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I'm not sure amazing is quite the word you'd be looking for... Or at least not without some modifiers or large quantities of highly refined, industrial grade irony.
Perpetually Confused
Never heard of bile fascination?
That said, I'm legit curious. Like, was the subcontractor just utterly unable to make the CGI animation? Was their stuff considered unusable? Was it just some technical stuff where their stuff couldn't be composited into other material? Or was it just they were so slow they were never gonna make the release date? Like CGI isn't weird magic no one knows how to do so it's kinda baffling how you hire a studio that presumably makes cgi animation and then end up in this weird all ends on deck in a crisis to make the footage.
Like, in light of some of the awful animation we actually got, stuff that's terrible and yet was deemed fine to release, what was the problem and how bad was that problem for this to be considered a decent alternative?
No, the other one.
So I watched the anime. I've read the webnovel at least past the world's history chapters. Forgot where I stopped exactly, but that was what existed at the time, and I've not checked since.
What I really miss is the humans being used as contrast to Kumoko, rather than as some kind of driving force for the plot. The contrasts were funny, like when the humans described how special the skill Appraise was. And then we have Kumoko using it on walls and rocks to level it up... We also have any time she tries to speak. At all. More trying than speaking. Or rather, more trying to not speak.
And that's not speaking about her morality. I'd easily categorise that as Blue-and-Orange Morality, rather than any kind of immorality or amorality. She's clearly much more bacon than necktie. Sure, she does have some ideas of human morality, but it's generally not part of her thought process.
Sophia's life between being a baby and appearing at that battlefield is hilarious (for us, not for her). She contrasts things both directions. Well, that's not part of the anime. It was one of my favourite parts in the webnovel. But considering what's been shown so far, it's not really possible to do it in a similar way, so it's a loss there.
Don't really care much about animation quality. I mean, I watch RWBY. I think people whine too much about that. It's like gamers who can't play games that aren't the newest generation with the highest spec hardware and software made with AAA budgets. The animation quality in this series serves its purpose well enough.
Check out my fanfiction!
Mhm. You lose a lot of the story's identity when you try to make it more, what, family friendly? Kumoko isn't meant to be morally clean at all times because that's Shun's job. The two groups don't contrast anymore, which means that Shun doesn't actually serve any purpose. And if you take away the fact that Kumoko thinks more like an intelligent spider than a human being, she ends up a much shallower character.
Though honestly I think Sophia probably has it worse than Kumoko in that respect. From what I remember of the light novel she's basically an entirely different character with the same name.
Edited by Arha on Jul 5th 2021 at 4:21:58 AM
I haven't consumed the original works but I think it's a stretch to call anime kumoko family-friendly, she still eats humans and delights in getting XP from killing them. Maybe some rough edges have been smoothed away but she's still obviously motivated by inhuman morality.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Jul 5th 2021 at 2:25:36 AM
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn
To avoid getting too far into spoilers, the light novels and such play up the wackiness way more while drastically downplaying the amount the amount of damage she causes and the level of responsibility she carries for the problems she does cause. The narrative focus also shifts in small ways to make her look better.
Ugh I can't even get into the meat of the matter because some people would consider it spoilers even though I think it should probably be kind of obvious even with LN info.
Edited by Arha on Jul 5th 2021 at 4:40:39 AM
I see, I'll take your word for it then.
But I still think that despite the fluffication she still isn't that conventionally heroic.
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn
CHADhan Player.
She's not, but the Anime playing up the overall jovial nature of her character makes what she does far less malicious than it should be.
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.
Yeah, I noticed that too. Part of it is that the anime really does play up visual gags like Kumoko doing the tehepero face, where in text it might be as simple as Kumoko thinking "whoopsie!" or so on. Even with the required differences between a textual medium and a visual one, thinking that and doing it are different things, I suppose.
That, and Kumoko does feel more bubbly and goofy in this treatment anyway. Some of her darker characterization also gets sanded off with time constraints - stuff like originally totally ignoring the boy with liver cancer because it wasn't really something she was interested in, or how the web network she set up to eavesdrop on the entire town where Sophia lives was also set up to serve as an invisible, untraceable assassination tool (admittedly like her compound Eyes + Clairvoyance ability, but).
It's been fun.
Wait, but her using that network to kill someone was what started the war. The anime couldn't have skipped that could it?
I liked the liver cancer boy scene, personally. "Ugh fine whiny mom I'll save your dumb kid. I can't cure cancer so I'll just knock you both out, rip out all his internal organs and regrow them with magic."
But yeah she gave no shits about helping people until she realized she could get cake for doing it.
Edited by Arha on Jul 5th 2021 at 11:41:42 AM
No, she used Clairvoyance plus one of her various Evil Eyes for it. That's just less sinister in presentation than an eavesdropping network that can also kill anyone within its range.
It's been fun.
I mean, that's effectively the same thing. One just requires her to be actively snooping and the other is passive.
Right, but it's a difference in presentation. With Clairvoyance, she can look around at anyone in town (or really most places), but with her web network, the intention was to eavesdrop on the entire town at once and basically rely on her Parallel Wills and Thought Acceleration to filter it and learn the entire language over the course of a week or so. It's not necessarily more sinister, but it does show more accurately how she views her own mind and her own ego as tools. It's even explicitly contrasted a chapter or two later, when Shun and Katia discuss Parallel Will and how it's essentially fracturing your mind into pieces.
It's been fun.
No, the other one.
Well, technically the war would've started anyway. What Kumoko did was just an excuse. Or at least, that's how the anime portrayed it. Forgot how it was in the WN.
If anything, Kumoko thinks like a pragmatic gamer. Who's main goal in life is to eat. That's one thing that was downplayed in the anime, since in the WN she constantly thought about food. Which is a rather spider thing to think of, I'd say. Not that I have any evidence of what an intelligent spider would think about.
Yes, the war would have happened anyway eventually, but it's still a really callous way to think.
Honestly that spoiler wasn't even what I meant. More like the stuff she does in part two (three?) and the role she plays in the story as a whole. Because if Shun is The Hero and Kumoko is his foil and antagonist, that slots her into being the villain protagonist, which she acknowledges herself.
Does it really count as villain protagonist when the "Hero" is mostly a convenient beatstick for some really shady people who seem intent on killing the planet?
It's been fun.
Yes. He's the hero and classic isekai protagonist and she's the one ruining his life by being the man behind the man to the demon king. She gets up to some bad shit when she becomes a god. With good intentions, if not necessarily good motivations, but she's still responsible for a ton of death and destruction and her plan to save the world could easily destroy humanity, a fact she doesn't mind at all.
Shun sucks but she's doing terrible things that may or may not be necessary.
And after that, I still question why/how people see Kumoko as Hero and perfectly good person? She maybe has some kind of logic behind her actions but she also taking things way too far and she also ran for her own responsibility when she does something that created a problem.
She's the protagonist, not the hero. And no one said she was a perfectly good person.
It's been fun.
Not on this topic but I see few comments that defence Kumoko.
It's the usual case of fandom adopting protagonist centered morality. Kumo is a character we've been with since the beginning and most have grown to like her so even when she does awful stuff it's easy to shrug and think "well, they probably had it coming" especially since her logic seems to mostly make sense, doesn't feel actively evil and her only competition on the whole "save the world" matter isn't doing anything that's actually helping in the long run besides hindering her.
Even in stories with way lower stakes, I've seen people intensely hate anyone they perceive as 'hindering' the protagonist, whether or not that assumption is proven correct
I absolutely cannot help but adore handsome 2D boys
Kumoko uses Defence Mechanism as Intellectualization to justify her drastic actions... But we as a readers have more objective viewpoint about things and know how things really are.
And still, I think I can see what you say even if I prefer the human's side in the story I still think Kumoko is an inseparable part of the world "So I'm a Spider, So What?" and I really can't see any development in the plot of the story without her.
People have said like a million times over that she's not a good person. She's an interesting, sympathetic and more or less well intentioned one. And honestly I wouldn't even say she's wrong, necessarily. At least she's doing something. The only other person who seems to be taking action, Dustin, has definitely caused more deaths than she has and may not even have a real solution. Or his 'solution' is horrifying. Either way it's definitely being implied that something bad is going on there.
She's also incredibly mentally ill and highly stunted when it comes to emotional development. Some of the bad things she does she didn't even realize would hurt people.
Also she isn't using it as a defense mechanism or anything. It's what she honestly believes. There's actually a subtle point going on that she responds well to being scolded or corrected on her behavior, but that basically no one ever thinks to do so.
Edited by Arha on Jul 7th 2021 at 6:29:28 AM
I didn't talk about this topic-specific I talk generally about opinions that I saw.
About the Defence Mechanisms, I disagree with you about this but we can't be right or wrong about this.
Edited by TURI12345 on Jul 7th 2021 at 5:25:54 AM
CHADhan Player.
Shun's side of the story is also just plain uninteresting. And the creators seem to agree as his parts of the Anime don't even try to salvage that.
Even if Shun is a good person, that doesn't make interesting and the worst thing a protagonist can be is boring.
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.