macross is bout love stories have you watched ne macross series b4 if u have ull notice that all of them hav a love story what bout music evry macross has music n singing 2 its kinda macrosss speshul trademark maybe u shud watch some macross i think ud like it mebbe then agin mebbe not cuz u want just mecha stuf and macross has a lot more than just that is clear enuff?

MUSIC! and LOVE STORIES!!

Umm...Protoculture is people.

Nah, it's just a pet peeve of mine...it seems to be the received wisdom that Eva is only about merchandising, when, rather ironically, they originally decided that there would be NO toys, models, or figures for the show, and it was only because of public demand that they made some...and then more...and then more... As such, it's probably one of the only mecha shows ever to appear on TV that wasn't created primarily to sell toys. And yet it always gets flak for selling toys.