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EP. REVIEW: Blade of the Immortal


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yuna49



Joined: 27 Aug 2008
Posts: 3804
PostPosted: Thu Nov 28, 2019 11:32 am Reply with quote
Panino Manino wrote:
yuna49 wrote:
I find it implausible that a scar made a few days or even a few weeks before would look the same as one from two years earlier. Perhaps the commissioner was so taken aback by Rin's forthrightness he didn't give it much thought.

She talked about this, she had to undress immediately in that room because if any one stopped to look closely they would noticed that it was a trick.

Yes, I know that. Still, even a cursory glance should have raised questions. I'm guessing the commissioner was surprised that Rin would undress before him and was shocked by the scar itself. He just wanted to get the whole thing over with.
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Panino Manino



Joined: 28 Jan 2018
Posts: 734
PostPosted: Mon Dec 02, 2019 5:26 pm Reply with quote
That letter isn't the only bad translation that it's hurting this story, but that aside, despite talking about how he went to read the manga he (James Beckett) still got some things wrong:
Quote:
For the husband, Nakaya, Rin's 21 ryos are apparently all the convincing needed to take a chance on Rin, though his wife Sato has some reservations.

This misunderstanding is at the same level of that letter in the end.

I'm confused how they'll add the cut Manji scenes after seeing the preview of the next episode.
Maybe if they switchspoiler[ Hyakurin for Giichi in saving Manji, and tell her story via her own flashback only and cut the Painter's explanation to Manji.]
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Amarantine



Joined: 14 Sep 2019
Posts: 26
PostPosted: Mon Dec 02, 2019 6:22 pm Reply with quote
I expect a lot of the skipped Manji scenes to be cut altogether. spoiler[Wouldn't be surprised if they removed his fight against those three Itto-ryuu entirely, since it's really long and not particularly important for the plot IIRC. Maybe he'll just run into Sori while completely healthy and unscathed? Laughing ]

And boy, if the reviewer is already making comments like "the ridiculously constant threat of being sexually assaulted", looking at the preview for the next episode, I bet his review of it is not gonna be pretty. Anime smile + sweatdrop
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Panino Manino



Joined: 28 Jan 2018
Posts: 734
PostPosted: Mon Dec 02, 2019 6:33 pm Reply with quote
I had imagined and now I'm suspecting, that the way for this adaptation to work is by cutting as much Manji as possible to tell the story.

About all the violence next episode, at least this all is happening in a world that we can believe those things could happen.
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Amarantine



Joined: 14 Sep 2019
Posts: 26
PostPosted: Tue Dec 03, 2019 4:12 am Reply with quote
Panino Manino wrote:
I had imagined and now I'm suspecting, that the way for this adaptation to work is by cutting as much Manji as possible to tell the story.


Yep, that seemed pretty likely from the moment they reduced his backstory with his sister to like one minute in the first episode.

Oh well, given the amount of material they have to cover in only 24 episodes, I can't say it's not a reasonable decision, since the story is obviously far more focused on Rin's personal journey of revenge than Manji's quest to slay 1000 evil men (which even the mangaka almost seemed to forget about after a while).
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#902692



Joined: 03 Dec 2019
Posts: 3
PostPosted: Tue Dec 03, 2019 5:57 am Reply with quote
I am hyped because of Hamasaki but it feels very sudden.
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MarshalBanana



Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 5296
PostPosted: Tue Dec 03, 2019 9:58 am Reply with quote
The people who who do the subtitle tracks fro Amazon video would be more general translators rather than the Japanese only translated that CR, Hidive and Funimation use?
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Panino Manino



Joined: 28 Jan 2018
Posts: 734
PostPosted: Wed Dec 04, 2019 2:44 pm Reply with quote
#10
I had a good laugh with this beginning.
How can we cut this many chapters and still makes sense for these characters to band together? Just make then meet randomly at the streets! It's a big little city after all.

This episode was not bad but also not "good". It was just something that they couldn't skip. They left out as much as they could, left in as little as they could. And because all had to be rushed, even if the events played clearly there was little tension and flair. Yes, "little tension" in this episode (compared with the previous one) where the main event was a long torture. We see what happened, but we didn't felt what happened. Because the anime didn't showed the worst of it and because we had seen little of Hyakurin talking and interacting with Shinjiri (and others).
Can't be help.

But some scenes could be a bit better, like when Hyakurin laughs when is asked about "Akagi", the transition for the flashbacks, and that idiotic and annoying "special defect" that they're using. Why the hell the blood need to blink?
And one detail that I had already noticed in earlier episodes and is inexcusable even with budget and man-work constraints is the super closed framing. There are times when you need to pan out a bit and show more of the bodies. For example, in this scene you can't see what Sorin is doing (getting something from inside Magatsu's clothes).

Anyway, I didn't expected to see some bits of Rin in this episode.
I was expecting for "something" in the end, didn't happened.
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Cam0



Joined: 13 Dec 2009
Posts: 4884
PostPosted: Thu Dec 05, 2019 3:34 pm Reply with quote
James might wanna get some brain bleach ready for this one.

Hyakurin and her male henchman have gotten so little development up to this point that this episode just didn't have the weight it was supposed to.
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Amarantine



Joined: 14 Sep 2019
Posts: 26
PostPosted: Fri Dec 06, 2019 4:29 am Reply with quote
Cam0 wrote:
Hyakurin and her male henchman have gotten so little development up to this point that this episode just didn't have the weight it was supposed to.


Yep, that was a prime example of what should be the main challenge of this adaptation going forward: the main beats of the plot will probably all be there for the most part, but with so many lengthy dialogue scenes cut or condensed, our interest in and attachment to the characters may not be as deep as it ought to be for us to be truly moved by tragic events like these. Don’t get me wrong, I still felt it was a powerful episode, but in the manga, by this point in the story, Hyakurin and Shinriji had already had like ten times more screentime (that’s not a hyperbole at all), so obviously it was more hard-hitting there.

They tried to juggle and weave together material from four different volumes in this episode, and I suppose they did a decent job all things considering, but there was one change there which didn't make much sense, namely having Sori go out of his way to show Manji the piece of paper with Shira’s kimono pattern. As Magatsu says later, he sensed Sori knew something but wouldn’t tell him, and that’s because Sori knows Shira is the one Magatsu is looking for and knows how dangerous Shira is, so he wants Magatsu to stay away from him. But obviously the chances of that happening are rather slim now that Manji's decided to help him in his quest for revenge (he's been doing that a lot lately).

Anyway, I was impressed with the quality of the art in this episode, especially during Shinriji's brief skirmish with the Itto-ryuu members. Given the show's sparse animation, I probably shouldn't expect too much, but it gives me a little hope for the action in the next episode, whose official preview has shown it will cover my favorite fight in the series.
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Panino Manino



Joined: 28 Jan 2018
Posts: 734
PostPosted: Fri Dec 06, 2019 9:10 am Reply with quote
Amarantine wrote:

They tried to juggle and weave together material from four different volumes in this episode, and I suppose they did a decent job all things considering, but there was one change there which didn't make much sense, namely having Sori go out of his way to show Manji the piece of paper with Shira’s kimono pattern. As Magatsu says later, he sensed Sori knew something but wouldn’t tell him, and that’s because Sori knows Shira is the one Magatsu is looking for and knows how dangerous Shira is, so he wants Magatsu to stay away from him. But obviously the chances of that happening are rather slim now that Manji's decided to help him in his quest for revenge (he's been doing that a lot lately).

I understood this in a different way.
Matgatsu went to Soori because he knows about his spy work and could help him discover who the murderer was.
Soori wanted Manji to stick with him because he knows Magatsu is not a bad person and could latter lead him to Anotsu.

Help Magatsu, gets his pass as payment, and then go after Rin together.
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John Thacker



Joined: 28 Oct 2013
Posts: 1006
PostPosted: Fri Dec 06, 2019 10:32 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
"I might as well say, I can't even begin to imagine how you'd use a sum of 21 ryo. While it is selfish, I will be taking about half of it for myself. My husband will be getting his share too, don't worry." This felt even more stilted than usual, and what's more, it didn't make much sense, since it implied that Sato was basically stealing the money that she'd implicitly refused in a flashback from only a minute or two earlier, only to then pack it up for Rin again. As suspected, the scene originally reads as Sato apologizing to Rin because she is intentionally giving back part of the money, which goes against Rin's original wishes. How the translation mixed up the scene so badly is anyone's guess


The "you" in that first sentence is a generic "you," not a pronoun referring to Rin. It has the same meaning as "I can't even begin to imagine how one could use a sum of 21 ryo" in more formal language.

It's a mistranslation in the sense that it can confuse a reader as to whether it's a generic you or referring to Rin, but I can certainly see why the translator did it. It is colloquial English, and sounds natural to me at least. At no point when reading the subtitle did I think that it implied she was stealing the money, but I can see how you did, which makes it poorly chosen.
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John Thacker



Joined: 28 Oct 2013
Posts: 1006
PostPosted: Sat Dec 07, 2019 3:19 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
I did like the gleefully-overwrought shot of Hyakurin creating a mythic looking arc of viscera out of that guy she kills. The show in no way earns the catharsis it's going for with that moment, but what can I say? I'm a sucker for a good blood-geyser.


Honestly, not really sure there's much difference is between being a sucker for gleefully-overwrought shots of murder and being a sucker for gleefully-overwrought shots of rape, both intended to either shock, titillate, or both. Certainly both are justified with the same sorts of arguments. Seems like in cases where you think that the justifications are flimsy or unearned, and an excuse to show the violence that people revel in, there's enough reason to morally condemn it either way?
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Panino Manino



Joined: 28 Jan 2018
Posts: 734
PostPosted: Sat Dec 07, 2019 3:38 pm Reply with quote
Review out.
Quote:
It isn't very interesting, and the way the bits are randomly edited into just the first half of the episode makes them feel that much more jarring and meaningless.

It's not that Rin is only in the first half and absent in the second half.
What happens is that the second half is Hyakurin's, this is a two in one episode.
first half = Rin + Manji, second half = Hyakurin.

I changed the order of what I wrote to get this out of the way already.
About the rape.
I can understand wanting to see other ways to tell the story that avoids rape, but it's not like an author couldn't show rape no matter what, right? Not surprising the reviewer judgment gets a big clouded amid all the complaints.
Amazing how he paid attention to some graphic details when the anime showed "just the necessary" (by comparison), reading his description "shocked" me more than watch the episode. The torture scenes actually shown in this episode where only the scenes where Hyakurin was being questioned, answering the questions and the one she freed herself, the moments where she resisted. A bit like that one episode with Shira, the anime showed the least possible.
Still disturbing for some, yes, but let's not exaggerate.
(good to know that there are some books that are educational about empathizing with the victims. good, but this is just and anime... despite having a theme about violence and vengeance anyway...)
(theme that escaped the reviewer, judging by his comment about "catharsis" in the end Rolling Eyes )

Anyone else saw that "tragic romance" between Hyakurin and Shinjiri that he mentioned? I'm asking because what I think was tragic about Shinjiri's death is that Hyakurin "watched another son being killed". His love for her was totally one sided and for her part I suspect that he lingered more on the maternal side of that love. So if you want to get funny ideas from that hypothetical relationship I put my money that this was the funniest idea to be had about their situation.
Oh, and pay attention to Hyakurin's bandaged arm in the end, spoiler[that's an important detail, it's an actual consequence of her torture that will be relevant to her character from here on.]


To say that this adaptation is "unsure of which character or narrative to focus" is a curious choice of words. Because despite accusations of "getting across the gist of the source material", the "gist" of the story is what is making the decisions about what to cut and what to keep.
Think about this, Hyakurin's story is tragic because... she was a victim of the "system" in place on that society. Twice. The same system that ruined her family is keeping her alive, alive to work to protect the system! From what I understand about her character, from only what the anime showed us, I can say that she has all the reasons to join a group like Itto-ryu that it's fighting against the root causes of her tragedy (at least is the discourse of their leaders).
Would she join if she had the choice? If the choice was offered for her to make, would she take it? Would she choose the path of vengeance?
Because deep down this is the gist of the matter, vengeance and forgiveness.

Yeah, this adaptation suffers a bit with it's lack of time, but it's actually much more focused on the "core theme".


Only read this those who read the manga:
spoiler[I read a bunch of people commenting about this episode and all of them sees only Giichi in that flashback and completely ignores "Mister Akagi" there. Laughing ]
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RedSwirl



Joined: 08 Feb 2006
Posts: 344
PostPosted: Sat Dec 07, 2019 9:42 pm Reply with quote
Panino Manino wrote:

Think about this, Hyakurin's story is tragic because... she was a victim of the "system" in place on that society. Twice. The same system that ruined her family is keeping her alive, alive to work to protect the system! From what I understand about her character, from only what the anime showed us, I can say that she has all the reasons to join a group like Itto-ryu that it's fighting against the root causes of her tragedy (at least is the discourse of their leaders).


The main issue I see here the anime didn't really talk about how all the Mugai-ryu members are death row prisoners. That bit of detail lends more context to Hyakurin being saved from death in her flashback.
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