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Black Rock Shooter: Dawn Fall (TV).




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Stark700



Joined: 30 Jan 2012
Posts: 11762
Location: Earth
PostPosted: Sun Apr 03, 2022 9:01 am Reply with quote


Black Rock Shooter: Dawn Fall (TV)

Genres: action, drama
Themes: superpowers

Plot Summary:It is the year 2062, two decades after the defeat of a massive workforce automation project. However Artemis, the artificial intelligence that formed the core of that project, decided to attack humanity, and the resulting war laid waste to Earth.

A girl, Empress, wakes up in a base's underground research institute. She is one of three surviving guardians of humanity. However, she has no memories of what came before. All she knows is what a colonel of the peace-building force tells her.

Artemis is constructing an orbital elevator to link the Moon and Earth, and Empress is ordered to destroy the orbital elevator before its completion. If the elevator is completed, a massive number of giant mechanized forces being built on the moon will descend upon Earth.

However, standing in her way are Dead Master and Strength (who should be allies of Empress), as well as the unmanned forces that are pawns of Artemis, the "Smileys" of the "Educational Institution" cult, and more.

Empress advances to the orbital elevator with the colonel and others. What awaits them there...[/quote]

April 3, 2022 (Sundays; Disney+)
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DuskyPredator



Joined: 10 Mar 2009
Posts: 15464
Location: Brisbane, Australia
PostPosted: Tue Apr 05, 2022 6:07 am Reply with quote
Episode 1

Coming into this series was something I was a little excited for, but also that I would have big expectations, which is because the TV series 2012 left a really big impact on me. It was a show that demonstrated to me that CGI actually can work very well in a primarily action series, that I literally compared all the later CGI shows to it. It was that I thought was fantastic in how it used metaphor in marrying action to drama in a much more emotional way.

It was possibly a big hurdle, that this reboot is doing away with the dreamscapes that made up the first TV series and OVA, which would imply characters like Mato, and leaning more into the theoretical sci-fi aspect of a world with BRS. My fears were that it could undo a lot of the human connection that those first series, because without spoiling them, they were a lot like human connections, and a having a healthy mentality to your and others feelings. Granted, I don't really know about any of the media outside of those anime.

So coming into this series, where the battle android things are the main world, but with expectations of a series much more thoughtful, than what might at first look like action noise, I might actually take a hand at analysing things.

Firstly, touching on the two human kids, I thought that it was kind of an interesting touch that in this man vs machine world, they both have cybernetic body parts. The brother is more obvious in his cyborg arm, being much thinner than a human one, which does give an interesting idea of function over say what might be bulkier but look cooler. But you can also see that one of the sister's eyes is cybernetic, something that I don't think was really brought attention to, but once you notice it its hard to miss.

I was wondering why the humans were all wearing gas masks, such that what could be making the air tough or dangerous to breathe. But I think that this was kind of explained when Black Rock Shooter (Empress) showed that she can make weapons appear by altering a robot's body into one. I would take it that the robots are made up of a lot of nano-machines, and that these might be in the air and dangerous to breathe in.

If the machines are bad in trying to kill humans, it did bring up some questions of why exactly Empress would exist, with the presumption of being on the human side. A question of if she was made by the machines, or made by the humans. Going by my knowledge of the previous series, where a big part of her character was about making connections with others, my guess might be she was either created by humans to connect with the machines, or the machines to connect with humans, emotionally so.

The episode also showed a weird guy, who seemed designed specifically to give off uncanny valley vibes, as a robot made to look like a human, but not quite right. Based off what he said, I am thinking that there might be splinters of different factions of the machines, and some of them think that their final goal as machines will eventually be to resemble humans. Only, they likely really don't understand the emotional side of things. Empress may be a target as a machine most close to humanity.

I might still be very wrong about a number of these things, and I will admit that some of the action choreography was a bit too choppy in places. Also, the need to have the colonel explain a bunch of things, stunk of a lot of not feeling confident in showing its story beats rather than just saying them more organically.
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bonbonsrus



Joined: 15 Oct 2003
Posts: 1537
Location: Michigan, USA
PostPosted: Wed Apr 06, 2022 6:29 pm Reply with quote
I had no idea what this was about, no background in it to draw from, but I was surprised by it. So many things about it actually.

It's on Disney, perhaps that is more common in Japan, but I don't recall seeing that before. Is Disney expanding?

It was more adult than I was expecting as well being a Disney show, which I get doesn't mean what it used to anymore, but still surprised me. spoiler[Why does an android looking guy need to F^(# another android girl...did he kill her with that? And was that ejaculate coming out of her mouth? eww. They didn't seem human so I am baffled why they'd act like this. Are they a sort of cyborg/human amalgamation?]

Some of it was fairly good looking though, more so than I was expecting for some of the violence and whatnot. I'll give it a few I guess and see if I am interested and can figure out what's going on.
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DuskyPredator



Joined: 10 Mar 2009
Posts: 15464
Location: Brisbane, Australia
PostPosted: Thu Apr 07, 2022 1:45 am Reply with quote
bonbonsrus wrote:
It was more adult than I was expecting as well being a Disney show, which I get doesn't mean what it used to anymore, but still surprised me. spoiler[Why does an android looking guy need to F^(# another android girl...did he kill her with that? And was that ejaculate coming out of her mouth? eww. They didn't seem human so I am baffled why they'd act like this. Are they a sort of cyborg/human amalgamation?]


My take based on his later speech was that it was his take of trying be more human, by emulating the most human thing he could think of. Especially consider that he could either remove or hide it, that it serves no function beyond emulating some idea of being human. And I also wasn't sure if the women themselves were androids or not, seeing as they look less uncanny than he does.
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