m
maybe th
maybe the real peng
maybe the real penguindrum was the friends we m
(screencap: the splash image at the end of the final episode)
…So, that sure was an anime that got made, huh?
Final reactions under the cut! Lots of spoilers, although if you haven’t watched the thing in the first place, a lot of them will probably be incomprehensible anyway.
The bad Utena video got me to take another shot at watching Mawaru Penguindrum, Ikuhara’s first series after a long post-SKU hiatus. Chasing each episode with the watchalong from the Imagine Me And Utena podcast.
The hosts are watching mostly-unspoiled, so there’s a lot of “wow, we have no idea where this is going either,” but they’ll dissect moments that I didn’t think that hard about, or go over cultural background I didn’t know. Which is cool and helpful.
At one point I figured I’d start watching the show once all the IMAU episodes were out? But they stopped cold after episode 17 (of 24), and that was 9 months ago. No idea if that was just Life Happening, or if the show did something so dramatic and off-putting they couldn’t keep watching.
Guess I’ll find out!
Writing this post as of episode 7. No spoilers, please — if I’m going to suffer, sit back and let me suffer.
(Screencap: this show winning an Oscar. /rimshot)
Never actually watched any James Somerton videos before the big callouts dropped. (If you missed them, and have some time to kill: Hbomberguy’s 4-hour video about plagiarism where half of it is just Somerton, and Todd in the Shadows’ 2-hour video about the sheer amount of blatant lies he told about queer history and media.)
But the other night I ended up watching this streamed commentary/breakdown of Somerton’s Utena video:
2/3 of the way through, it’s mostly a sludge of reading off Wikipedia interspersed with lukewarm takes. Then, around 1:54:25, a line that made me stop cold and rewind to make sure I heard it right:
“…which I feel gives a lot of undue complexity to a work that is otherwise meant to just be straightforward.”
UNDUE COMPLEXITY. Utena!
Meant to just be straightforward! UTENA?!
I just
Wh
(For the sake of not spending an hour on this post, I am restraining myself from getting into the weeds about more specific stupid takes that the streamers didn’t call out already, but I can’t leave this out: He also goes on this big tangent about how Miley Cyrus doesn’t indicate anywhere in the music video for “Wrecking Ball” that the construction imagery is supposed to be symbolic? The song where, if you only know one thing about it, it’s the line about how the wrecking ball is a symbol)
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winterfish
