I watched a thing! Now I will tell you about it!
So, at Tekkoshocon I managed to complete my set of DVDs for the anime Betterman (I found all but the last disk in a clearance box in the dealer's room for five bucks each, I had the last one on my shelf at home, it was fate). It's pretty good. Interesting. A bit like a biomechanical engineer's orgasm with some giant robots and metahumans thrown in. It's craaaack. In a dark way. Like, Eva kind of dark, only replace the religious mysticism with scientific things and lots of big words.
Did you know T-cells sparkle when used as a projectile weapon? No, seriously.
It's 26 episodes long, and if you took out all the long scientific explanations (that I keep having to rewind and watch pieces of again to actually get all the words and what if it's important later?) it would probably be...five. Including more exploration of why Betterman looks mysteriously like the main female character's presumed dead older brother. That's not actually a spoiler, if you can't tell that there's a connection there without Hinoki's constant bewildered comments of, "...big brother?" you're probably blind and getting a bad description.
Okay, so basically there's this group, Akamatsu Industries, that has a big mech called a Neuronoid, which main character Keita finds very cool especially since one of the two pilots is his old childhood friend Hinoki and since her co-pilot suddenly died they're in need of a new one. And it just so happens that Keita is a Dual Kind, a sort of meta human that you have to be in order to pilot a Neuronoid. Akamatsu Industries is a sub-contractor of the organization Mode Warp, who is trying to stop a strange....disease, lets go with disease, called Algeron. It makes people freak out and kill everyone around them. Also fighting Algernon is an entity known to the humans as 'Betterman,' who transforms into jiant monsters by eating the seeds of flowers that grow out of people's faces.
I'm sure there's a Flowers for Algernon joke here but I'm not even gonna bother.
There's also a little girl wearing a lizard and another girl who at times makes River Tam look functional. And the big bad is a giant shadow that...well, if you've seen Howl's Moving Castle, the scene where the court sorcerer is trying to destroy Howl's powers and those creepy shadow creatures start dancing around them, it looks like one of those only huge.
And word to the wise, when you're in a really dark series and a large portion of significant secondary characters are dead (except for when they...sort of aren't? talkative dead people), whatever you do don't tell anyone you're pregnant and don't get married. You're only going to end up getting possessed by the scary whateveritis, disease or whatever, and kill yourselves.
And then bombs fall and everyone dies (maybe). Betterman fights the...shadow blob thing, and wins. Akamatsu and Sakura the psychic girl wind up floating on a bit of debris in the middle of the ocean, surely to die of exposure, and then there's a fetus floating in the ocean in a bubble (umbilical cord and all) and the little girl wearing the lizard finds it and swims off with it. Maybe she'll keep it in a box. I am not even kidding, this happens.
After the closing credits (which are different from the rest of the series and involve a song apparently sung entirely in falsetto and it's not very nice), Hinoki and Keita wash up on a beach. She babbles something about how "he" brought them all the way there, I'm presuming Betterman, Keita jumps around excitedly about not being dead, and then they laugh hysterically for a minute before the English credits roll.
...I'm pretty sure that Neon Geneisis Evangelion made more sense, actually. But it's entertaining and no one turned into Tang. And Betterman is the most bishie liver I've ever seen.
...Yeah, I didn't get that one either.
Well, I'd originally watched this on G4 ten years ago (you know, before they started sucking and showing nothing but Cops), so it was nice to finally finish the series. Maybe another day I'll review one of the movies I got at con, the one based on a manga that's based on a children's card game (no, not that one.)
Did you know T-cells sparkle when used as a projectile weapon? No, seriously.
It's 26 episodes long, and if you took out all the long scientific explanations (that I keep having to rewind and watch pieces of again to actually get all the words and what if it's important later?) it would probably be...five. Including more exploration of why Betterman looks mysteriously like the main female character's presumed dead older brother. That's not actually a spoiler, if you can't tell that there's a connection there without Hinoki's constant bewildered comments of, "...big brother?" you're probably blind and getting a bad description.
Okay, so basically there's this group, Akamatsu Industries, that has a big mech called a Neuronoid, which main character Keita finds very cool especially since one of the two pilots is his old childhood friend Hinoki and since her co-pilot suddenly died they're in need of a new one. And it just so happens that Keita is a Dual Kind, a sort of meta human that you have to be in order to pilot a Neuronoid. Akamatsu Industries is a sub-contractor of the organization Mode Warp, who is trying to stop a strange....disease, lets go with disease, called Algeron. It makes people freak out and kill everyone around them. Also fighting Algernon is an entity known to the humans as 'Betterman,' who transforms into jiant monsters by eating the seeds of flowers that grow out of people's faces.
I'm sure there's a Flowers for Algernon joke here but I'm not even gonna bother.
There's also a little girl wearing a lizard and another girl who at times makes River Tam look functional. And the big bad is a giant shadow that...well, if you've seen Howl's Moving Castle, the scene where the court sorcerer is trying to destroy Howl's powers and those creepy shadow creatures start dancing around them, it looks like one of those only huge.
And word to the wise, when you're in a really dark series and a large portion of significant secondary characters are dead (except for when they...sort of aren't? talkative dead people), whatever you do don't tell anyone you're pregnant and don't get married. You're only going to end up getting possessed by the scary whateveritis, disease or whatever, and kill yourselves.
And then bombs fall and everyone dies (maybe). Betterman fights the...shadow blob thing, and wins. Akamatsu and Sakura the psychic girl wind up floating on a bit of debris in the middle of the ocean, surely to die of exposure, and then there's a fetus floating in the ocean in a bubble (umbilical cord and all) and the little girl wearing the lizard finds it and swims off with it. Maybe she'll keep it in a box. I am not even kidding, this happens.
After the closing credits (which are different from the rest of the series and involve a song apparently sung entirely in falsetto and it's not very nice), Hinoki and Keita wash up on a beach. She babbles something about how "he" brought them all the way there, I'm presuming Betterman, Keita jumps around excitedly about not being dead, and then they laugh hysterically for a minute before the English credits roll.
...I'm pretty sure that Neon Geneisis Evangelion made more sense, actually. But it's entertaining and no one turned into Tang. And Betterman is the most bishie liver I've ever seen.
...Yeah, I didn't get that one either.
Well, I'd originally watched this on G4 ten years ago (you know, before they started sucking and showing nothing but Cops), so it was nice to finally finish the series. Maybe another day I'll review one of the movies I got at con, the one based on a manga that's based on a children's card game (no, not that one.)