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EP. REVIEW: Land of the Lustrous


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Animechic420



Joined: 25 Sep 2012
Posts: 1724
Location: A Cave Filled With Riches
PostPosted: Sun Oct 15, 2017 7:25 pm Reply with quote
It’s almost challenging not to refer to the gems as “she” or “her”, but it’s all good. As long as people remember they’ll genderless. Anime exclamation
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Joshua Zarate



Joined: 12 Jan 2017
Posts: 2061
PostPosted: Sun Oct 15, 2017 7:59 pm Reply with quote
Animechic420 wrote:
It’s almost challenging not to refer to the gems as “she” or “her”, but it’s all good. As long as people remember they’ll genderless. Anime exclamation


Pardon me for my off-handedness, but whoa, it looks like you and I are watching several of the same shows this season (TAMB, Kino’s Journey, Girls’ Last Tour, and now this). I just found that happening to be a slight coincidence and wanted to point it out just because.

Anyway, it’s a shame to read that the reviewer doesn’t like the characters much. I can somewhat see why she would feel this way, but I personally thought that Phos was at least a charming lead to follow, as did some others on the preview guide. Good voice acting also. Oh well, I guess they will not resonate with everyone, I suppose.

One thing that I heard on the interwebs is that the story for this series is one that is beautiful and I’m curious to see what we will be shown going forward.
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Mhora





PostPosted: Sun Oct 15, 2017 8:06 pm Reply with quote
The enemy designs are so beautiful! Visually stunning!
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Mhora





PostPosted: Sun Oct 15, 2017 8:08 pm Reply with quote
Animechic420 wrote:
It’s almost challenging not to refer to the gems as “she” or “her”, but it’s all good. As long as people remember they’ll genderless. Anime exclamation

Genderless? They appear to be pretty much all women, no?
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Paulo27



Joined: 22 Jan 2015
Posts: 400
PostPosted: Sun Oct 15, 2017 8:29 pm Reply with quote
Mhora wrote:
Animechic420 wrote:
It’s almost challenging not to refer to the gems as “she” or “her”, but it’s all good. As long as people remember they’ll genderless. Anime exclamation

Genderless? They appear to be pretty much all women, no?
Some refer to themselves as "boku", but they all look like women, so I guess that's how genderless they are.
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Niello



Joined: 22 Dec 2013
Posts: 302
PostPosted: Sun Oct 15, 2017 8:43 pm Reply with quote
I was a bit disappointed with the opening. Good song, but they really could have done something more creative with the visuals. I'm hoping this is a case where they change the opener as the series progress. It's in CG so I'm assuming it's easier to do, would be a loss of opportunity if they don't play around with that.

On the contrary I was impressed with the ending sequence by Yoko Kuno, she really captured the manga look. Plus, it reminds me quite a bit of Shinsekai Yori and Erased endings.

Also, the sub is really shoddy. I understand that they have to work against time but it was bad. The toughness explanation was all over the place, still can't believe they went with "durability". There's the proper term for it, if they don't know the least they could do is a quick Google search. Then there's also parts where they tried to avoid using gendered pronouns and ended up with awkward sentences (just use he/him/his/brother and problems would be solved). Then there's the cherry on top. I have spotted at least two occasions where unfaithful translation is going to cause problems down the line. Namely the omission of the term "inclusion" and changing the word "fun" to "better".


Last edited by Niello on Sun Oct 15, 2017 9:05 pm; edited 2 times in total
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Niello



Joined: 22 Dec 2013
Posts: 302
PostPosted: Sun Oct 15, 2017 8:45 pm Reply with quote
Mhora wrote:
Animechic420 wrote:
It’s almost challenging not to refer to the gems as “she” or “her”, but it’s all good. As long as people remember they’ll genderless. Anime exclamation

Genderless? They appear to be pretty much all women, no?


There is a world building reason for why they all look so similar (and why their bodies look like that).
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Ashabel



Joined: 16 Feb 2010
Posts: 350
PostPosted: Sun Oct 15, 2017 9:06 pm Reply with quote
Mhora wrote:
Animechic420 wrote:
It’s almost challenging not to refer to the gems as “she” or “her”, but it’s all good. As long as people remember they’ll genderless. Anime exclamation

Genderless? They appear to be pretty much all women, no?


All of them use either neutral or masculine speech, and refer to themselves and each other with masculine or neutral pronouns. Official subtitles choose to refer to all gems with gender-neutral pronouns for the sake of consistency, but grammatically it would actually be more correct to refer to Phos as male because everyone in the series refers to him with masculine pronouns.

The contrast is very intentional due to the series' narrative themes.
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Animechic420



Joined: 25 Sep 2012
Posts: 1724
Location: A Cave Filled With Riches
PostPosted: Sun Oct 15, 2017 10:42 pm Reply with quote
Joshua Zarate wrote:
Animechic420 wrote:
It’s almost challenging not to refer to the gems as “she” or “her”, but it’s all good. As long as people remember they’ll genderless. Anime exclamation

Pardon me for my off-handedness, but whoa, it looks like you and I are watching several of the same shows this season (TAMB, Kino’s Journey, Girls’ Last Tour, and now this). I just found that happening to be a slight coincidence and wanted to point it out just because.

Yeah, I have a boat load of new anime I'm watching, plus three form last season and I just wanted be one of the first people to leave a comment in each thread. Mr. Green

There are quite some awesome selections among the Fall collection and I don't wanna miss any of them. Very Happy
Joshua Zarate wrote:
Anyway, it’s a shame to read that the reviewer doesn’t like the characters much. I can somewhat see why she would feel this way, but I personally thought that Phos was at least a charming lead to follow, as did some others on the preview guide. Good voice acting also. Oh well, I guess they will not resonate with everyone, I suppose.

You're right, but I wouldn't worry about it. I know I enjoyed watching and all the reviews are just opinions I like to read up on.
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meiam



Joined: 23 Jun 2013
Posts: 3442
PostPosted: Sun Oct 15, 2017 10:57 pm Reply with quote
Yeah I agree, world is interesting, character aren't really. They all seem to be jerk in there own special way, with more than a little bit of recklessness/stupidity thrown in ("well the enemy just dumb something on our doorstep, no need to investigate let's just leave it here and ignore it"). The monster are effectively really cool and make good use of the CG, so much so that I don't even really mind it!

I don't quiet understand how Dia and Bort work, Bort isn't fundamentally different than diamond, it's just a class of diamond. If anything it should be the weakest one since it's the leftover diamond that can't be used for gem. Diamond are very different than other gemstone and crystal, there not alloy but large single molecule, typically they break along defect in the structure, the more perfect a diamond is, the harder it is. So why is Bort the stronger one I don't quite get. Also not quiet sure what the enemy is supposed to be, there's no real way to dissolve/melt diamond, you need high temperature to do anything to it.
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Niello



Joined: 22 Dec 2013
Posts: 302
PostPosted: Sun Oct 15, 2017 11:29 pm Reply with quote
meiam wrote:

I don't quiet understand how Dia and Bort work, Bort isn't fundamentally different than diamond, it's just a class of diamond. If anything it should be the weakest one since it's the leftover diamond that can't be used for gem. Diamond are very different than other gemstone and crystal, there not alloy but large single molecule, typically they break along defect in the structure, the more perfect a diamond is, the harder it is. So why is Bort the stronger one I don't quite get. Also not quiet sure what the enemy is supposed to be, there's no real way to dissolve/melt diamond, you need high temperature to do anything to it.


Well, first of all, hardness is not equal to toughness. Just because something is harder to get scratched doesn't necessarily mean that it's more resistant to shattering on impact. Diamond is a single big crystalline structure, whereas Bort is made up of many tiny crystals, still a macromolecule but many of that together. So when cracked, the damage doesn't spread to the rest of the body. When you say borts aren't use for gems, that's just because they don't look good enough to be crafted into jewelleries for selling (it's opaque). It has nothing to do with hardness or toughness. As for the "enemy", keep in mind that this is basically post apocalyptic, the evolution is of course different. It doesn't necessarily have to be the same as contemporary real world creatures.

Like I mentioned earlier...shoddy sub. They even got the lore wrong.
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Shaterri



Joined: 03 Jan 2008
Posts: 173
PostPosted: Mon Oct 16, 2017 1:47 pm Reply with quote
This show was right up at the top of my watch list going into the season because the originality in the visual design was just so striking. Now that I've read the first couple of (translated) volumes of the manga and seen the first couple of episodes, I really want to love it but find myself being consistently frustrated by all the little ways it just doesn't quite hold up.

Phos is clearly meant to be the main character and we're meant to sympathize with them, but at this point (in both stories) the annoyance factor is just too high for me; all the classic 'annoying shonen protagonist' traits are there, but so far I'm just not feeling any of the 'redeeming virtues' element. Even their desire to try and help Cinnabar feels a little too juvenile, more like a puppy or duckling imprinting on someone than a youth (and keep in mind that even Phos is supposed to have multiple hundreds of years under their belt!) being inspired by example.

And while the visual design is absolutely amazing, so far the animation feels like it just can't quite get to the level of execution that the premise demands. (This is kind of a frustration in the manga too, where the ideas are clearly there but the technical skill just feels a little bit short.) I really hope that every aspect of this production can grow into what the concept and design promise, because the best execution would make this an instant classic, but right now it just feels like it's highlighting all the ways it's lacking.
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PotatoGirl



Joined: 16 Dec 2016
Posts: 78
PostPosted: Mon Oct 16, 2017 4:04 pm Reply with quote
Shaterri wrote:

Phos is clearly meant to be the main character and we're meant to sympathize with them, but at this point (in both stories) the annoyance factor is just too high for me; all the classic 'annoying shonen protagonist' traits are there, but so far I'm just not feeling any of the 'redeeming virtues' element. Even their desire to try and help Cinnabar feels a little too juvenile, more like a puppy or duckling imprinting on someone than a youth (and keep in mind that even Phos is supposed to have multiple hundreds of years under their belt!) being inspired by example.

Oh, don't worry about Phos's attitude, it changes in book 3 spoiler[ you'll actually miss it later on, but in a good way]

I'm really like the anime so far, except for the way they shoot the fight scenes. There are way too many closeups, which make it kinda hard to see where they characters are and what they're doing.
Also Bort slashing the lunarian in half looked kinda ridiculous.
spoiler[MY HAND!]
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killjoy_the



Joined: 30 May 2015
Posts: 2457
PostPosted: Mon Oct 16, 2017 7:16 pm Reply with quote
Aw man I love Phos why does everyone hate them. They're such an annoying little shit, so unashamedly, it's great.
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Chrono1000





PostPosted: Wed Oct 18, 2017 11:02 pm Reply with quote
Land of the Lustrous might be the best looking CGI anime show I have seen though it does help when the characters are living gems. A bit early to say much about the story but it feels like it is being carefully setup and the character designs for the enemy Lunarians are nicely ethereal. Episode 2 was one heck of a cliffhanger and while I doubt that the protagonist of the story would die in the second episode I get the sense that her wish about getting reborn is going to come true in classic monkey paw style.

killjoy_the wrote:
Aw man I love Phos why does everyone hate them. They're such an annoying little shit, so unashamedly, it's great.
I think Phos is a good protagonist but she is bratty, egotistical, and lazy so she is certainly a flawed protagonist. Phos even tries repeatedly to get out of the one job she was given simply because she thinks it is boring. Still that Phos sincerely wants to help Cinnabar does give her a noble purpose.
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