Oh, good, let’s start off with all the cheesy CGI exposition we skipped last week. While they’re reciting Not The Three Laws, I’ll throw in a note that the character designer added leggings to her uniform; on the light-novel covers, her legs are bare under her short-shorts, like all good Interpol agents. Also, she’s 19, so she gets a pass for not being the hardened detective she poses as.

But how is the story proceeding? Well, we’ve got a Mad Scientist claiming Her Finest Creations are true AIs (which according to OpenAI means “profitable” and according to this show means “sapient”), a suspect who’s been ruled out with an axe, a team that’s been pulled off the case, and some sitting around talking about plot coupons.

The good news is that once we reach the halfway point, things start happening. On a technical note, when Our Spunky Heroine’s cyber implant boots up, it’s running Linux kernel 2.2.18 with a VGA console and a PS/2 mouse. Also, Our Mysterious Villain couldn’t have flipped his knife open that way. Just sayin’.

My biggest complaint is that when they get around to the brain diving that is the hook for the show, they once again run the full startup animation, like a third-rate magical-girl transformation; I’ll be very happy if they ditch it in future episodes. Just plug her in and go.

Verdict: this does not show signs of being a slow-burn romance, at least not for now, but the buddy-cop dynamic is complicated by the boy-girl dynamic, with both of them being emotionally damaged goods. In a story-promoting way, that is. Unrelated, the ED animation was apparently produced by a team that was told this was a rom-com.

(Our Heroine only acts like a zombie…)

Robo-Ho Classmate

I had to go to Teh Torrentz for this week’s Your Forma, and the trashiest-sounding series of the season was right there, so…

Yes, I just watched the first episode of Hide me! Makina-san!!, in which a ridiculously-stacked naked high-school chick showers before the opening credits with just a hint of soap and steam over her crotch, then shows more nip during the credits, then speaks kindly to the nerdiest nerd who ever nerded, and finally shows up at the apartment where he lives alone (as all high-school nerds do), which she knew about because she’s basically been stalking him.

She opens her flasher coat and shows him that she’s a seriously damaged robot. Also, she makes a complete mockery of all the fan-service up to this point by revealing that her boobs are hollow. As in cracked eggshell hollow. Once she’s fixed up, she’s equipped with sentient lightbeams and steam clouds to keep her crotch Safe For Japan, except when she gets Barbied.

He fixes her up overnight, and she wakes up (alone) in his bed the next morning, a bed that has a prominently-placed box of tissues. Boy Wonder is a wreck, between staying up all night reading her manual that’s filled with future-tech, and having a girl and a robot in his bed.

There’s “not subtle”, and then there’s this thing, which looks like someone read a badly-translated wiki article on Hand Maid May, cut the guy’s age by 10 years, and made the lead girl a willing sexbot with a gal skin. The harem’s even got a loli, according to the credits and the official site.

Verdict: shouty, of course, but unapologetic, and objectively better than Dere-Dere Dark Elf. Faint praise, but I actually made it all the way through the episode…

(unrelated, but naked and busty…)

Not the comparison I would have made…

I happened to notice that Poul Anderson’s classic Three Hearts And Three Lions was on Kindle Unlimited. That’s a good way to spend some time, I thought, and then I read the blurb:

Before Thomas Covenant, Roger Zelazny’s Amber, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the great Poul Anderson introduced readers to the Middle World and the legendary hero Ogier the Dane.

This is technically true, if you’re referring to the original 1953 3H&3L novella that ran in a magazine one year before Fellowship was released, but it wasn’t expanded into a novel until 1961, so they can’t be directly compared in scale for “introduced readers to”.

But that’s a small point. Of all the fantasy series written since 1953/1961, they put Thomas Fucking Covenant first on the list?!? Without even including the author’s name, as if it’s more iconic on its own than Amber or LoTR? I don’t think Covenant himself even has anything in common with the heroes of the others except being an adult male.

I can see excluding Narnia, despite its superior name recognition and the fact that it came out in 1950; the same logic might be applied to Prydain and Wrinkle In Time, by calling them “chidren’s books” despite their depth. But since they extended their list to the late 1970s, let’s see what alternatives come to mind: Norton’s Witch World (which even starts off with an isekai transfer), Vance’s The Dying Earth, Le Guin’s Earthsea, McCaffrey’s Pern, Moorcock’s Elric and Corum, Lieber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Cherryh’s Morgaine, and if most of my books weren’t in boxes, I could probably list a dozen more.

Hell, Brooks’ Shannara surely has better name recognition than Thomas F. Covenant, given that it had a two-season TV show less than ten years ago.

Unrelated, Timothy Zahn has a new story out

Trap Line, and by “new” I mean “two weeks ago”.

---

Comments via Isso

Markdown formatting and simple HTML accepted.

Sometimes you have to double-click to enter text in the form (interaction between Isso and Bootstrap?). Tab is more reliable.

---