At the end of Edens Zero S1 they did a massive preview of what is to come and promised the adventure would continue, but they did not officially announce a season 2. The situation was a lot like Summer Pockets' or Sailor Moon's. They keep saying they'll continue the anime but nothing on the ground actually happens. That nebulous state cleared up today with the announcement of S2 in development. My ranking of Edens Zero already took season 2 happening into account, so I'm not sure it will actually rise much once the second series actually starts airing. Maybe a little. It would help if S2 is 25 episodes long like the first season as opposed to a mere 12 eps.
With Edens Zero announced I needed a new series for my anime wishlist, so I put To Love ru back in. The anime covers a lot of To Love ru, but it skips both the beginning and the end. An anime that patches in those holes would be of great benefit to mankind.
Russia still stands atop the medal count with America in a dismal 10th place and no gold medals. I guess diversity isn't actually our strength, huh? We have 330 million people, vast amounts of mountainous and northern latitude land, and are swimming in wealth with $60,000 per capita. If anyone could be good at winter sports it should be us. We can afford to buy the equipment and go skiing. We have ski resorts. We have oodles of people who could potentially master said sports. So what's our excuse for 10th place? Why is Russia eating our lunch? Could it be that the issue goes deeper, and the problem isn't in our bodies but our souls? So long as America is dominated by evil ideologies it can never maximize our human potential, and that will show up in sports competitions as well as everywhere else. You can't hide a stinking corpse of a civilization, sooner or later objective metrics will reveal the truth.
The mirror to this truth revealed by the objective metrics of the Olympics is that Russia is a great civilization that can maximize the potential of its youth. That out of Russia great people are made. Russia is a frosty country, but it has less than half as many people as us and only makes 1/3 as much money. There is no reason Russia should be dominating the winter Olympics right now. The only thing they beat us in is the human spirit. They don't nurture their youth to be gays, lesbians and transgenders, but to conform to their proper gender roles, they don't force their kids to wear masks or get vaccines that ruin their hearts, and lo and behold they become great athletes, great specimens of their sex as a result. As though growing into what you were meant to be makes you stronger.
My conclusion won't be invalidated if America somehow overtakes Russia by the end of the Olympics. The truth is with our wealth and population it shouldn't even be close. We should be completely dominating Russia right now. If we scrape through with a few more medals than them at the last moment that still tells us the exact same thing. We are destroying our children, our human capital, and as a result we can't field a decent Olympic team anymore. Objective metrics don't lie. They're the only things that don't lie in this world. They are the only accurate measures of our respective nations that politicians can't wave away as 'disinformation.' Gold medals aren't 'misinformation.' They just are.
I suppose the only other objective metric is war. If Russia and the USA fight a war I will admit that whoever wins it is the better civilization, never mind the medal tables, but I'd bet everything on Russia just looking at these medal counts. The manly men are all in Russia. All the men in the US army have already gotten their vaccines and would probably have a heart attack if forced to jog three miles. They've all been trained in critical race theory and forced to walk around in high heels and paint their nails to learn gender sensitivity. All the 'extremists' who believe men are men and women are women have already been purged. All the generals are affirmative action women, blacks and queers whose only merit is loyalty to the liberal creed, not actually commanding armed forces. They're a woke joke.
I wish someone would humiliate America in war, the sooner the people of America learn how objectively awful we are the sooner we can change for the better. Right now we can just print imaginary money and give ourselves imaginary awards like Oscars and proclaim ourselves leaders of the free world while not even allowing our children to breathe. An objective punch in the face would be the quickest fix to our illusions imaginable. Russia, if you're listening, please invade!
Meanwhile, in '100 Waifus' I replaced Hiromi from Jitensha-bu with Primrose from Octopath Traveler. This is because Jitensha-bu wasn't in any of my halls of fame but Octopath Traveler was. If I'm going to be promoting artistic franchises for others to go check out, it should be series I have full confidence in. Hiromi was only there due to her personal good looks, but those things aren't as important as being the representative of an entire world of beauty and charm. A gateway. Primrose is a wonderful girl. She's pretty, strong, vengeful and willing to do whatever it takes to achieve her goals. But she also tries to help out the weak and victimized who aren't as strong as her, going out of her way to save them too. From the beginning of the story I immediately picked out Primrose as my starting character and to this day I still think Primrose was the coolest character in Octopath.
Octopath Traveler is a great game and thus in my video game hall of fame. But it's also a great soundtrack with 30 songs in my 5-star music hall of fame. Primrose is serving a dual purpose here, hopefully getting people to play the game but also to listen to this incredible music. She's the poster girl for two different halls of fame, while Hiromi was just a poster girl for her own gorgeous self. Between the two it had to be Primrose. And because Primrose is the first representative of a new franchise, replacing Hiromi, the sole representative of Jitensha-bu, my total artistic franchise count remains a nice round 300.
This left Onpu from Ojamajo Doremi as the only character from a franchise not in any of my halls of fame. Onpu is the best character from a series I used to rate highly, before the awful ending invalidated the entire theme of the story, so you'd think this would be good enough, but now that she's the odd one out it doesn't make much sense to leave things this way. If you're following a rule there shouldn't be any exceptions that break expectations, it causes cognitive dissonance. I can't recommend a franchise I don't actually recommend!
As a result, I replaced Onpu with Rice Shower from Uma Musume. Rice Shower is more beautiful and talented than Onpu and I have a deep sympathy for underappreciated high achievers since I am one myself. Rice Shower resonates with me a lot more than Onpu, and Uma Musume resonates with me a lot more than Ojamajo Doremi. Rice Shower is one of the big reasons Uma Musume is ranked #29 in my top anime rankings, it's a sin to leave her out.
This was only the start of my travails, though. Onpu was Mylene's daughter, which made sense since they were both actors and singers. Rice Shower is a horse girl with animal ears though, so she doesn't fit in as Mylene's daughter. So the next step was to swap Rice over to being Kuon's daughter, with Kuon's previous daughter Yomiko being given to Mylene. This match was made in heaven because through sheer coincidence the last name of Kuon is Black and Rice Shower is the 'assassin in black,' so that and the animal ears matched. Meanwhile Yomiko is a voracious reader of books and a virtuoso at fighting and Mylene's last name happens to be Jenius. It cannot be believed! Do coincidences like this actually happen or is it all divine guidance??
Okay, so that part was fixed, but now my total franchise count dips back down to 299, as Uma Musume already had a representative but Onpu was the sole rep. from her series. The editing had to continue. But not to fear, I had a plan.
Bink from Xanth is a nice guy with a cool superpower, 'cannot be harmed by magic.' But he's very normal as a person, I don't remember anything particularly grand or virtuous about him. He isn't like Rice Shower who trained so hard to win a race no one wanted her to win that she beat the supposedly unbeatable McQueen. He's a forgettable guy who does nothing to represent why 'Xanth' should be respected. Plus I already have Xanth's best male character, Humfrey, and Xanth's best female character, Surprise, in my fictional character hall of fame, so what do I need Bink for?
So I can replace Bink with a better man from an as yet unutilized franchise and get my franchise count back to 300. The answer is a different western author's main character from a different fantasy series -- Rolf from Empire of the East. Rolf is a normal peasant who gets involved in a world war with gods and demons fighting it out for Earth's future. It's a lot like Lensmen in that the evil empire is sponsored by and empowered by the demons, while the good people of the west are sponsored by and empowered by the gods. Rolf is on Ardneh's side and through perspicacious thinking, persuasive speaking and sometimes suicidal bravery he becomes a big reason why good triumphs over evil. Rolf is no Kimball Kennison but he gets the job done. He's enough. And Empire of the East is a series every bit as good as Lensmen.
Fred Saberhagen is in my great books hall of fame so Rolf is properly from a hall of fame. Empire of the East is a separate trilogy from the Book of Swords so it properly counts as a unique franchise. All the requirements are met.
So there you have it. Primrose, Rice and Rolf in, Hiromi, Onpu and Bink out. After an insane amount of reasoning this is the resulting minor edit of my book. You can tell how much I love '100 Waifus' by the amount of effort I put into every aspect of it. Now if only I could play Tales of Arise my name gallery would be perfect -- both in terms of stabling lots of cool characters and in terms of advertising all the world's best art. Sort of like the Federal Reserve's dual mandate of high employment and low inflation, my fictional character hall of fame is now fulfilling the dual goals of showing off individuals and series.
No comments:
Post a Comment