Doctor Who First Impressions: Easter 2022 Special (Legend Of The Aquatic Silurians)

(A quick note before we begin: "Legend Of The Aquatic Silurians" is pointedly not the name of the episode in question. The titlular antagonists are referred to by what is, for better or worse, their canonical Doctor Who monster name. For reasons I'll lay out as we get into things, I refuse to use that name for them. Hence the title replace. If you're going to look into the episode somehow, you're not going to find it by the name listed here. Okay, on with the show.)

I thought I'd be angrier at the episode than I ended up being. The fact that I'm not is kind of telling in how much my interest in the show has waned since November 2021.

Am I not turtley enough for the Turtle Club?

Let's begin there, I guess. I absolutely railed against the finale to Flux, a show which disappeared completely up its own ass to be Doctor Who about Doctor Who, rather than anything pertaining to anything about the world or the human condition. In its own way, Legend is kind of like that as well on a smaller scale. Supposedly it wasn't even going to be a thing, and Jodie Whittaker's final episode would have aired here with its grandiose bombast and conclusive regeneration. Instead we kick the can with all of that in it down the road by about six months and get a bonus track. A romp. Disposable fun with Chinese pirates, swashbuckling adventure, spooky pirate ships, a giant sea monster, and EVIL TURTLE PIRATES. Yeehaw! Turn your brain off for 45 minutes and watch one big dumb fun Doctor Who adventure with all the Doctor Who things before our big grandiose finale in like six months!

It's a wonderful idea. But it doesn't work.

Night Of The Loving Dead: Part 1 (Zombie Land Saga) [1.4]

(Continued from 1.3)

Part 4: RIP, Our Insecurities, Our Fear Of Failure, And Our Karmic Destiny Which Curses Us With Eternal Bad Luck! 

Well, here we are. The beginning of the end of our look into Zombie Land Saga's first season. We've covered lots of the zombie girls in depth, learning the traumas of their deaths and the pain and loss their loved ones were burdened with in the intervening years. Even so, we haven't talked about three girls in any real detail. Yugiri is basically sort of there and the "mom" of the group, and her big backstory about the trauma of her death and what she left behind is going to be written about at length when we come to Season 2. Tae Yamada's just a stereotypical groaning zombie, As A Joke. (There is one big thematic resonant exception to this that we'll get to later in this very post.) That leaves Sakura. Over these 9 episodes, Sakura has been many things. A flustered nervous middlewoman in between all the other conflicts and crises we've been discussing, mostly. Throughout the show she's still been struggling to remember her past, only able to get those brief glimmers of witnessing an idol show somewhere. It's when those glimmers get stronger that we get the big issues, and get to really delve into Sakura's issues. Let's heal the heart of this dead idol. Let's talk about Sakura.

Night Of The Loving Dead: Part 1 (Zombie Land Saga) [1.3]

(Continued from 1.2)

Part 3: RIP, The Lack Of Closure Our Loved Ones Struggle With As They Process The Pain And Loss Of Our Untimely Deaths!

Wow, there was a lot going on in that last bit, huh? All that business with Ai and Junko and needing to come to terms with the strange new world they were revived in. Still, they managed to grow and heal from it... but the zombie girls aren't the only ones who feel the hurt of being out of time. The next big arc of Zombie Land Saga, episodes 8 and 9, focuses on the people the girls left behind. The people who had to soldier on and live with the loss of these people who were close to them. It's heavy, it's heartbreaking, and it made me cry. Solid stuff to cover on this blog... and boy howdy does episode 8 deliver on that. Let's dive right on in.

Night Of The Loving Dead: Part 1 (Zombie Land Saga) [1.2]

(Continued from 1.1)

Part 2: RIP, Our Idol Industry Differences, And The Traumas Born From Our Deaths!

As we said last time, Zombie Land Saga's 12 episodes can be split up into discrete little arcs. We passed out of the first, and here we're going to cover the second and the third. Really, we're going to cover the third in-depth. The second little arc which spans episodes 3, 4, and 5 of the show is mainly fun fluff of the week as our zombie idol group continues to take steps to becoming a legitimate force in the pop music sphere. It's all very important stuff and not "filler" in any sense of the word, but you'll forgive me if I want to fast-forward a bit to the more emotionally resonant stuff. We will talk for a bit, though, on these episodes. Episode 3 concerns the girls performing a guerrilla performance, in which they just head out into a town square in Saga and sing and dance. There's a bit of tension where Ai and Junko still aren't entirely on board with the project, but they cut in to help at the last minute and the guerrilla show goes as well as it could have. Episode 3 also finally has the girls decide on a name for the group, inspired by Tae's zombie groaning/sneezing: From here on, the zombie idol girls are known as Franchouchou. Saki also takes on the role of the group's leader, so to speak, so things are getting more organized.

Night Of The Loving Dead: Part 1 (Zombie Land Saga) [1.1]

(Here we are again, like two months later, with the good stuff! Sorry it took so long, but you know what I'm like. An impending trip I'm going on at the end of the month turned out to be the deadline fire I needed lit under me. Hey, the last minute bullshit worked for Douglas Adams, and he came up with some brilliant results under a burst so close to a deadline. Douglas Adams this is not, but it is my usual on-brand bullshit and I hope you rejoin me here in the metaphorical coffee shop for it! 

Oh yeah, spoilers for Zombie Land Saga. There will be spoilers. This particular first section only covers the first two episodes, so if you decide this is the kind of show you want to see, here is a link to episode 1 via Crunchyroll. All the screencaps here are from my DVD copy of the show, which I'm fairly certain is the translation used there. I also hear the dub is very well-done, but I've only seen the show subbed because that's the way I am. Enough preamble. Let's talk about some zombie girls.)

(Continued from Introduction)

Goodness, I made some bold claims at the end of that intro, didn't I? Can there be a show with zombies that really lives up to all that beauty and more? Over the next god knows how many words because I haven't written them yet, we're going to argue that yes it can. We're going to talk about 12 episodes and just under 5 hours of animated television that put all that perceived nihilistic bullshit about zombies back into the dirt where it belongs. The steps Zombie Land Saga takes are in the wake of George Romero's legacy, as we've discussed, and some of them are more beautiful and wonderful than he could have ever imagined. All of them are better than anything Zac Snyder, Robert Kirkman, or a horde of other stock zombie apocalypse fiction writers could even begin to imagine. Sorry. There was a little nihilistic zombie fiction shit-talking left in the tank. Forget about all those folks. We're going to talk about anime zombies from now on. Let's shift into gear. Refill your warm drink, get comfy in your chair... and let me tell you all about anime zombie girls. 

On Yugioh Master Duel. The XYZ Festival, And A Self-Destructive Metagame

Hi there! So yeah, this is not the long-awaited first segment of Night Of The Loving Dead. I assure you it's a work in progress and I'm in the "watch the show and take notes" section of things. There are so many mirror shots in this show that I didn't notice before, and thus I am in heaven. Anyway, we're putting all that on the back burner so I can spend a morning talking to you about the fucked-up meta of a limited event in a competitive trading card/free-to-play gacha game. Yes, really, but this is fresh in my mind and it's fascinating to me, and whenever that happens thousands of words pour forth from my fingers. I don't think we'll hit more than a 2 or 3k here today, but we'll find out. Together, hopefully. Let me tell you a little about Yugioh Master Duel first.

I've been a fan of the Yugioh card game for... dear God, almost 20 years now. I will spare you the nostalgic memories of 2003 and forging a friendship and circle of gamers for the time being, though I will direct you to this fun post from a few years back, an off-the-cuff piece much like this about a Yugioh video game that interested me. Even though I haven't played the card game for every one of those 20 years, I have kept an eye on things and occasionally jumped back into the fray. Such was the case a month ago when Konami stealth launched Yugioh Master Duel, an official and premium free-to-play Yugioh simulator. You can imagine the deal, I'm sure. Earn in-game currency for playing, spend it on virtual booster packs, upgrade your deck and make it better. Oh hey, they're extra generous for newcomers as well and you'll drown in gems, enough to make two or three good decks. Then the free gems dry up, and if you want to make another deck or upgrade the cards in previous decks to the high-power must-have cards? Goodness me, look at this handy dandy way to purchase gems for real money! Yeah, it's a gacha game. It very much wants you to spend real money on it. A strike against it making GOTY 2022, to be sure, but I with enough responsible willpower and some good fun decks have been enjoying it. 

Yesterday, Master Duel unveiled a new event: the XYZ Festival. "XYZ" being... God, how to explain this without a dissertation? For once I need brevity. XYZ are a special class of card within the Yugioh card game, a type of monster that can be played by placing them atop other monsters you control, which then use the materials it sits upon as fuel for various advantageous effects. Detach a material to destroy one of your opponent's cards, for instance. If I've done it right, I've put the MVP of the deck I built in preparation for the XYZ Festival to the right of this paragraph. I went with the "Zoodiac" archetype, a cool set of zodiac-themed XYZ monsters that chain into each other to make one big boss who can destroy other cards on a whim. I wasn't sure what the meta would be and what decks would be on top, but currently in ranked Master Duel a hybrid deck featuring Zoodiac and other cards is one of the best you can play. Cutting the hybrid part to play pure Zoodiac seemed like a good idea! The XYZ Festival even had its own specific list of banned cards, not only banning other special classes of cards but also banning things that wouldn't fit the spirit of the format: powerful decks which don't use XYZ cards and would dominate otherwise, or cards that specifically counter/prevent XYZ cards as their key strategy. What could go wrong?

Night Of The Loving Dead: Introduction (My Mini-Zombie Movie Marathon)

(Hi there! It's the start of another new and exciting project wherein I talk about a Japanese cartoon that made me cry for several thousands of words. Business as usual over here on the blog, I know. Before that, though, I'm going to talk about a mini zombie movie marathon I did for research into the project, and for other reasons we'll delve into in the post. This is just our introduction, though. Hopefully we'll have Part 1 of Night Of The Loving Dead all ready for you sometime in February. Until then, have 3000 words of whatever the hell this became as your appetizer and introduction to my internal landscape going into this longform criticism. Enjoy!)

Here we are again, you and I. The metaphorical coffee shop, warm atmosphere and a hot drink each, ready to hear another story. When last we met here, in May of 2021 at the end of the grand Symphogear project, I framed the end of that story in terms of a regeneration, a moving on to something new and beautiful and resonant. Such things are rarely instant, and so here and now in January 2022 it's very much in progress. Then again, perhaps that's apt. Being in transition, crossing a boundary between one thing and other, somewhere between life and death... It's all tied into why we're back here again. If you'd care to stay and share a hot drink with me, I'd love to tell you all about it.

Sandwiched between the grand Symphogear project was another experience entirely. I first laid eyes on it in October 2019 on vacation in scenic Grand Bank, Newfoundland, a spooky-themed dalliance to stave off boredom whilst off the grid. A month later I began watching Symphogear, a show which quite literally changed me and my life, but we've told that story before. In April 2021, as I was working on the closing statements of what Symphogear meant to me, a second season of that experience from October 2019 began. This experience was another Japanese cartoon, a show named Zombie Land Saga. In the wilds of its second season, I got angry. I did not get angry because of the poor quality of the show; quite the opposite. I got angry because it was dealing in themes and moods and songs that spoke to me, that spoke to the project I just finished. Zombie Land Saga reached a cold blue hand from the peat of the grave, grabbed me by the collar, and hissed in the crooning clotted voice of eternal undeath a demand that I write about it with the lavish love and attention I gave Symphogear.