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EP. REVIEW: The Kingdoms of Ruin


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nl_TvdL





PostPosted: Tue Oct 24, 2023 11:29 am Reply with quote
Doroka probably isn’t dead, i mean, if she is, what’s the meaning behind putting her in this story then? And isn’t she the “cover girl” on the still image? Isn’t she prominantly visible in the intro/outro?
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jr240483



Joined: 24 Dec 2005
Posts: 4430
Location: New York City,New York,USA
PostPosted: Tue Oct 24, 2023 11:33 am Reply with quote
nl_TvdL wrote:
Doroka probably isn’t dead, i mean, if she is, what’s the meaning behind putting her in this story then? And isn’t she the “cover girl” on the still image? Isn’t she prominantly visible in the intro/outro?


i have a sneaky bad feeling that this series is going down the "KILL EM ALL" route. not good at all
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Gnarth



Joined: 06 Oct 2023
Posts: 175
PostPosted: Tue Oct 24, 2023 11:54 am Reply with quote
Glad this was assigned to someone who digs it. Personally I'm liking it so far, but unfortunately the animation is its biggest downside. I appreciate the negligible CGI use, but pretty much all fight scenes are a bunch of stills with shaky camera and panning. Also not the biggest fan of the villains character designs and the quite intense film grain.

I still don't really get why so many people find it so "extreme", personally I actually think it's tamer than it should be: almost all the gore is off screen or censored through color filters. It's probably because of TV regulations, but I feel something of this kind has to be as brutal as possible.

As for the story, it's looking like a pretty simple revenge setup, but it had a great start and I'm a sucker for these. The high mortality is good but I hope some of the characters become recurring, as I'd like the Ritsuko clone, the girl at the end of episode 3 and Adonis's "killer" to stay around for more (Doroka surely will be back somehow). All three cliffangers caught me by surprise and could potentially open the way to interesting implications, so I can safely say I'm hooked.
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tywhoppity



Joined: 09 Sep 2019
Posts: 216
PostPosted: Tue Oct 24, 2023 2:14 pm Reply with quote
I'm still watching this, but good lord, this is an edgefest.
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Terraziel



Joined: 01 Jul 2023
Posts: 76
PostPosted: Tue Oct 24, 2023 5:27 pm Reply with quote
Am I the only one who found there was so much going on that it went straight back to being boring? Like it was chucking stuff at me and hoping that i found some of it interesting, but doing it at the pace it has meant that i didn't have time to care about any of it.

Also the whole "anti-magic makes your eyeballs bleed" bit comes off as deeply stupid, i mean you have only noticed this Now? despite having used it to purge the world? if every one who turned on the machine instantly started bleeding out you've got to have been doing pretty well not to notice.
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VerQuality



Joined: 01 Oct 2016
Posts: 138
PostPosted: Tue Oct 24, 2023 8:24 pm Reply with quote
Terraziel wrote:
Am I the only one who found there was so much going on that it went straight back to being boring? Like it was chucking stuff at me and hoping that i found some of it interesting, but doing it at the pace it has meant that i didn't have time to care about any of it.

Also the whole "anti-magic makes your eyeballs bleed" bit comes off as deeply stupid, i mean you have only noticed this Now? despite having used it to purge the world? if every one who turned on the machine instantly started bleeding out you've got to have been doing pretty well not to notice.

I think they said something about the witches causing the particles to naturally disperse, so with fewer and fewer witches the effects got more and more severe. I mean, it's still dumb.

I do agree with the "so much happening it goes straight back to being boring." Like, they have a whole bunch of stuff happening, but they completely forget to give you a reason to care. Characters are uniformly evil, stupid, or evil and stupid, and most of them are dead at this point. The world seems somewhat interesting, but the world-building so far has been deeply clumsy, and once again, they've forgotten to give you a reason to care. Sure the entire world is on the brink of environmental collapse and there's a brutal fascist state in charge, but when literally everyone we've met so far in this world is either evil, stupid, or Chloe (deceased), I really don't see a reason to stick with it. Especially when something like Eminence in Shadow is also airing, which is also edgy as heck but has fun with it and looks great while doing it. The animation also looks like it's really struggling.
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TarsTarkas



Joined: 20 Dec 2007
Posts: 5915
Location: Virginia, United States
PostPosted: Wed Oct 25, 2023 2:27 am Reply with quote
jr240483 wrote:
nl_TvdL wrote:
Doroka probably isn’t dead, i mean, if she is, what’s the meaning behind putting her in this story then? And isn’t she the “cover girl” on the still image? Isn’t she prominantly visible in the intro/outro?


i have a sneaky bad feeling that this series is going down the "KILL EM ALL" route. not good at all


Someone has to pay for the genocide, and all the humans cheering the murder and death of all the witches fit the bill.
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T3rmidor



Joined: 14 Aug 2023
Posts: 66
PostPosted: Wed Oct 25, 2023 10:35 am Reply with quote
So edgy you can cut a finger just by watching.

The first three episodes seem to be just a murder fest, seems hard to keep it up for a whole season. Characters currently are very uninteresting with the exception of the King roleplaying as a nazi, mainly bc I don't buy that the whole reason for genociding witches was bc of science. I honestly don't have much hopes that the show would be anything other than violence for violence sake, but we'll see in the coming weeks.
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YourNameIsMitsuha



Joined: 14 Mar 2023
Posts: 66
PostPosted: Wed Oct 25, 2023 11:02 am Reply with quote
I stopped watching this 6 minutes into ep 2 when he shoots a giant bullet into a building. Indiscriminate killing of innocents is not what I want to see in my protagonists. Ragna Crimson will be filling the action fantasy slot for me this season. Never been into anime that are dark and edgy just for the sake of being dark and edgy.
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NeverConvex
Subscriber



Joined: 08 Jun 2013
Posts: 2491
PostPosted: Wed Oct 25, 2023 11:08 am Reply with quote
Ambivalent on this. Feels like maybe there's decent writing waiting to happen, but, as almost everyone else has already noted, the obsession with making everything as dark, edgy, and rushed as possible hasn't given it any opportunity to do anything (and most of the characters end up dead before they become interesting!). Might keep checking in with it, but keeping my expectations for it on the low side.
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TarsTarkas



Joined: 20 Dec 2007
Posts: 5915
Location: Virginia, United States
PostPosted: Thu Oct 26, 2023 5:09 am Reply with quote
YourNameIsMitsuha wrote:
I stopped watching this 6 minutes into ep 2 when he shoots a giant bullet into a building. Indiscriminate killing of innocents is not what I want to see in my protagonists. Ragna Crimson will be filling the action fantasy slot for me this season. Never been into anime that are dark and edgy just for the sake of being dark and edgy.


I understand what you are saying, but considering this nation successfully completed a full genocide for the cheering masses, it is hard to say anyone is innocent.
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Greed1914



Joined: 28 Oct 2007
Posts: 4586
PostPosted: Mon Oct 30, 2023 12:40 pm Reply with quote
nl_TvdL wrote:
Doroka probably isn’t dead, i mean, if she is, what’s the meaning behind putting her in this story then? And isn’t she the “cover girl” on the still image? Isn’t she prominantly visible in the intro/outro?


I'm guessing one of two things. One could be that somebody was using the expectation that those things bring as a way to say, "nobody is safe," or it has to do with that magic to bring people back to life. Maybe it is easier to use on people who recently died and it will take more effort for Chloe 10 years later? I could see Doroka's resurrection as the proof of concept that motivates Adonis to do something other than rampage.



So far, the most awkward thing about the show is that it seems to wrestle with wanting to have a main character that indulges in hatred to its most extreme degree, but also understands that being guilty by association isn't enough to convince a sizeable chunk of the audience. So, it makes up for that by having cartoonishly evil villains to prop up the idea that everything is so rotten that the rest is fine.
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NeverConvex
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Joined: 08 Jun 2013
Posts: 2491
PostPosted: Mon Oct 30, 2023 12:51 pm Reply with quote
Greed1914 wrote:
So far, the most awkward thing about the show is that it seems to wrestle with wanting to have a main character that indulges in hatred to its most extreme degree, but also understands that being guilty by association isn't enough to convince a sizeable chunk of the audience. So, it makes up for that by having cartoonishly evil villains to prop up the idea that everything is so rotten that the rest is fine.


I'm not sure if it is the show's intention, exactly (the framing is kind of.. unclear, so far?), but the way I've been reading it is that the main character is not a good person. Hatred has consumed what was good in him pretty thoroughly; what we've seen so far would be a good start to a longer story about finding who he was before all of this, experiencing some kind of catharsis and processing Chloe's death more fully, acknowledging a need for some kind of redemption, etc.

Not sure it's going that way at all, though, since it looks like Chloe's literally going to be resurrected, which sends all kinds of mixed emotional and narrative signals.
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Gnarth



Joined: 06 Oct 2023
Posts: 175
PostPosted: Mon Oct 30, 2023 2:50 pm Reply with quote
I really like how the show's not leaning into a simple witches good - humans bad and it's showing that witches have pretty despicable "higher-ups" as well, though nowhere near as bad as the empire so far. I also like how it seemingly just won't stop with the bonkers reveals and I'm fond of utterly crazy main characters like Adonis.

Mixed feelings about the possibility of reviving witches as usually it's better to leave dead characters dead, but the final "malfunction" could mean the idea isn't so simple. I've been wondering about how the witches "reproduce" since episode one, so it's nice to have an answer, although them supposedly not having sexual organs has me a bit perplexed in a similar way I was with Mass Effect's Asari species. If they have no sexual organs, then why do they look exactly like women? I guess it's because they're beautiful, and they are, but it's not very logical.
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One-Eye



Joined: 08 Mar 2011
Posts: 2265
PostPosted: Sun Nov 05, 2023 1:56 pm Reply with quote
I'm just about ready to dump this mess. It wants to be edgy for edge's sake, but the show translates that into a kill them all approach. The larger the body count the cooler, no matter how dumb it appears. Show thinks complexity is that both sides could be evil (wow how deep Rolling Eyes) Then there's the a**hole protagonist which seems to be his only feature with his potential morality pet in tow.

Do I care about any of these characters? (they're all superficial dimwits so no) Are there any issues/themes that the show wants me to care about ? (doesn't seem to be interested in anything except body count) Is it at the very least stylistically cool in someway? (its visually ok-ish, but nothing is really blowing me away). I think I could be spending my time better, so might as well drop this one.
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