trinity blood

[piranha]

one thing that annoys me about my relationship to anime is that i still don't have a good feel for how long i should watch a series before giving up on it for good. occasionally i know right away that i will never take to this one (like with amaenaideyo, or with aa, megami-sama), sometimes i'll know right away that this is one i'll watch through its entire run, and will regret when it ends (took me all of 5 minutes for zettai shounen, and so far it's living up to that instant judgment). but most of the time i feel thoroughly indifferent before a series grabs me (prince of tennis i would have given up on before episode 34 if aya hadn't talked it up so much). some never manage to grab me at all, and i resent having waited so long before walking away from them. but all too often series slowly grow on me, and while i'll probably never write as excitedly about them as i did about zipang, i'll end up enjoying them, because bit for bit they do develop deeper backstory and motivation for characters, and in the end i'll come to care for and like them. and so i never know, will it happen this way, or will it leave me feeling empty?

i'm afraid trinity blood will become one of the latter. i'd already have ditched it if it were not for the awesome settings -- the art is just so pretty. episode 8 was set in barcelona, and there was lots of gaudi, and so well adapted i couldn't stop watching even though the story was hideous. usually some of my favourite seiyuu carry such anime (and this has a fair number of my second string faves in it: suwabe junichi, fujiwara keiji, konichi katsuyuki, minagawa junko, kosugi juurota), but the bombastic speechifying in this series makes me almost not even enjoy the game of "name that seiyuu" when they first pop up. the plot -- what plot? for the first 4 episodes there seemed to be one, though we were of course not let into it very far since "here be political intrigue". but 4 episodes further in it's gone much more episodic, and nothing seems carried through. *grump*.

maybe i need to develop a rating system, with immediate minus points for: vampires, fake european setting, real-people names where the characters have nothing to do with the real people (here we have william wordsworth, vaclav havel, francesco di medici), ripoffs of fairy tales that are not solid enough to count as homage (we got neverland, peter, wendy, and the "tinkerbell system" in one episode), weird-ass christianity, bumbling good-for-nothing leads who transform into ueber-super-duper competent fighters with invincible weaponry at only 40% activation...

at least the men are pretty. *sigh*.

Comments

parallel musings...

[platonios.livejournal.com]

Re: parallel musings...

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yes, i am a total geek. :)

i download some, i rent some, i buy some. when i download, i watch a few episodes and burn to DVD right away if i don't hate it (because my disk space is spent on images; i have tens of thousands of those). so i'll have anything i sorta like around for rewatching, not just my favourites (my favourites i will buy). i do re-watch; not a huge amount, but i definitely rewatch favourites, and often individual episodes if i am discussing them somewhere and want to refresh my memory, or if i am writing a thorough review a long time after finishing a series. and when i buy a series which i had previously only downloaded, i will watch the whole thing through because the quality tends to be better.

the only reason i don't have a house overflowing with DVDs is that i've been watching anime seriously for less than a year. :) (before that i only bought the occasional anime movie, like miyazaki's works and other really outstanding ones.) it's the same with books; i like owning them, and i will reread the ones i liked, but sometimes 10 years pass before i get back to any specific one.

hibernation is good. :) i do a lot of that myself.

[huashan.livejournal.com]

That's exactly the problem I had with Trinity Blood, and why I gave up on it. I was hopeful of the series because of the great artwork, but it just went no where and I quickly lost interest.

trinity blood

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i finished it, and you were right to give up on it. it didn't get much better -- a little; there was actual plot after the episodic spurt, but not enough to make up for the horrible story and the bombastic telling of it.

man, what i could do with that by rewriting it. such a waste of art that was.