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megaman_zer0
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| QUOTE (mccamy @ Dec 17 2008, 06:07 PM) | | Glad to see someone has picked this series up again. I was beginning to think that if a show does not have a chibi, an animal mascot, a 12 year old female crime fighter or a vampire, no one in the U.S. will fansub it. The average age of people that I see at anime cons is ADULT. |
well the show itself is also fairly boring and predictable so you also have to take that into consideration. |
mccamy
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Dec 17 2008 07:07 PM Glad to see someone has picked this series up again. I was beginning to think that if a show does not have a chibi, an animal mascot, a 12 year old female crime fighter or a vampire, no one in the U.S. will fansub it. The average age of people that I see at anime cons is ADULT. |
poonk
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Jun 11 2008 01:36 AM God, this series is great. I think the more eps I see, the more I really love it (as dark as it is). The Kinuko 2-parter (eps.05-06) was quite good. I sort of guessed that Tsuyuguchi (the executed man) must be innocent and that he confessed in order to save his guilty daughter. So at first I thought that a great travesty had occurred, since an innocent man was executed. But as Maki reminds Aoki, "Don't simplify matters and thoughtlessly say, 'a murder he was wrongly accused of.' This is a perfect case of complicity." And as they peer further into Tsuyuguchi's brain, it's revealed that he's not exactly the purely self-sacrificing father he seemed to be at first-- he actually feels guilty for the part he played in Kinuko's disturbing behavior (as perhaps he should). And Kinuko's no suffering, angelic victim-character, either. She's actually more than a bit scary-- taunting Aoki with what they both know she's done, but for which she can't be prosecuted. Until...
...Hirai-kun and Zipp cross her path. I found their deaths to be extremely sad; I think something about the real-world setting made seeing it so much more disturbing to me than that your average side-character's death. Then seeing it all again through Zipp's eyes, knowing what was coming, was awful. And after all the darkness of these 2 episodes, it actually ends on a... well, not really an upbeat note, but sort of a... hopeful note. Aoki, upon viewing Zipp's memories of time spent with his master Hirai-kun, realizes that, despite the focus of his job, it's not all ugliness that people leave behind in their memories and he decides to crack open the one remaining volume of his deceased father's secret diary. And I admit I sort of cried along with Aoki at that point. *sigh* P.S. I'm sorry if I'm making this anime sound like a super-downer of death, depression, and angst*, but it's a wonderful and much-needed alternative to "high school hijinx"-type series, IMHO.( *meant in a non-derogatory way.) |
butterhex
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Jun 4 2008 03:05 PM Just to put my 2 cents in... I'm really beginning to like this one a lot. The characters are great and I can't wait to see how they develop. I don't usually read too deeply into the shows I watch and just enjoy them for entertainment value. This anime is a great find for the "older" anime viewer. Hope more people start to realize what they're missing! |
poonk
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poonk
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| QUOTE (mccamy @ May 23 2008, 11:22 PM) | | I mean, if they can generate visuals, why not sounds or smells? They are working with synapses. Memory is encoded in all the senses. |
Y'know, I thought about this too-- but I've decided that if I held logical inconsistancies against a series, I wouldn't be watching anime (or TV in general). But you're right, synpases are synapses, neurons are neurons, so why would it be visual only and not the other senses?
| QUOTE | | I like the way that everyone has secrets. This is why seinen manga is so much fun to read. It gets dark and twisted. Usually when they translate seinen manga into anime it loses the dark quality and turns into shonen or shoujo--all action and cute little kids and puppies to warm the heart. |
This is a seinen manga!? Forgive my shock, but judging from the manga art samples I've seen, I had actually assumed this was shoujo, kind of a borderline shounen-ai-tease type series, because of how "delicate" the characters look (sorry to stereotype, but I couldn't think of a better way to describe it). So I wonder... is the mangaka a man or a woman?
| QUOTE | | Since none of the characters goes to high school, I guess that means that this series will not last long in Japan. Too bad. It is fun. |
*laughs* I'm going to start telling people that it's full of panty shots and maybe then everyone will start watching... |
mccamy
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May 24 2008 12:22 AM Surprise! I think a lot of people are watching this one, just not at this site. The premise is incredibly lame from a sci/fi point of view. I write science fiction and I would never do a story about a computer that can show pictures of a person's life history on a monitor taken from sections of their cadaver brain. I mean, if they can generate visuals, why not sounds or smells? They are working with synapses. Memory is encoded in all the senses. So, I was not expecting much. However, the characterizations are top rate. And the animation style is some of the best noir that I have ever seen. Plus, I like the way that everyone has secrets. This is why seinen manga is so much fun to read. It gets dark and twisted. Usually when they translate seinen manga into anime it loses the dark quality and turns into shonen or shoujo--all action and cute little kids and puppies to warm the heart. Since none of the characters goes to high school, I guess that means that this series will not last long in Japan. Too bad. It is fun. |
poonk
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May 20 2008 07:29 PM I'm the only person on FTV following this, aren't I? *sigh*
Anyway, since I looove hearing myself talk-- er, type:Wow. 2-1/2 surprises from ep03:1. The president's murderer was his daughter's boyfriend, who was a terrorist-- and with whom the president was in love!? I was guessing that the bf was actually like the president's secret love-child or something, since he and the daughter both were very blonde/blue-eyed and looked alike. Didn't anticipate a secret infatuation. And since the bf was later found dead, and the Secret Service agent that was involved went missing -- I hope they come back to this story later, since it seems there's more to tell.
2. Aoki has had/is having/is afraid of having indecent thoughts about his sister, enough so that he decides to move out of his parents' house . Nothing like a job probing people's innermost secrets to make a guy incredibly self-conscious and/or paranoid about his own inner life. * Which sort of made me wonder, would people act differently if this technology were real? ** Or would they think, "When I'm dead, I won't care." ****Although as Maki pointed out, it's agency policy that employees never lose a sense of respect for the (former) person to whose secrets they are made privvy-- kind of like "Judge not, lest ye be judged," since we all have our less-than-noble moments-- still, that's easier to accept when you're on the "observing" side, and not the "observed" side.
**Although, in retrospect, this MRI (Memory Recall Imaging, I think it was) technology has quite a few limitations, doesn't it? I mean, they are only able to recover what the victim saw throughout his/her lifetime-- not what they heard (hence Aoki's lipreading skills), nor their emotional states (in fact it seems they could only conclude what happened in the president's case by observing the way his gaze fell-- lingering stares, etc.). So maybe you'd be "safe" if you somehow never let your body language betray your thoughts-- difficult, but maybe not impossible. But what a stifling way to live, huh? And I wonder if the MRI can recall things like dreams and fantasies (which are, to a degree, somewhat visual in nature).
***Maki obviously doesn't feel this way, since he keeps that gun with him to destroy his own brain if he feels death is imminent (I'm going to stop putting this in spoilers, as it was in ep01, which came out over a month ago).2-1/2. Maki killed his best friend/partner . I only count this as a half-surprise because you (the viewer) just knew he must have had some kind of tragic and/or scandalous event in his past. So can we assume the gun is insurance against his own people finding out the truth behind that incident? (or at least, the truth from Maki's POV.) I'm hoping maybe we'll start to learn more about Maki now-- so far the series has been pretty focused on Aoki, although judging from the OP/ED, Maki plays an equally major role. |
poonk
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May 1 2008 03:16 AM I just watched episode 02 and as I suspected in my previous post, in this episode the victim (a U.S. President!) had his back to the murderer so the detectives will actually have to do some detecting for their culprit. And on the personal front, the newcomer Aoki starts to feel the heavy weight of prying into other people's minds; it seems he has a hard time overlooking the potentially voyeuristic aspect of poking about in someone's memory, versus the desire/need to bring a murderer to justice (and honestly, if you think about it, how ultimately depressing a job would it be to watch people get murdered from a first-person point of view?). When I hit the end of the episode and remembered from the beginning that it was a 2-parter, I was pretty disappointed (because I hate waiting, and I was pretty into this). |
poonk
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Apr 20 2008 02:27 PM I watched the first episode and found it interesting enough to keep watching, at least for now. I'm not even sure this is crime- solving; the first episode, to me, was more about why the murderer did it than who did it, because once they plug into the victim's brain they basically have an eyewitness. Of course, this might have been just to establish for the viewer the capabilities of this "memory-recall" technology they are using; future cases might involve victims who "didn't know what hit them" and therefore might require more actual sleuthing based on what the victims saw/recalled before their deaths. And I would like to know why Maki sleeps with a gun so he can shoot himself in the head if he has to!? I'm curious what's in his head that he doesn't want anyone to scan... |