Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Alderamin on the Sky
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11415 |
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Episode 8
This series sure knows how to kick you in the gut. While simultaneously making you want to strangle a few idiots. It actually seems fairly logical for him to coin the Japanese word for sniper, but in English? Nope. 
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FilthyCasual
Posts: 2220 |
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Why is it always the cute girls who die ;_;
I'm looking to seeing how the Alderan Church plays into all of this. |
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One-Eye
 Posts: 2261 |
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Ep 8
Pretty decent episode. Life and history is full of poor or incompetent leaders that make a mess of things. Ikta is slowly but steadily gaining successes and those under him will undoubtedly come to trust in his leadership more making for a stronger unit all around. I had a feeling Kanna was going to bite it, but they did a good job in a short time demonstrating that she was a smart and dependable person which is why her death stings for the viewers. The only thing that is still off for me is when they try to bring in technology or ideas and it comes out awkwardly. Look sniper boy invented "sniping" or whatever. Kinda like look I invented "science" aren't you impressed.  Its not organic, no its pretty hideous how its presented.
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zrnzle500
 Posts: 3767 |
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Yeah this has been one of the only issues I've had with the show. These segments are always so awkward they take me out of it. You invented science you say? Uh huh...Seriously how many things has his mentor invented? So far, science, ice cream, and now rifling (the term for those grooves in the barrel the sniper mentioned). Yes yes, you and your mentor are so smart and (most) everyone else is unscientific dumb dumb idiots. How much stimulation does the author think our hero's ego needs? |
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NeverConvex
 Subscriber Posts: 2332 |
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I think the show's need to identify major innovations by using abstract, familiar-in-our-zeitgeist-but-not-in-theirs labels for them is what makes it feel so artificial and forced. It seems like a form of telling rather than showing; instead've clueing us in that systematic investigation of the principles of nature is an important developing force in this world by showing us people doing that and its consequences, we get endless repetition of people using a label that means a lot in our world but shouldn't mean much of anything in theirs, even to the neophyte scientists. When a field/style of inquiry's still developing it doesn't feel natural for its practitioners to explain what they're doing by labeling it, and so it seems like lazy storytelling when that's a show's primary mechanism for illustrating some new force's importance in its world.
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Australian JRPG Gamer
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I am sad that Kanna died, I liked her interactions with Ikta and thought that somewhere along the line they could be study partners or something like that.
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Morry
Posts: 756 |
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That's been my biggest issue with the series. The writing sounds unnecessarily pretentious, like somehow "science" had to just come to be and never coexisted with religion, culture, warfare or any other aspect of society since man first made cave paintings.
I can understand wanting to make Ikta this genius who's unique perspective propels amazing advances in warfare, but some of this seems construed to just make things easy for him less than naturally developing out of the narrative. |
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helln00
Posts: 106 |
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well its not like the show is saying that science and religion doesnt coexist, it just doesnt coexist in the current state of the empire, which is an empire in decline with a strong theocratic control of truth, not the secular states that we are familiar with. there are many similar historical parallels with real world empires and states that went into decline, as tightening political control obsessions of the state reduces resources for productive thinking and activities
remember the "science" that the show talks about was merely defined as "an alternative way to explain the natural world that is not the way that is defined be the state religion" and for this new philosophy/scientific thinking the man was prosecuted and had to flee, his students scattered and his works considered heresy to the empire's enemies, whom as far as we can tell, doesnt seem to suffer from these issues and from the brief encounter we see with kioka's soldiers, they seem to be also more politically free and open. the show mentions this even more with the discussion regarding the folk religion of the natives and how it contradicts the state religion, bringing the state religion itself into question. thats a mode of thinking that is new and even in our world, pretty new by historical standards. i think the point of the show is to think outside of what we feel comfortable with and the things that we think are inherently true and may not even think we should ever question, which is a core tenet of scientific thought and definitely not something that is appreciated by the empire's state religion. also towards the language that is being used to talk about "science", its not like its an established profession with its own language right now, it was first talked about by one man who is being persecuted, its going to sound vague and odd to people like us who have an established paradigm and language to talk about these topics. the current scientific langauge we have now is built over hundreds of years and even then talking about it is hard for people to understand and even scientist disagree |
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2332 |
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But this is exactly the point of the criticism - that it doesn't make sense to explain a completely novel approach to understanding the world with a label. In the absence of hundreds of years of development of 'science,' running around telling people you're doing science as a scientist with other scientists all science'ing just comes off as poor storytelling. It doesn't make sense for Ikta to explain his activities with a label, because the label is meaningless in his world; it only has meaning to us, and so it looks like a lazy attempt to use our preconceptions rather than strong narrative to drive our reactions to the story. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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I think its worse because it basically TRIVIALIZES the work and research of MULTIPLE real world men and basically attributes their achievements to one fictional world guy. It wouldn't even be that bad if the items in question were NOT pretty much from completely disparate lines of thought and research. I also find it ridiculous that some semi-pacifistic scientist would "invent" rifling. Why would he be doing research into weapon improvement in the first place? Where did he find time while simultaneously testing temperature effects on food, doing in depth analysis on foreign cultures and societies and studying the effects on altitude changes on the human body? At least the others kind of "flow" directly, but I see zero reason why he would've even pondered the principles behind rifling, much less ACTUALLY apply them, in the first place. |
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MiloTheFirst
Posts: 429 |
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Ikr, just as in this episode sniper boy explained how rffling works, how would even ikta´s mentor know that? one thing would be just to try different ways to mess with the barrel then see which one statiscally resulted on higher accuracy, but how could they possibly know that the air caused the bullet to spin without a super slow motion high resolution camera? or a microscope (to inspect the fibers of whatever they were using as shooting targets for testing)? I don´t mind the author using the notion of new technology changing the course of war but he should at least be more careful on how much it makes sense for his character even the scientist to understand about such technology. on another note. am I the only one who tought kana´s death was not handled well at all. I mean, to me it fell as if they were spelling her death flags every 3 minutes. by the the time her corpse was found I was instead surprised that the they were done dragging the forshadowing. I am starting to become worried about this series, I think things have been building slow for far too long, If the series had already a second cour approved I would welcome it instead, but know judging by the pace it has had so far, I cant see the season ending on any sort of relevant story arc, I don't think we have even been introduced to the overarching plot yet. all we know is yatori wants to be a military officer, Ikta hates the country he lives in and doesnt want to work on the military and yet for all his genius he doesnt do anything to desert and flee as his master did and instead just decides to slack around yatori where he could get killed. I am not saying we can't apreciate the moral reflections the shows offer or the sheer entertainment due to tactical badassery, but as of right now there doesn't seems to be any end goal to the narrative or overarching conflict, it almost feel as a slice-of-life genre. as things are now I wont even feel pumped enough to check the LNs aout, I will remember alderamin as a perfectly competent piece of weekly enetainment but otherwise not memorable at all |
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helln00
Posts: 106 |
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i see your point there and i agree on the point that its being called "science" mostly to use as a way of pointing towards our preconception of science and not having to build things from the ground up. its just i dont particularly feel that the language that they are using to talk about it feels particularly off. Reason probably due to the definition of "science" here as more of a school of thought or even a cult rather then the method that we know. i mean it could have been called khanism and its followers "khanist" and it would be the same since people who are "scientist" here almost always refered to themselves as his students. second is that east asian languages dont have a particular wide vocabulary when it comes to science or when talking about it in abstract, and the words are often descriptive, so it doesnt feel as off to me when listening to it, since my langauge is similar. i mean the word that is used to mean "science" here literally translates to "catergorical studies" and similarly sniper roughly translates to "shooter from hidden position" so it feels less like people are inventing words out of thin air and more like they are just describing what they are doing. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18226 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Frankly, I don't see a big problem about any of this.
Let's take a look at the rifling issue. In our world the first examples of rifling gun barrels date back to the early 16th century but the practice was not commonly-used until the advent of the longrifle on the American frontier in the mid-18th century. The concept of a sharpshooter did not appear in warfare until the American Revolution and the term "sniper" didn't appear until the 1820s. Hence the emergence of sharpshooters/snipers on the battlefield goes hand-in-hand with rifled gun barrels first being widely-used on the battlefield. On that the series is very accurate. You can quibble, I suppose, about the semantics; the verb "to snipe" was originally coined by British soldiers in India in the late 18th century and referred specifically to hunting snipes (which were apparently difficult to shoot), and there's no indication of such an origin here. However it's entirely reasonable that Torway coined a term for it, and why not use one that audiences would be familiar with? As for the good doctor coming up with rifling despite not being a fan of warfare, I don't see a problem there, either. The physics behind rifling has applications well beyond guns and was understood for centuries before guns even existed, so it's not at all unreasonable that he just speculated a military application for it at some point rather than designing it himself. Also, I think people are getting too hung up on the word "science." I don't think the series is meaning at all to imply that he developed the concept, but rather that he was the first in possibly a very long time to push it as a credible alternative to religion rather than as subservient to (or, in the worst case, subsumed by) religion. That people aren't widely-familiar with the word suggests that supernatural explanations for things have been promoted for a long time; the existence of the spirits certainly suggests that. I also don't see what the problem is in him having researched or invented such a wide array of things. Being a master of many disciplines was actually a common thing among the great minds of our 16th and 17th centuries; just look at everything that Leonardo Da Vinci came up with, for instance. So yeah, there's nothing fantastically out of line here. |
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2332 |
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I think the show's "getting too hung up on" the word science.
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Helociraptor
 Posts: 44 |
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@Key:
Military use of rifles is documented as early as 1631 when William V. Landgraf of Hesse-Kassel recruited hunters, game-keepers and foresters for military service. These formations were called Jäger (lit. meaning “hunter” or “hunters” in German) and brought their own weapons: mostly hunting rifles. Muzzle-loading rifles were popular hunting weapons in Germany at the time. Volunteer Jäger are documented to have been raised in 1645 in Bavaria and 1674 in Brandenburg and the practice spread in the German states and became commonplace, “Jäger” becoming a general term for units of rifle-armed skirmishers and scouts. In 1744 Prussia raised a professional (in contrast to the earlier volunteer and temporary) Jäger corps. By the Seven Years’ War (known as French and Indian War in America) most German states and Russia raised Jäger corps, many equipped with a “militarised” rifle. These military versions were shorter and lighter than earlier hunting rifles, sacrificing some accuracy and range for better handling in the field and faster reload. Note that these short rifles, while “militarised”, were still not standardised and often private property of the Jäger. Great Britain finally adopted a short rifle for military service in 1776, the Pattern 1776 Infantry Rifle, a modified copy of a Hessian short rifle, brought along by Jäger from Hesse-Kassel employed by the British). The concept behind rifling also was already known and used in antiquity. An example is what the Greek called ankule and the Romans amentum: a strip of leather or rope attached and wound around a javelin to induce it to spin when thrown to increase stability and thus range and accuracy. Arrows also were often fletched at a slight angle for the same effect. To apply this well-known, quite old concept to firearms was more of an engineering question, than anything, and the drawbacks of muzzle-loading rifles (slow and difficult to reload) prevented their widespread adoption as standard military issue, until the invention of the Minié Ball in 1847 (which was already obsolete due to the breech-loading Dreyse needle gun introduced in 1841). The term “sharpshooter” might be an extension (and literal translation) of the German Scharfschütze (lit. scharf: “sharp”, Schütze: “shooter”), a term that was used from the Thirty Years’ War onward to describe rifle-armed soldiers, especially Jäger. Again, the presence of German Jäger in the American Revolutionary War might have helped transplant the term to America (but this is just speculation, really). |
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