Dave

happy birthday :)!

Happy Birthday ! =)

happy birthday nigga :D

Happy birthday

Happy birthday stoneyyy =]

mew

Happy birthday stone! :3

Happy Birthday! :D booo I didn't even get a chance for your well .-.

nigga

I wish we coulda chilled earlier this year. Maybe some other time.

Happy Birthday bro. :)

also just post multiple vms like the rest of us normal people ._.

hmmm thinking about it, the most intriguing part about sayaka imo is the fact that she's deemed "hopeless" and sort of a goner, with homura telling madoka to give up on her and etc. idk, the idea that our fates could be so set in stone (well i suppose it wasn't entirely fixed: it was either die or become a witch, but still, that's no buffet) is rather interesting if not altogether the nicest or most comforting thought

wrt her selfishness, imo the message the show wants to convey is that it wasn't the selfishness itself that was "wrong", it was the fact that she was deluding herself into thinking she was being selfless, thinking she genuinely wanted kyousuke to get well, when she really just wanted him to love her! especially through kyoko pre-sacrifice, i thought the show was p clear on its stance that selfishness is a-ok, the most important thing is to be honest with yourself about what exactly you want and why you want it

back to sayaka tho, my take on it is that her character's resolution at the end, after her death, was her learning to be happy through violin guy's happiness, which were the conditions of her original wish (wanting kyosuke to be happy for his own sake, not for her selfish reasons) and hence finding peace

(IK this last part was totally garbled, if you need clarification i can try rephrasing it sometime else when i'm not running on retarded amounts of (read: no) sleep)

ahaha why not!!! do get into it lol - kyubey is a magnificent manipulative bitch and such a masterpiece of a character imo :p love the reactions he gets out of people. he is right up there on my list of characters i would not want to meet in a dark alley alone at night, but we can definitely see that he has his reasons and, if not altogether sympathetic, he's at least quite an understandable character imo! he wasn't a classic villain in that he didn't perform evil deeds out of petty spite or selfish motivation, his race needed to harvest energy to stave off the ~destruction of the universe~ and it's just that deluding the girls was the best way to do it..?

we don't like being used as pawns, we like thinking that our universe is the be-all-end-all of things, the center of everything that's ever existed blah blah blah, but that's hardly true really, and idk i like that this anime forced us to consider that head-on. to dislike it just because -- to quote/ paraphrase madoka -- "it's horrible" is understandable, but kind of narrowminded / immature / overly simplistic..?

(i don't mean you, i mean madoka :p)

as for homura coming clean about everything, she tried that in one time loop and shit hit the fan, iirc? i think it was the one where mami went nuts upon finding out that puella magi became witches and tried to kill them all <_<. besides, in the present time loop kyubey had turned sayaka and mami against homura, and both of them were undoubtedly closer to madoka than homura was, so that would probably not have worked out particularly well

also 9.9 about kyoko's eating, i will never be able to think of that as cute or indeed anything but disturbed and completely fucking tragic

also i think i'll give you my thoughts on mami here since we didnt get to that in chat!

basically my understanding of it is that she's kind of an examination/ deconstruction of the strong happy optimistic leader, the ideal magical girl in anime like cardcaptor sakura / sailor moon, if you will (then again i've never rly watched any of those anime so take w/ a pinch of salt :P). anyway, she tries to live up to that ideal and present a perfect appearance, that she's got it all together, especially to madoka and sayaka, but in reality she's far from that - i mean she spends all her spare time fighting witches, no one else can even begin to understand her life etc

so in that light i'm always a little bit *heart twinge* when i see people who idolize her because of her perfect-magical-girl-ness (in-universe sayaka does that as well) i'm like ....... that's not who she really is D: D: that's who she pretends to be, and it's because of people like you that she has to put up such a pretense

SO YEAH awesome anime, inversions of typical magical girl tropes like "the cute mascot" and "the charm/ gem thing", great characters in their own right, musings about humanity and other deep shit, plus a fuckload of gray morality on top of it all, love love love this show sfm lol seriously i could talk about it for days

noice noice 'm already so excited!! I got 2 to put pressure on myself to get a gf who likes fun. by november xP

but i can't walk there DDDDD:

hey when should I post my well?

Apparently on Nov. 29 they are playing in Raleigh according to their fb page, haven't found news about this date anywhere else though. But I think their page is accurate bc they have their entire tour listed

stone_cold do you like fun. (the band)

na nigga I was joking do it when/if you want. i've been sick lately too and it sucks that I have a shit ton of work already piled up, and i've only had school for a week now.

reply to people you bum.

also srndpt you have not lived until you marathon dtb! welcome to the club!

if i get a superpower i want it to be temporal manipulation it's the power all the awesome people have

(i just marathoned all the rest of dtb at one shot ugh i need a life)

i will thoughtsplode later but for now one thing i dont get is - so what was up with bai all along, and more pertinently what's happened to her after hei's powers have disappeared and stuff? is she actually dead-dead now (so effectively he killed her?) / was she already dead, what?


ps uhuh i can attest to his sweetness indeed birkal

;)

oh my goodness you are the sweetest person on this planet <3

thoughts on dtb - I can't really remember what I've told you so sorry if you've heard some of this before

firstly A+ on characterization, Hei is made of awesome, such a badass etc etc. haha, he's one of those characters that's so engaging and interesting in the present that he doesn't need a woobie tragic backstory for me to find sympathetic and "root for" (although given their choice of setting time-wise I'm sure we'll be given one) - good thing too, considering the mysterious nature of the story and all :p.

hm originally I was kind of confused / put off by the sister obsession, what with contractors not supposed to have emotion and blah blah etc, but the more I think about it the more sure I am that, lol, he isn't even a contractor at all, is he? the total lack of mention of any contract payment, powers that /could/ possibly be generated through nonsupernatural means, why he uses a mask while no other contractor does, etc, something's fishy

Misaki is a standout too; true that it's rather stock, but I've always loved the "lone normal human person in a world of the supernatural" archetype, and the fact that she's a competent respected career woman on top of that is just ahhhhh lots of all-around awesome <33.

not really sure what I should think of Hei's entourage; I can't even decide if I want to see more or less of them. I think they either need more backstory or less screentime, because they feel very superfluous/ deadweight right now <_<

anyway I thought the plot had great direction going into the first couple arcs, uncovering the mystery of the gate and origins of contractor powers, but it kinda seems to be.. deviating from that? atm they're developing a pretty awesome universe, so no complaints for the time being, but I hope they explain everything in the end

oh, I actually hugely liked the two-part arc format as well, probably simply because being so used to 40-minute tv shows I felt much more comfortable with the pace, and I'm not one to mind monster-of-the-week formats as long as there's some sort of underlying direction I guessssss. I do wish characters like Mai and Wei got more screentime though! the former because imo there's a lot more potential to her character arc, and the latter just because he's an awesome badass~

at least uh i guess on the bright side annoying arcs get dropped quickly? :p I didn't get the missing black cat arc, I don't see what it had to do with anything really ._. actually for that matter I don't get Gai and Kiko at all - they're too over-the-top slapstick and caricatured for such a serious realistic anime imo. meh, I hope they turn out to have some sort of plot significance other than comic relief (or they're murdered in their sleep and are never heard from again), because this anime really has far better things to be doing!!

also this is probably like the only time I'm gonna comment on something non writing related: ok it's probably just an unfortunate combination of "not my taste" and being forced to hear it twenty times b/c my streaming site won't let me skip ahead, but - the OP is fucking vile ahhhhhhh my ears