-Droken

What's most frustrating about it to me is that I generally start to, and then they take it too far and it just gets annoying.

Well, in Railgun, anyway. My problem with Index was mainly a combination of "unable to figure out WTF is going on" and "don't find the protagonist* at all engaging".

--G.
* the dude, I mean, not Index
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

To be fair, it feels like they kind of backed themselves into a corner as far as her esper ability goes. The pitfall of coming up with a character with that kind of power is that you then have to come up with some way of limiting her, or face having it pointed out for the rest of time that Situation A and Situation B should have been resolved in two seconds because She Could Just Do X. In this instance, they seem to have opted for the "make her incapable of planning the opening of an envelope" approach, which is too bad, but I can empathize with the self-inflicted predicament they found themselves in.

>Railgun is one of those shows that I feel would be so much better if
>it was integrated into the UF verse and treated with proper gravitas
>and respect, and that includes giving Mikoto and Kuroko a fair shake
>at a relationship where they're treated as PEOPLE and not just as
>walking badly written piles of joke.

No pressure there! :)

I've done a bit of reading, since I wanted more information, didn't feel like investing the time in watching more of the show until I had it, and didn't mind about spoilers. There are a variety of different approaches I could take, ranging from "just drop the setting onto some planet somewhere in the galaxy in one piece" (like, for instance, the UF version of Metropolis) to "the various characters end up slotted into various places scattered around the cosmology and may never even have met" (like, for instance, Anakin Skywalker and Queen Amidala).

What I end up doing in this instance will probably fall somewhere in the middle, but I'm still playing with the pieces to see how they fit together.

This is made slightly more complicated by the fact that there at 9,938 of one of the pieces in the kit. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I'm still convinced that Heaven Canceller is the most powerful guy in the setting, in almost exactly the same way that Edison Bell is in UF. Not a combat guy at all, but his medical knowledge allows the whole plot to happen at all.

> I think I'm liable to get tired of Kuroko pretty quick, though,
> I will say that. Two episodes in, and her shtick is already feeling overdone,
> possibly because it's so wildly exaggerated. I dunno, maybe I'm just getting
> old; I know it's supposed to be the comic relief, but the relationship
> between her and Mikoto is sort of just... criminally abusive in both
> directions, which is kind of distracting.

> There are a variety of different approaches I could take, ranging from
> "just drop the setting onto some planet somewhere in the galaxy in one piece"
> (like, for instance, the UF version of Metropolis) to "the various characters
> end up slotted into various places scattered around the cosmology and may
> never even have met" (like, for instance, Anakin Skywalker and Queen Amidala).

Replying to both, I think there's a reason that Academy City is full of assholes. The whole idea of how they produce ability users is essentially a form of brainwashing -- basically getting people to think that they're special enough that reality starts to warp around them. Producing abilities this way has got to result in a lot of sociopathy; or rather, the sociopathy is intentionally induced in children to generate the conditions for psychic powers to flourish.

If you ignore all the aeons and confusing magic-side stuff, this sounds like exactly the kind of program in which a certain Psi Corps would be interested. Like the P13 Shift Project or something. And the unsatisfying character interactions would feel more appropriate, because hey, they're the bad guys.

> This is made *slightly* more complicated by the fact that there at 9,938 of one of the pieces in the kit. :)

Rob Kelk is the one who got me to start watching Railgun, because I'm writing a fic with him. The plan there is to let the Misaka-tachi get their own starship to go off and be CuteBorg; no reason why that couldn't happen here. :)

That's one of the things I like about UF. There's a lot more depth behind the characters in general. Of the major Utena characters in SOS, for instance, only Touga got short-changed in that regard, and lots of things you planned as potential side bits (Saionji, Utena/Corwin) grew into their own things which made the work stronger.

Crunchyroll has the whole thing, and it's worth watching.

We get some 'young espers being adorable in the tragic backstory flashback' bits, we get Sogiita Gunha (the number 7 Level 5, whose power can be summed up as 'Is a Shonen Anime Protagonist'), we get Shokuhou Misaki (imagine Al Bester as a teenage ojou-sama)...

NGL, that sounds like the worst character ever.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Heh. Yeah, there's something of that. She's more than a bit of a bitch. Very powerful telepath/mind-controller, no compunctions whatsoever about casually using it, but she lacks Bester's edge. She's not malicious or sadistic about it.

And Mikoto herself is one of the few who are totally immune to her ability.

Second half of the season has Mikoto working with not only Shokuhou (fulfilling Bester's role of "annoying but useful not-and-enemy-right-this-minute" non-antagonist, but a team of teenage Shadowrunners (closest comparison I could see. It's slightly disturbing that there are apparently a large number of such groups running around the place, most of those we've seen before have been a bit older but these seem to be even younger than Mikoto...)