Forum - View topicThe Stream - Winds of Amnesia
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Ranma824
 Posts: 456 |
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That's the impression I got as well. And by the time she did figure it out, she just kept doing the same thing to keep people from socializing with her. |
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Zac
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 7912 Location: Anime News Network Technodrome |
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Why does everything you watch need to also encourage you to masturbate? It isn't because people are prudes, it's because fanservice is distracting when it's unnecessary or inserted into a story just to sell DVDs. |
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getchman
 He started itPosts: 9121 Location: Bedford, NH |
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considering it's Arms that animated the show, a little cleavage here an there seems very trivial.
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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I had considered this, but Kotoura didn't seem like she had Asperger's or a similar syndrome. She seemed perfectly normal and sociable, except she couldn't STFU.
They didn't need to for two reasons. The first is that Kotoura is a freaking mind-reader. The second is that she is human and even regular human children could pick up on that sort of thing. I did elaborate on that point in my previous post.
Yes, and what does a girl who is yelled at when she speaks do? She might have initially tried telling the truth even moreso than usual, but that would make things worse. She would have quickly realised that there was a deeper problem and that no matter what she said she hurt people. And that's without having to use her mind-reading powers. Depending on how well she understood her predicament and what was causing it, she could have put on an act like the girl in Telepathy Girl Ran, or she could have withdrawn into her shell and spoke much less than she did before.
She could have realised that their mouths didn't move when they 'said' all those embarrassing things that directly contradicted everything they said when their mouths did move. It would have taken her awhile to realise that she was different, but not into her teens. You give children far too little credit at how perceptive they are. If she went to kindergarten/preschool then she could have well have subconsciously known by then, even if she hadn't consciously figured it out. And given that Kotoura is a mind-reader, it would have been a cinch to hear people think that she's weird for saying things out loud. This would have puzzled the heck out of her, but she wouldn't have responded by saying to herself, "Well, that was pretty bad and made me lose friends, but I've got a good feeling about it. I'm gonna keep on doing it." It's kind of sad when Telepathy Girl Ran - a title with generally mediocre writing - had a more realistic depiction of how a prepubescent child would cope with telepathy. ---------- Putting aside the fact that even a normal child could have handled it better than Kotoura, what really pisses me off is that Kotoura's biggest problem - her mind-reading ability - is also the best possible tool to solve that problem. A child with ESP would face issues with fitting in and getting along, but ESP is also the perfect way to overcome those issues. She isn't in the dark about what she's doing wrong, she can just read people's minds and figure it out instantly. It's like the writers tried to cherry-pick; they took the "outcast" consequence of the power but did not take the "can fix her own problems by using ESP" part as well. But you can't take one without the other, because both are inherent consequences of the power to read minds. ---------- Anyway, the show has been very good outside of those first ten minutes, and I very much enjoyed the second episode. Third one was pretty weird with spoiler[the bully's motivation (why not beat up Kotoura? Why hurt the boy she likes?),] though it was still charming. I'm definitely going to keep up with watching the series. |
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RyanSaotome
 Posts: 4210 Location: Towson, Maryland |
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Exactly. Based on what they normally do, I was expecting a lot more fanservice then it has. You can't get an ARMs anime thats fanservice free since they are a studio that specializes in fanservice to begin with. |
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PlatinumHawke
Posts: 204 |
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I don't think anyone has an issue with Demon King's cleavage, but rather how ARMS constantly reminds you of said fact.
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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I guess the anime could have changed that, but a light novel isn't shoving tits in your face, just your mind through suggestion. The way that manga, novels, and anime are intertwined, the big breasts remained, but it was ARMS' decision to embellish them with extra animation. Why assume the animators aren't doing it for themselves as well? |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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Spice & Wolf didn't require massive jiggling breasts with acres of cleavage as part of its fanservice, so I am a bit disappointed that MAOYU went that route. However, it isn't so pervasive as to actually bother me. For me, it's "I wish they hadn't done that" rather than "I hate them for doing that". |
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nyunyuelf
 Posts: 27 |
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I, for one, like Amnesia. The opening/closing themes are awesome, the animation is beautiful (to me), and I'm actually kind of curious as to what the *bleep* is going on...that's just me though, they've only aired three episodes and the next comes out, tomorrow, so I'll stick with it for a while longer.[/i]
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mistress_kisara
 Posts: 210 |
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Well I am one of the few who likes Amnesia, probably because I've played the VN
 But I understand why you dislike it, the heroine is bland and the clothes are weird.  The story is actually pretty good especially when we get to spoiler[Ukyo and Toma's backstory]
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ANN_Bamboo
ANN Contributor
 Posts: 3904 Location: CO |
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I would imagine that if you're a child, and the people who are supposed to protect and support you think you're a monster, you would not be in the healthiest of mindsets, and you'd probably not understand how normal human interactions really work.
Or she would've tried to fix things. When her mother's upset because the father didn't come home, she said, "Don't worry, he's coming home tomorrow." She said that to encourage her mother, but instead of support, she got more anger. But she doesn't understand why her mom's angry. She knows only that her mom is upset because the father isn't coming home. Also, as a small child, she probably doesn't understand the concept of cheating. When she says, "Mom's gonna go stay at Bob's house!" and "Dad's gonna go spend the night with Alice!" she likely has no idea what's going on. She doesn't understand that her parents are both having affairs. She doesn't understand that they're not just going to sleepovers. She doesn't know any of these things because she's a small child, and just wants to know why her parents are lying to her out loud. You can't expect 5 year olds to have the same level of social understanding as a teenager. If I had been a child in her shoes, I'm not sure I would've understood what was going on either. That is a lot of mental strain to put on a young child.
I think by then, she was doing it on purpose. She'd been burned so many times that she found solace in being alone, and purposely drove away the people around her. In fact, since she believes that the people close to her will leave her, she simply doesn't allow new people to get close to her. Her blurting out stuff as a teenager is not borne from the same reasons she blurted out things as a kid.
And I think you are underestimating how fragile the human mind can be, or how complex human interactions can be. It seemed as though she mostly only blurted out things when caught her friends/family lying, as though she just couldn't understand why anyone would lie (because she's always known the truth). If she sees her friends saying, "I don't like any boys," she might think, "That's silly, why are they lying about this? Of course they have boys they like" and tell them so in order to help them. She wouldn't know until later that this was the wrong move to make.
Right, because you have so much personal experience with how a prepubescent child would cope with telepathy.
I really don't think it's quite so easy to fix one's own problems, regardless if you have or don't have ESP. If it were a matter of, "I should just not do what people think is weird!" then there would be no outcasts in society. And yet there are. "Why don't those goth kids just cut their hair and stop wearing black? Can't they tell everyone thinks they're weird?" "Why doesn't that anime loser stop reading manga and talk about normal stuff? Can't he tell everyone thinks he's weird?" |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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Neither do you. What I do have is knowledge about how children think and learn. Kotoura isn't a psychic who happens to be a child, she's a child who happens to be psychic. She still has human feelings, still learns the same way that regular humans do. She is human. And therefore I think it is perfectly reasonable of the audience to expect her to behave and cope with stress the same way normal humans do. After all, while her ability is unique, both her outcast situation at school and broken family at home are certainly not.
And yet, all Kotoura had to do upon reaching middle school and especially high school is to fit in and makes friends. Which is easier than it sounds for her; she already had a half-dozen people trying to be her friend, even after she was impolite in her introduction (forget the class president, I was talking about the crowd of people surrounding her desk attempting to talk to her). She actively drove them away, however if she'd acted normal she wouldn't have been treated as an outcast and ostracised. |
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ANN_Bamboo
ANN Contributor
Posts: 3904 Location: CO |
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Nope, which is why I'm taking the anime at face value, because that is the character they've given us.
You're assuming she wants to make friends. She clearly does NOT want to make friends, because she's afraid of letting anyone get close to her. She states that several times. Eventually, her behavior becomes a defense mechanism. She'd rather never have friends, than have those friends abandon her. |
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giseki
Posts: 54 |
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lol that was funny...i think this show is too divisive to exist...they should cancel it |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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Nice going skipping the paragraph where I explained how Kotoura is human and should behave like a human. By your logic, any Anime could present to you any character who belongs to a group you have no experience with and you'd automatically accept that character, no matter how poorly their characterisation is. Whether the character is a bunny girl from another dimension, a boy with a crow for an arm, a ninja schoolgirl, a girl afflicted with amnesia or a living goddess, you should just accept the way their characters are portrayed because you don't have the experience to say that they aren't done properly. Which is a load of bull of course, because you do have the experience to tell when the characterisation is bad or not. Each one of those varied characters are human, or at least possess human emotions and thoughts. So you don't need to have experience with how a prepubescent girl would handle telepathy to say if Kotoura is done well or not, because all you need to know is how a human girl would act in that situation.
They wouldn't abandon her if she just shut her trap. The girl from Telepathy Girl Ran also spoiler[caused her mother to disown her,] and yet she still knew how to act around people and get along with them. She wasn't bullied, she was actually quite popular. Yeah, she had heavy emotional scarring, but she didn't let herself be lost to the despair. Which is why I struggle to sympathise with Kotoura and her self-inflicted emo suffering. She could easily change her life around but instead had it done for her by Manabe, and now spoiler[she's thrown it all away again without even a goodbye or thank you.] |
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