- Last OnlineMar 11, 10:06 PM
- BirthdayJan 1, 1970
- LocationEmpire of Japan
- JoinedMay 25, 2015
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Feb 26, 2025
There's a lot that's great about this show, but I think it's fair to say that it's overrated. People treat it as some sort of historical or academic show when it's really just a cool fantasy setting with some fun astronomy themes. The show also has some pacing issues which stem partially from the simple fact that this is an adaptation from printed media.
Personally, I really dislike the depiction of geocentric thought and astronomy as a whole in this show. They present the geocentric model as some sort of monolithic, meritless, and useless tool that is incapable of making accurate predictions, contrasted against heliocentrism
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depicted as some sort of bastion of reason and aesthetics. The opposition to heliocentric thought is depicted as some purely irrational religious bogus. Way to shake your contemporary biases. To their credit, Badeni says something decent in one scene, that the concept of heliocentrism alone is insufficient to surpass the utility of preexisting models, but he then completely circumvents this issue by having a sidekick with super-human abilities to observe Venus' phases unaided and kills some prestiged caricature "geocentrist" with the power of facts and logic. He then skips hundreds of years of astronomy to single-handedly overstep the Copernican model to suggest planetary bodies travel in conic sections in order to resolve the orbits of the outer planets. While he was at it, Oczy aught to have discovered Io and personally confirmed stellar parallax while Badeni was proposing gravitation with his big galaxy brain. It's ridiculous.
This rant about "inaccuracy" is relevant because it significantly hinders the message and pacing of the show. The overarching theme is that life can be given significance and meaning by building upon the work of people before you and passing it onto the future across great gaps in time. This would have been served well by a sequence of baton-passes between various characters separated in time, introducing new ideas and technology, just as it was in history. Instead, the most they manage is a few forgettable side-characters acting as couriers of last resort (for drama). The show understates the intellectual and technological hurdles required to develop heliocentric models to tell an oversized morality story about evil intellectuals and inquisitors, only for "heliocentrism" to be "saved" by an illiterate man, some girl (whose character is less developed than compound optics in 15th century Poland), and protestants. If they really wanted a "bad guy" like Badeni, they should've thrown him in at the end to really kill the mood of progress instead of taking up the majority of the season with his antics. He could have been a nutso-Kepler who's obsessed with "useless" mathematics who burns the contents of the stone chest at the end before he's killed, only for the show to end with some kid coming to return a book he had "borrowed" so the story can complete in a circle. The kid could be a future student at Rafal's old school or something. A twist like that'll get you on the MAL top 100.
Now, with only 4 episodes left in the season, they've just introduced two more courier characters who probably have nothing to contribute except for a few moments of self-sacrifice to make copies of a journal with no critical details. Then, they treat movable type like it's some sort of new unknown technology (again, contemporary biases) that can't be replicated; are these people so incapable of casting some letters and slapping it on a cheese press? Next, they'll expect me to believe that a handful of inquisitors could easily track down a dozen motivated and organized men running for their lives in rural Central Europe with a ~6 hour head start. At this point, I'm not sure how they're going to end this season. After successfully escaping, I guess they'll meet some other last-minute character with a screw press, only to be caught by Nowak and everyone will die. However, through some miraculous turn of events, the books will get printed anyway in some small quantity. Nowak will be devastated, knowing his life was for nothing. Some guy living at Potocki's house gets 1/10. It will then be revealed that the book was apparently so epic and based that it inspires the mind of some future astronomer or something and leave it at a cliffhanger. If they were really tasteless, they'd name-drop anime Copernicus himself reading the book in an after-credits scene.
It's a decent watch, but nowhere as good as people seem to suggest.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Dec 18, 2024
This is just another iyashi show for wagie fujos. A lot of people dislike this show because the setting gives the impression of a trendy Dungeon Food or Frieren-esque adventure and world-building story. While that initial misunderstanding is to be expected, I don't think it's fair to then discredit the show entirely. It's very clear what this show is actually intended to be and what demographic they're targeting from the very first episode. It would be like watching 6 seasons of Natsume and going "wow, that was terrible, nothing like the Monogatari Series."
For "seasonal slop," this one was pretty good. They got a lot of
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great talent in all of the right places. The art style is nice. The voice acting/writing doesn't make you lose brain cells. All of the characters are pleasant and enjoyable to see interact. Certainly deserving of more than a 7, which is what it's sitting at when I type this.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jul 25, 2024
I enjoyed this show, as many other people have, but most MAL users would not. The visual style is somewhat abnormal and the episodes are self-contained. Also, other reviews and synopses overstate the presence of psychiatry in the show beyond a fun setting. The show isn't really about psychiatry; it's just psychiatry-flavored. This is not a bad thing, but if you watch this show expecting something substantial in that regard, disappointment is inevitable.
This idea deserved more than just 11 episodes. My only complaint is that Irabu could've used more screen time.
Semi-spoilers:
I thought the last episode sucked. I fear that if they had made more
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episodes, they would've tried to deviate even more from the working formula.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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May 23, 2024
I think the poor reception by MAL users is easily explained: the show, like the source material, was not localized. The original adaptation pandered to whales to make as much money as possible at the peak of the game's popularity. This season, made a decade later, was a more genuine attempt to make a show that wasn't a 12-episode ad, and this was (again) done with a domestic audience in mind. Usually, this is not a problem, as the content may be easily translatable or the foreign audience may be filtered by its obscurity, but neither was the case with this show. Foreign audiences (including
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the biggest weebs with no life outside of early 2010's gatcha games) were primed to watch another 8 episodes of video game moe slop shounen drama (like Azur Lane) but instead were faced with something more traditionally artistic, and it wasn't something that a simple "just translate the buttons" localization would work on.
Of course, this show was far from perfect. It's clear they were really stretching their budget to make 8 episodes and there are times you feel like you're watching a video at 0.75x speed to pad the runtime. I suspect the original intent was for a movie or 4-6 episode OVA, but some higher-ups stepped in with some forced decisions. There are also some dumb out-of-place parts too, which I also assume were added on in a similar manner. I won't point out specifics just for the sake of spoilers (for those that care).
In my opinion, this season far exceeds the first+movie in quality, yet has the lowest rating of the three on MAL. I don't know how else to explain this discrepancy. Looking at the other reviews, it seems like this TV show was probably the first time they had heard of a "she-goo-ray". This is not a thinly-veiled "to be fair, you have to have a very high Jomon admixture, a descendant of Amaterasu, to understand this show" statement (at least mostly). In part, the show does benefit from an audience with prior knowledge and "memberberries", but even excluding that, I don't even think you could adequately localize it. I'm simply not sure how I would explain why I liked this show to a foreign audience in a single MAL review. I genuinely think there is a significant cultural barrier to enjoying this season.
In MAL's shitty condensed scoring system, I think I'd give it an 8. Maybe I'm remembering the show too fondly or my brain is conflating it with other similar media (namely, *that* music video). Perhaps my score and opinion would change on a rewatch, but It certainly deserves more than a below average score.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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