Review-Attack on Titan

Back when anime was first flooding America, I was a big fan. I collected VHSes and DVDs of everything I could get my hands on. I owned figurines and dolls and posters and pins.

I couldn't get enough...until I had enough. Like everyone else, I stopped accepting plotholes, flat characters, grating voice acting, and rampant mysogyny.

I expected quality just the same as from any literature, movie, graphic novel, or show from anywhere else.

This is why I almost never watch anime anymore. Companies don't need to grab the cheapest and hire actors who barely speak English anymore. Studios don't need to squish mangas the height of a dishwasher into three episodes anymore. There are now many different groups of audiences who like different kinds of anime to market to. Yet whatever I find always seems to be from 15 years ago, when real effort was too hard, only this time they're shinier.

One of the first new animes I watch in years was Attack on Titan. I want a refund on the time I spent on it. While not horrible, the anime doesn't really have anything going for the audience short of the theme song. The characters angst for long periods of time and don't change. Scenes are disjointed to the point that it is difficult to tell a flashback from the present. Anyone over thirty also seems to have given up already and tossed their IQ points out with their ability to give a damn.

The plot is simple: giant beings called titans attack people, so people built walls to protect themselves. Gianter titans smash through the wall and many titans terrorize everybody. There are three walls and there are three people who can turn into titans (because...magic?)

I said it was simple, not that it made sense.

So much time devoted to whining about bad things for five to twenty minutes could have been put to better use. Where did the titans come from? How were the walls built? The anime mentions knowledge and discussion of other places where people live is banned, but why? Wouldn't somewhere safer benefit everyone?

When did the main character figure out how to use his Spider-Man harness? Why are they using those harnesses when they have cannons and nets and tranches and giant batarangs? How do those harnesses no tangle all the time?

Why say titans can survive with their head cut off and then that titans have died because their heads were cut off?

Why do some people turn into titans? We are told the main character was abducted by his dad when everyone started fleeing the city at the first titan attack and was injected with whatever turns him into a titan, but why? Why was then the best timing? What exactly was in the injection? How did he make it? Why just his son and not a professional soldier?

Why do the other humans who can turn into titans help the titans? What do they gain? Why not move to somewhere the main character isn't if he keeps trying to defeat you? Why can human-titans pull powers out of their ass one time and not another? Why are they different powers to different human-titans?

How does this society feed itself when before the titan attack there couldn't possibly be enough farmland to support the population? Why is there so much metal and so few factories? Why don't the evil human-titans attack the factories and not the army?

If you turn into a titan (if you have the power) by bleeding, will you do it if you have a papercut or get stabbed by a cat or thornbush?

Over all, the whole anime is really boring. It leaves fights with titans to have red herrings, flashbacks, worrying and debating about irrelevant issues. People stop to explain things you don't want explained instead of what you do.

On top of that, the art is bad and inconsistent. Proportions are often wrong, Perspective is often wrong. Styles used to animate humans and titans don't match up (I kept expecting the foot from Monty Python's Flying Circus from one of them). Titans move inconsistently. They are sized inconsistently (was one a baby?).

On top of that, many times the whole show just seems to intentionally hit a nerve for no reason. There are huge gushes of blood not from battle (fighting was rather bloodless), but from when a character bit his tongue every time he talked. Why is the most blood in scenes during downtime from the actual fighting? Why is the only main female character the only person in the entire country who was nearly raped and almost sold into sexual slavery (to whom?)? And are the titans...mentally handicapped? Why? If not, why do they so closely resemble people with problems like that?

Sovereign Stone Review

The authors of the long and very complicated Dragonlance series should be given more credit for the other series they have produced.  These stories give the usually vague and cliché fantasy races intricate and complex cultures, which outshine the drab and flat versions in their more famous books.

The first book, a singular tale that acts as a long prologue to the story of the following two, is called Well of Darkness.

The story talks about the lifetime of the second child of the king, Dagnarus and his Anakin-like turn to evil and literal powers of destruction.  In this fantasy world, there are the usual four elements of magic, but in this one, the fifth—called The Void—is a destructive, purely harmful element, knowledge of which is forbidden in the kingdom.  Feeling he belongs in the emptiness between the other four elements, Dagnarus pushes his scholarly whipping boy to learn magic of the Void, somehow seeking out documents and practitioners.  After that, he begins to seek out the same honor bestowed upon his brother: the power of a Dominion Lord—a soldier of the gods blessed with great powers to fight the powers of The Void.  From there things get stranger, but not uninteresting or jarring.  The whipping boy, now grown, and an expert at void magic and ferreting out its practitioners, has found and ancient void artifact for his master.  The knife creates vampire-like creatures called vrykyl, servants to the knife’s owner and being of the void powerful enough to fight the dominion lords and meant for the task, should the need ever arise.  When Dagnarus’s father died, his jealousy and arrogance finally show itself to everyone who never suspected his true intentions and devotions, as he declares was on his half-brother over the throne.

The book is very well written, engaging every step of the way, no mater what you do or don’t expect.  There are many other aspects not mentioned, such as the Orken already suspected due to omens, Dagnarus’s illicit love affair, and the whipping boy’s hero worship of Dagnarus’s brother.

Sadly, two most major issues are not truly addressed in the book.  It is only until the second book do we get an understandable reason to turn to the void for power as use of it not only harms or breaks other things, but creates ulcers and sores all over you as you use it.  Secondly, the chamberlain and man in charge of rearing Dagnarus , the elf Silwyth, vows revenge, never to be seen, heard, or cared about again and that’s all his machinations for war ever truly amount to.

This is definitely a recommended book o read if fantasy is up your alley, especially if you love to see plots unfold and worlds that are expansive and intricate.  It’s a stand-alone story, so if the later two don’t pull their weight, this on still does on its own merit.