You're right, a high-quality version of this should exist. Maria's spinny dagger thing deserves to be seen.

it really is crazy how quickly people were willing to just let chatgpt do everything for them. i have never even tried it. brother i don't even know if it's just a website you go to or what. i do not know where chatgpt actually lives, because i can decide my own grocery list.

rip to all the “fuckyeah___” blogs that carried our society at one point </3

we are in the midst of a true Real One

Dude the fact a COELACANTH blog is the one that survived when the rest died off……..

(This post is brought to you by the fact that tumblr are, hilariously, claiming that 50% of current users are gen z, and i wanna see how accurate claim that is.)

Edit: so far it looks like there are way less Gen X than I thought there were on here, and way more Gen Z. Huh. How about that. Colour me surprised.

Tumblr Code.

If I ever see any of you in public, the code is horrifying weapon attack

The response will be collapsing into a bloody heap!

must keep reblogering!! Im going to be so suspicious if any one fells me with a single wicked blow now!

Just finished XV

After a run of mecha anime shows that, quite frankly, took themselves way too seriously, it is an indescribable relief to watch something that's going out of its way to be fun.

Star Driver is 80% froth and 20% soul-searingly poignant and no, you cannot pull those two things apart. It works by being at once both unrepentant exaggeration and quiet understatement, such that the most impactful moments are frequently those that occur outside the action sequences, when character motivations finally click together. Above all, it is unabashedly about performance, treating mecha fights as theatre, complete with an audience, and in doing so it successfully swallows the formulaic 'monster of the week' structure of a lot of 'super robot' media with a feral smile on its face.

Well, mostly successfully.

I'm going to start with the reasons you might not like Star Driver, because think they are important to understand going in. It *is* formulaic and uses a lot of stock footage for its episodic fights, of which there are probably a few too many. I'm curious how the movie adaptation compresses things: it certainly reanimates the battles gorgeously, but I would think you'd lose a lot of the character drama beats by focusing on the action more. Because the thing is, in terms of the story, the mecha battles are often very much structure rather than content. They are there because the conceit is that they are, and everything else revolves around them. It is therefore impactful when we finally get an episode without a fight, and when the formula eventually breaks entirely.

But I won't lie and tell you that you aren't going to find them predictable. In many ways, that's the point, yet the pay off for it only comes very late in the game. I can see people getting frustrated by this aspect pretty easily.

The other big turn-off is, as I said when I was watching it, this is a high-school sex comedy from 2010, with all that entails. To be clear, I don't mean it is ever explicitly pornographic. But it is full of busty girls, lovingly rendered, whose sex-appeal is absolutely foregrounded for the sake of a male audience. There's a lot of boobs and butts, a lot of suggestions of sex, and everyone is moderately obsessed with who is dating whom.

By and large, that's the kind of thing I just roll my eyes at, because it's essentially a genre indicator. Star Driver is the kind of show where there is going to be titillation aimed at teenage boys on tap. You either accept that and focus on measuring it by what it does within those trappings, or you bounce off. It certainly doesn't manage to break my personal bar of 'if objectification, ideally equal-opportunities objectification': main character Takuto is frequently in situations where he is stark naked and/or objectified by other characters, but he is really the only boy treated in that manner.

Irrespective of whether the sex-appeal is to your specific taste, this is an *extremely* horny series and that horniness is a general feature of the characters. The whole underlying point is that the mecha ('Cybodies') are fuelled by the pilot's libido, here equated not just to sex drive but to ambition and zest for life as well. The central premise is kind of that bit in Power Rangers were Zordon says they have to recruit teenagers for the correct emotional boost, only turned into an underlying philosophical point about the explosive potential of young people. This naturally leads to a lot of obvious jokes and the aforementioned titillation, which includes, rather notably, the control rig used by the bad guys being a bondage chair that shackles pilots (boys and girls alike) into place and snaps a collar around their neck, complete with a 'stimulating' cascade of electricity.

For the most part, this is all fairly good-natured. The jokes seldom reduce a character down to just being horny - most are given depth and history to make sense of their current actions and desires. The single example that made me go 'ick' is the school nurse lusting after male students. This treats something very unpleasant as a gag and mean-spiritedly takes aim at a certain type of (assumed female) manga/anime fan into the bargain. It also stands as broadly plot irrelevant in comparison to pretty much every other enemy of the week (to be clear, the school nurse is part of the 'evil' secret society and nominally a 'bad guy', but the concept of an adult feeling desire for teenagers under their professional care is not given much moral weight).

Again, whether you can stomach this sort of thing is something you'll have to judge for yourself. At the level of actual story-telling, my main criticism would be that its fairly brisk pace leaves little room to follow up on characters after they've played their part. Even if they hang around in the opening credits, some of them leave the narrative and several outright disappear once things build up momentum towards the finale. I think it works, more or less, regardless of this but it's another thing you have to accept, that some of the players leave the stage for good once their part is done.

To move on to the good stuff, theatricality is the watch-word. Partly I mean that to describe the style, which I feel is best conveyed by some appropriate gifs. Here is Takuto 'Galactic Pretty Boy' Tsunashi's power-up sequence:

Yeah. When I call Star Driver 'camp', that's a very deliberate choice of words. It embraces excess and being as over the top as possible.

But it's also a story concerned with theatrics. The heroes are the school drama club and their enemies, a secret society formed largely from their classmates who dress up in masks and costumes to go plot in the abandoned mine next door. The club's yearly production is a recurring plot point. Nobody is exactly what they appear; everyone has a part they play in public vs what they are underneath. The overall story boils down to two characters doing long-cons on everybody around them. It is extremely important that so much of the action, while meaningful on one level, is also an exercise in play-acting - a game that does not matter as much as how the participants treat one another off the stage.

Nowhere does this come together better than in the concept of the Cybodies. In the real world, these appear as giant 'puppets' hidden under the island where the story takes place, at the bottom of that abandoned mine. These puppets are plain and static, incapable of actually manifesting as working mecha. This is because they have been magically sealed such that they can only operate in an alternate dimension known as 'Zero Time', accessible by people who have been 'marked' with symbols of power. These marks (glowing letters embedded in the chest) allow one to enter Zero Time where, as the name implies, time is stopped, and to operate a Cybody, which will reconfigure into a functional mecha. This is where the fights take place, in the space between ticks of the clock, isolated from normal reality. Moreover, at least to begin with, only Takuto operates his mecha, Tauburn, from the inside. His enemies use a 'cyber casket' (the bondage chair) to remote control their Cybodies, meaning he can slice them to bits without fear of harming a soul. When destroyed in Zero Time, a Cybody's puppet form darkens from white to grey, put beyond use, and the corresponding mark becomes inactive, removing the owner from the game.

So at first, there are no physical stakes to the combat. Takuto, the only person at risk of being killed, is a league above any of the people trying to take him down. There's no sense of him personally being in any danger.

Now here's the clever part: the secret society, Glittering Star, has the ultimate aim of releasing the seals that keep the Cybodies trapped in Zero Time. Their goal is to bring them into reality and use their power to conquer the world - financially if not literally, since the technology of these machines would net them a fortune even if they refrained from going wild with a bunch of giant, unstoppable robots. The seal is maintained by four 'maidens', a particular kind of Cybody. By destroying each of these in turn and thus neutralising their pilots' marks, Glittering Star bring all the rest closer to the point where they can emerge.

Thus, while each individual fight might have low stakes and a predictable outcome, they're all in the name of working up to breaking the seals and releasing these things into a place where they can do actual harm. It's a fascinating gimmick that works to make diegetic the kind of reset button seen in many a similarly formulaic show while ensuring there is a real, genuine threat looming ever closer over events. A lot of what Glittering Star are doing, as they fail over and over to beat Takuto's defence of the maidens, is mapping the extent of the Cybodies' powers. They are also, whether they realise it or not, is putting on a show to distract everyone from the actual villain's actual plan. Hence why it is important for this to be framed by theatre. I was hit early on by the nagging sense that what I was watching wasn't the actual point, and was delighted by how accurate this assessment turned out to be.

Also, not to put too fine a point on it, the mecha designs in Star Driver are *beautiful*. The Cybodies are wonderful, impossibly exaggerated devices that defy physics in order to look spectacular. They're utterly gorgeous.

Anyway, this show's entire premise is shouting 'polyamory!' with its whole chest.

Belated cut for spoilers on the actual plot.

making a poll that's specifically hard for tumblr users based on the things i know tumblr loves

more votes. we have to settle this.

With the ides of march fast approaching we must be prepared

Please reblog to make sure is equipped!