Little Witch Academia

Perhaps you should post some Chariot/Croix to balance it out.

Well okay.

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Your pandering is appreciated.

I think the closest we get is Akko laughing in disguise in that episode with the magic mirror. When Diana's emoting that strongly, it's usually because she's upset about or at Akko.

I don't know why, but that feels like a surprise.

Speaking of Diana and emoting, her voice acting in English has a very different feel. I was expecting something more severe, but the English voice actress makes her voice very light and soft.

I mean, it's possible I'm forgetting something but I have no idea when it could possibly be. Diana's naturally reserved, so when she's happy and in her element she's not likely to make any emotional outbursts. It's stuff like Akko calling her a bourgeoise or wandering off in the middle of the snowy night that gets that level of reaction from her.

Croix and Chariot post-show

Chariot's ideal woman

:D Sorry but I am laughing to myself that there could be a prison in this world that really is called Witch Jail.

Does the cake have a nail file in it that Croix somehow just keeps missing?

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"Wow, Croix, your nails are immacu—wait. Wait. Aren't you supposed to be the smart one?"

"What?"

Finally finished this. I had watched the first half, but then stopped when Croix showed up because it looked like it was going to push a Science Is Bad message (and I was in a bad mood for unrelated reasons). Got back into it a few days ago.

Definitely very good. Not as good as Gurren Lagann or Kill La Kill, but also not as insanely over the top. Good for what they were trying to do. I was annoyed for much of the series how Akko was completely useless and just got lucky. I mean, I'm all for keeping the protagonist from being overpowered, but it just seemed ridiculous. Tying that into Chariot and her disappearance, and the idea of persevering despite your shortcomings, helped. There was still a small Science Is Bad message (or at least "belief is more powerful than science"), which still rubbed me the wrong way, but it wasn't that bad.

Does Trigger have anything else on the docket?

I submit that if Little Witch Academia was about the badness of science we wouldn't have an episode devoted to Constanze getting to make a giant mecha.

Edited by rikalous on Sep 6th 2018 at 12:32:13 PM

They did a serviceable job stretching two OV As out to a series, but clearly they didn't do it the best way. Akko's personality is amusing for like one moment and that's it. You can only do so much with her same shtick again and again until it gets repetitive unless you give her real development. That development arrived by the end, but in the meantime we get a lot of middle episodes that seem needless.

My thought was that it wasn't science being bad, but rather Croix needing to draw from more sources of knowledge than her just her own specific field.

She's an engineer who designed a device without consulting the humanities about the effects that her invention would have on society. It seemed like she expected to be able to turn the Noir Spirit off if things got bad, not considering 1) how being angry for a long time has its own momentum, and 2) being surrounded by angry people can heighten feelings of fear, anger, or despair. The hell of it is that she could have rigorously (scientifically, even!) examined the human effects of noir spirit and realized that the Noir Rod going rampant was a possibility.

Like, if she'd tried to run her scheme past the IRB, everything would be fine.

Edited by Durazno on Sep 6th 2018 at 3:38:26 AM

My take was that the problem with Croix isn't the science or technology (which I'm gonna be conflating for the rest of this post), it's that her character is built around negative emotion. Her big evil plan revolves around engendering and harnessing anxiety and anger, as a metaphor for the way she's motivated to do it by envy and spite and the need to prove that she was always more worthy than Chariot. And in the end these forces prove counterproductive to her ultimate aims and have to be overcome by hope and friendship and shit, because again metaphors.

So that's Croix, and if she was the only technomage around I could see a message that tech and by extension science is linked with all the things that make Croix an asshole. But Constanze came first.

Constanze is, if anything, more closely linked to tech than Croix is. Hardly a scene with her goes by that doesn't involve robots or laser guns or a spot of idle welding. While she spends most of her time just kind of hanging around tinkering, she does get that spotlight episode, and it's not about science running amok or making her a worse person or anything. No, science is the goal, the payoff at the climax. The episode's conflict comes from things like Akko's Akkoity and Constanze's difficulty communicating preventing the science from happening. One of the major obstacles is resolved by Akko going to a guy and saying "we need this thing to do fucking cool science with," which works immediately because the guy agrees that science is fucking cool.

You see this smile?◊ Science brought you this smile.

Croix as STEMlord who needs to learn to shut up when the humanities people are talking is not an angle I'd thought of before, but I really like it.

Edited by rikalous on Sep 6th 2018 at 9:21:40 AM

Who would've though that writers of the show would lean on the side of humanities against STEM?

Hehe, and yet, as rikalous points out, they showcase the ability of STEM folks to do amazing things, as long as they have the support of people with other skills. (Or possibly have cultivated those other skills themselves?)

I actually wonder where Diana falls in this interpretation.

Good point. Following this, note that Chariot using the Fuel Spirit to (accidentally) consume the dreams of the people at her show led to less dreams in the short term (as their magic potential was consumed), but more in the long term (as they had the drive to overcome that handicap). Same with Croix's anger magic; in the short term their anger was reduced (through the magic app that fed the energy to her), but in the long term it grew beyond her control.

And in turn, the artsy types benefit from the techy ability to build slow-moving vehicles to make up for their shortcomings. (I'm still disappointed that broom was just a one-off gag and never showed up again with a rocket boost or the like.)

On Diana, she seems to be aiming for the family tradition of a medical career, so naturally she's an overachiever with no free time for academic pissing matches.

Good point. I think she's more positive STEM-rep, though perhaps more of a renaissance woman.

Actually, a visual artist witch would be a good addition.

Akko and Chariot ARE artsy witch types.

Akko, in particular, seems born to the stage.

A proud thespian

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Right, good point. By "visual" I was trying to suggest, like, a magical painter or maybe sculptor, rather than a performer.

Damn. A LOT MORE of this show could be metaphorical than i thought.

Yeah, Trigger is good at that.

Trigger is the thing that demands you look at the work for what they may have intended. They are indeed very good with that.