I don’t really do recs or full reviews here and most of my stuff is just a notes dump unless I summarize before hand and it’s a mess and I tend to note stuff that I found to be weird writing decisions.
It’s more or less like the philosophy of I read and watch things based on online recommends and ratings and if a lot of people are watching it and I drop them if there’s something I don’t like or I just find it boring. If the writer is doing something weird then I can just close the page. This becomes slightly more difficult when you are invested in a media and then the writer adds a new weird thing that wasn’t there before and you have to do your best to ignore it and hope that it doesn’t become like a mainstay go away.
This is ultimately because I do not have a vetting process before I go into watching things which means I will be blindsided and flash banged by the worst writing decisions of all time. Like in my mind there’s a gross meter and I measure some things based on how ”ick” I find them. Things I find “ick” tend to be stuff like unnecessary fanservice (hot springs episodes have hit that) or like goon type characters (unfortunately not like henchmen goons). When I was younger this kind of stuff flew over my head and I was in places that normalized some tropes and there’s more that I can think of that I’d probably be like “ick” about now but that’s just a part of growing up and finding tropes you dislike/find weird.
I don’t think exposing yourself to things you don’t like will help you with like, the things you dislike. It’s like me and the bount arc because like I don’t want to see them or the mod souls, I want to see Aizen’s wild plans play out and these guys are a hindrance. I’d definitely use a filler guide for bleach. And I’m not actively reviewing things either, it’s more or less “I watched things because I’m bored and I’ve got free time, here’s my raw unfiltered thoughts.” The thing is I am not 100% or even like 50% correct about anything and that includes my opinion most of the time.
I’m not a stick in the mud though, I just find somethings to be like, unfunny or tasteless and I tend to point them out because these are like my notes on media I watch. Like a lot of things I find to dislike being fanservice and weird shots are basically like inherently baked into the shows since the target audience is teenagers who are like, generally figuring stuff out. So the real answer here is I need to watch things that aren’t just shonen!

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Does anyone remember Monsuno
They had monsters in those capsules. There's a guy here named John Ace
3 protagonists here aiming to find a missing dad who's been working with secret toys and the government.
The generic distilled water of protag, nerd, girl. Instead of saying crap he says Crag.
It really works by beyblade rules of "don't spin that thing". Literally the government guys are saying that the kid is armed because he has a magic monster in his little capsule thing
Kid's franchises where the weapons are little toys are always kind of funny to revisit, they are fighting for their lives with these toys. I like to think that they're all in the same universe somehow but just miss each other for cross over events.

Jem (Ep 1 to 5)

I love 80s cartoons with cheesy rock music and puns and glam YEAHHHH
The first 5 episodes could literally be a whole movie of the origin story because it lasts that long. Jem and the holograms is a show of chaos. The juxtaposition of losing Jem when there could've been a contrast between that and the transformers because the show was good but the dolls didn't sell and the live action movie killed it...I feel like any live action thing that has an inherently absurd premise needs to lean onto their absurdity and be cartoony. Need more campiness.

It's a soap opera that uses a rock band with techno power to become their own musician disguises like it's a magical girl costume. All intents and purposes it's juxtaposed in the same world as GI Joe and Transformers in that time frame and it's great to imagine any of those characters listening to any of the bands. It's absurd, it's got a love triangle between the main woman, her holographic alter ego, and the man she loves who has some issue with lying that is never fully explained. This romantic conflict lasts for the entire 60+ episode run. Jerrica has to juggle so much between the orphanage, her dad's company, and her secret identity. The Misfits are criminals who are so good at singing that they get bailed out multiple times.
The show's named Jem, the band is named Jem, and the conflict of the episode is that Kimberly is mad about not getting enough attention because even though in public perception it's Jem and the Holograms the band name isn't the same.
The entire first season's few episodes are an origin story for Jem. I like how for a moment I really did think synergy was destroyed but uh, it's a hologram. Synergy is one of those things I have zero recall on but Jem's father building a scientific holographic computer that is almost borderline mythological is a fascinating plot thing by itself being used for a rock band. I think she could be plopped into the transformers universe with no change.
The juxtaposition of the animated music videos being an in universe thing is great. The Jem songs are all you know, feel good, sometimes corny, the misfits get to be their chaotic selves all the time. Villains always get to just do the things that cause the most conflict and have no shame about it and the misfits truly exemplify their role in the story to cause mischief. Realistically they should be in jail but since they've got money they can bail out immediately. I think Jem CDs would've sold as a niche. The bands having different genres is a good touch for the battle of the bands thing.
I always hated that they changed the theme song for later seasons. I mean, the exciting adventure aspect is there, but i like how mysterious sounding season 1's song was.

Voltron, Defender of the Universe:
Sven entered and exited the plot immediately with the same accent he had on Netflix.
Going from LD to this is night and day like allura and coran’s roles. Immensely glad that the nanny character does not exist in the Netflix reboot.

Personalities? There are none. I think this is one of those things where to distinguish characters they give them varied voices. There are only 7 people on the imdb page.

This show has a limited soundtrack and stock footage but actually seeing the robot transform and do fights rules because the show I just watched before was more about the characters, and this one is just the writers and the VAs winging it.

I am still watching g1 transformers but I do not want to flood the entire page. I'm taking my time with it which means I'm still chilling through season 2 while also starting up smaller shows (not really though, rescue bot is like almost the same amount of seasons...)

I remember Mashle's manga for a bit, funniest thing because it's like one punch man meets generic magic school story.
He gets buff and punches the hell out of magic and just improvs his way into tricking people he's got incredible power, all he wants to do is eat cream puffs.
My mind did block out the siscon guy and that type of gag continues to suck to me.
Everyone in this story thinks they're the main character. They're all so stupidly generic it wraps around to being funny.

Batgirl?
Batman's got a brand new theme song that's way more high pace compared to the other one which was more mysterious. There's action and a sidekick now!
"You're probably wondering how I got into this situation, huh."
The new batgirl lives the double life as the daughter of commissioner Gordon and a gymnastic. She used to know the poison Ivy of this world and they were environmentalists. In this world you can just hire mercenaries to destroy big buildings. People get mutated by plant genetics. It would be funny if Batman didn't know who batgirl was so there's like multiple secret identity things happening but I feel like she's too obvious. Commissioner Gordon doesn't know that batgirl's his daughter because he couldn't see a thing.
Batman lets her stay because not every kid gets to rescue their parent which is in reference to him and his parents. Anyways next episode he's got amnesia or something which means he's back to being a party boy for real. The way his life would be if he didn't become the Batman is he would be his actual persona and there is like, a complex issue of "if Batman was gone would the villains stop?" But the answer is that the issues that caused Gotham's people to be like that would be there without the Batman, he just caused more people to pop up out of the woodworks. Also the treatment of mental illnesses within Gotham is also like, the major issue, but there's also evil wizards and mutant powers so mixed bag. Correlation and causation which I always get confused. Penguin has umbrellas that shoot fire and a helicopter and its a sword . Do they just build devices in this world to be sold to any villain who has enough money? Immediately I'm proven right with the comment because not only did the puppet get fridge'd the doctor in charge of rehabilitation purposefully sabotaged it so the man would have to go back to jail. Batman's got it all. Now he's a formula 1 racer. He's got a bat cycle.
Detective Yin is basically gone now. I guess Batman is rotating sidekicks.
The Joker Gas is one of those things where I go "dang, show writers really do get to do crazy things when they outright can't kill people". Poison Ivy is absurdly overpowered because she not only can make clones of people out of plants but also outright brainwash them. But Batman knows CQC so the army is no match for him. Krank. Co is a robot building industry that were building toys that were all dangerous. Since Bruce shut that down, bad things are happening now. They brought back Cash Tank.
There is a man running for mayor, who when failed, decided to attack Gotham while claiming to be Zeus. Feels like despite the show still being the same art style wise the intro of batgirl and new villains have made this Gotham less noir and more outlandish for this season. I say that, and the underlying sadness of the last season was a guy made of clay.
Joker wants his own sidekick. What he gets is a boy who installs whoopie cushions as a joke. He's making this little guy into his little joke generator. The guy however does have a brain cell and does not want to be implicit in murder.
I like episodes showcasing Alfred because he's basically the closest thing Batman has to an anchor telling him to not burnout. He's like his moral compass.
Doctor Strange has created a device known as DAVE (digitally advanced villain emulator) as a machine to learn and defeat their crimes with artificial intelligence with all the memories of the criminals. Anyways he immediately becomes evil. The immediate question of "why would you build such a device" is I'm starting to suspect the Arkham asylum guy is also evil. He built himself a robot body and he has little eyelids that use shutters to blink. Cool design! DAVE is just going about a checklist of all the crimes. It's his whole purpose. So naturally his defeat is coming from Batman pointing out that he's not actually human. DAVE narrowed the entire thing down to find out Batman's identity, and I doubt anyone would actually believe the whole "Bruce Wayne is Batman" thing. No one seems to ever realize it anyways because the personalities are always so different.
There is a movie as well. Batman fights Dracula in it.

Aka: the part where I start segwaying into talking about transformers devastation
My knowledge of machinima's was limited to just Mario 64 stuff, my bad. I mean, there was also halo. Yeah, true.
The enigma of combination seems to be like this major plot thing that pops up a ton of times within things like Earth wars so they introduced a new macguffin. I know that this story was in the time frame of the combiner wars advertisement era because they keep saying it. Why are they treating the combiners as singular characters rather than as cohesive team units and members.
Victorion seems like pretentious because she's like "we need better leaders and I am here to save the galaxy".

"Combiners are the manifestation of harmony and singularity" Me remembering that Devastator and Bruticus and Menasor are all big guys who blow shit up and the latter two groups are dysfunctional personalities and Menasor's is so bad it's to the point of making their combined form unstable: yeah, sure, I'll add that to my belief system.

How are you going to have the premise of big robot fight and then move at 10 FPS. These fights would be like, better, if they were at like, 2x speed. I'm not sure if it's trying to be stop motion but whatever the aim is it's not working.
The story premise of starscream and Rodimus prime and other character being the leader of Cybertron and combiners fighting in a big war would be so good if it wasn't made with the budget of a shoestring but I can't imagine what it would be like if it wasn't shorts format because then I'd have to sit there and look in slow motion even longer. There was an early prologue short of Starscream where he was saying "I'm a good guy, 100%, trust me" so now by default I had zero trust in that.
Some of these voice actors are something else, man, I know this is an out of house production but some of these guys sound like they're talking in a voice chat trying not to wake anyone up and some of them are real silly sounding. Maybe it's for the best the other g1 autobot combiners didn't show up. I don't want to imagine what YouTuber would VA for them. And I'm not trying to hate on YouTubers or Internet personalities in general but I don't think I should be thinking "this guy sounds like he would be in a video game lobby" when this is a semi-professional commissioned production. At least give them a better voice filter so it's not obvious, I can recognize some of those voices and it makes me lose it. And the filter they have working sucks. The prominent characters being voiced by non professionals next to actual professional VAs stick out like a sore thumb. I don't think they're getting any direction.
Megatron is carrying this show on his back. Windblade is mad so she's killing combiners somehow. He said "stop yapping."
The show wants to hype up combiners but why are they so small??? They're saying the city is being destroyed but where are the civilians?
This soundtrack is flaccid.
The best part of this one was megatron in the arena and when Windblade woke up metroplex to flatten starscream like a pancake. So basically just 2 episodes out of 8 of them.
It's still a baffling decision to me that combiners were treated as singular characters but whatever. The cast bloat would've been insane. And yet in megatron's debut episode he was fighting the constructicons separate which is a headscratcher.
The ensemble cast individual combiner team show that exists only in my brain that has been seen in glimpses of g1 episodes and like a single mission in one of the Cybertron games.

Titans Return

Please move and talk faster. Or stop talking. Perceptor's kinda funny here, he's just out here examining starscream for fun. I'm over here yawning. This is nuts, how is this a show about giant robots fighting and it's got me yawning. The theorem of "the worst thing a thing can be is boring" is once again being proven right. They're pretty slow moving, no rocket boosters anywhere? Oops, got distracted by devastation.

I'm thinking about transformers devastation and you know, those bots were moving absurdly fast.

Doesn't make sense for such a big guy to be moving that fast. Well, my counterpoint is it looks rad as hell. He does the Obari Sword/Brave Perspective pose. Plus in another video to dodge he decombines and recombines.

The most absurd boss fight of the lineup is probably the one where the player has to fight Devastator and Menasor at the same time. It really has to be seen to be believed.
Man, this game's like when I envision a transformers media I'd like to see I would like to see incredibly high paced robot fight scenes with cel shading and color I can actually see and characters that act like their character personalities rather than just being there. And also bumblebee just punching the hell out of things.
So far out of what I've seen of transformers the things that have matched this high pace energy are the fight scenes only from the first bayformers movie and the entirety of the skybound/energon comics lineup. I'm giving way too much credit to the first thing though.
Look I don't think my wants are that complex, I want a thing that has big robot fights hell yeah and also gives those robots good reasons and personalities and it can be serious sometimes but it also needs to be cheesy without feeling ashamed for being cheesy. I want sincerity. Not just for transformers, for anything I'm looking at these days because if things don't have confidence in what they're saying/selling why should I be listening/buying?

I read a translated manga in between and I've only known Star Saber for approximately a few panels but I know he is a father and a hero of justice. Deathsaurus/Dezaras is also a father and they both just have human sons fighting on their sides. They have named attacks, it's awesome. There's also train robots that combine. Astrotrain would've loved them.
We could solve so manu issues if more cities were structured based on trains versus cars...

Back to this show I guess.
You know how things sound better sometimes when its in other languages? Or maybe that's just because they put more enthusiasm into it? I'm imagining that this would sound 20 times better with VAs in another language who are putting in more energy into speaking.
I wonder if Japanese transformers shows will ever be officially acknowledged, I feel like them getting official subs or something or a rerelease would be a licensing nightmare but they can get into games and things and toys but like, their actual shows of origin? No. Are there subs? I should add them to my watchlist.
Need to pay attention.
Everyone's just standing and watching. There's exposition but now I'm like "when's the big fight". Something about transformer gods.
The only good part so far was when Menasor launched a rocket and everyone was like "what did you do" and he said "nothing".
If I put this at 1.5x speed I'd be here for like 5 minutes.

Who is that. Why is there a giant southern blue cube robot with detailed lips. Bro's just yapping. He's Overlording all over the place. Amazing. He's taking no damage whatsoever. Hang on, let me google something. Oh, he's a Japanese transformer. Neat!

There's a split screen effect happening like this is a video game cutscene or something.
The effect of an entertaining character trapped in a boring show so now you sit around and hope he shows up again. It's kind of a funny thing when writers accidentally create a character who is more interesting by sheer virtue of everyone else being more boring/irritating in comparison.

Hot Rod (formerly Rodimus prime): I'm happy i gave up the matrix since that's usually my character arc within transformers stories because I understand that I'm not fit for leadership, i sure hope nothing bad happens to me
Immediately bad things happen to him
If you can't tell by my immensely long segway distraction moment, this is a very slow paced show. It's kind of disappointing. It's supposed to be about the combiner wars but the combiners aren't interesting (victorion is dragging things down further) and there's two characters carrying this show on their backs and one has only been here for two episodes. I actually fell asleep during titan's return so I had to rewatch episodes and nearly fell asleep again.
Megatron is carrying this show and the writing literally just makes him into a chiller frieza saga Vegeta. Well, if it works, it works!
Cliffhanger: Rod is evil now, because he is purple. He has now become Rodimus crime
Power of the Primes

You know, just because theyre robot lifeforms doesn't mean they have to talk like robots.
Oh yeah, Optimus is dead now. Megatron has gathered like an RPG party to find this ancient blaster gun or something because Megatronus is looking for it because of his dead robot partner.
Goddammit, they've misunderstood grimlock's speech pattern to assume it means he's got low intellect when it's the opposite within the g1 show itself where Grimlock clearly points out that Optimus prime is reliant on him because he's so powerful and that Grimlock always needs to get them out of messes ! The speech quirk is just a quirk, grimlock's actually pretty smart! Writers when they write the character so uncharacteristic of them you have to become a Stan for them at that very moment.
Why is there a Grimlock combiner.
This show will be like "combiners are so strong" meanwhile Evil Rod is blasting holes in them like there's nothing. Evil Rod's boots are squeaking. There's a matrix of chaos that's corrupted Rodimus and turned him into an agent of chaos and vessel for Unicron. That would be a great idea but it's trapped in this show so no one gives a shit about it.
The writing has probably fundamentally screwed up when I'm more interested in seeing Overlord and Rodimus Cron or whatever he's calling himself blowing everyone up than whatever the main plot's supposed to be. I'm not supposed to be here going "YES! KILL!"
Megatronus misses his dead wife and also the awesome god killing gun she had

Hang on is that Mark Hamill Googles something How'd they get him for this

I miss Overlord, everytime he's not on screen and I'm dealing with all the other characters being the way they are I'm like "where's Overlord?" Literally him and Megatron are doing their best to get this plot going. Perceptor is also hitting that but I think it's because I feel bad for him getting wrapped up in all of this.

Optimus Primal is also here now. I should watch Beast Wars.
Overlord being like "I need to beat Megatron and get my run back, partner" and now they're fighting the dinosaurs too. These two are the only ones that have any speed going on within these fight scenes. That squeaking noise is killing me here.
Love that the ultimate gun attack from Cron that was destroying literally everything else is now all of a sudden unable to handle the main cast. The tanks are moving so slow it's hilarious. What canon is this, Galvatron was Megatron once in this canon so is this like G1 S3+ or what. The answer is "don't ask."

Windblade: you'll have to kill me first! He moved in the kill with zero hesitation.
That's it? Overlord died from that? I mean there's the big old laser debris and everything.
Get up king, you can't be dead from that. I refuse to believe that, bro just said "I'm out" and he walked off while the blast was going.
Hey quick question is the main cast going to do anything about Rodimus being possessed by Unicron or are they just gonna let his body keep twitching in the corner. Show has a real problem of "talking and not doing anything until the plot demands it".
The plot has now moved onto "okay, everyone let's have hot rod die fighting Megatronus, Megatron's in charge now, let's get this cybertronian bread".
They don't say cybertronian though, they just say transformer.

Why is Optimus primal even here? Okay, let me google something Apparently it was because of a fan vote, there were multiple options like Hound and Megatron and Arcee and Star Saber and Deathsaurus/Deszaras but Primal won. I see. Knowing how the general public reception of things work, I bet people voted for Primal because they thought he was Prime. You know what, I bet that's why he's written as generically as possible because it was written to fit like multiple characters.

The issue with transformers more or less is once you get past the premise you have to deal with increasingly more absurd names Deathsaurus.

Megatron: I can stop you because I'm me Yeah he's him.

Being evil in this universe gives you facial hair for some reason. Edit: No, evil Rodimus just consistently has facial hair. Also there's an alternate universe where everyone is EVIL but the decepticons are GOOD now called shattered glass. Neat.

Optimal Optimus... Oh he's garish. My ugly neon boy.

This would be so good if it wasn't the equivalent of a discord slideshow with a can of coke. It's certainly something. It's not the worst thing I've ever seen, but it's boring, and I think something being boring is far worse to me than being bad. You remember bad things, you forget boring things because of how boring they were.

They keep beheading the combiners but in G1 literally devastator was running around without his head just fine but I guess that's just this show not caring.
Megatron loading up the gun: Divorce!
Look, there's no way there's gonna be a Galvatron in the last 5 minutes because there's no budget for a new model.
Me doing a salute for Megatron because he sacrificed his life to destroy the matrix of chaos Rip King he was a real one he just wanted to chill in his arena beating up randoms and got dragged into a 3 season show

"The power of the primes" title drop, okay, you can leave now

Why does Rod still have the squeaky shoes Rod after being possessed: I need a vacation bro This entire mess happened because you took a vacation

They didn't have the budget for the ending so they just made a slideshow instead Starscream, what are you doing here? The show's over. Leave!

Favorite characters: Megatron, Overlord, Perceptor

Combiner Meta Commentary: It's so weird to have an entire series based around combiners and then barely even focus on the fact that it's like 5 robots making up the big robot

There are many combiners out there because robots combining to make a bigger robot is awesome. Japan has a train combiner. I will never see him animated. Sometimes the combiner members don’t even stay on the team and just go become their own individual characters like people on average probably recognize Blades more by his rescue bot counterpart than the protectobot.

A show focused on combiners should focus on the combiners and yet…. If you get 5 of them that means that there’s 25 bots to work with or more since some combiner teams have more members. Add in the regular cast and there is a very large group of characters and not all of them are going to be able to get enough screen time. I think it should be a show that is like the combiners as a team unit being sent away from the usual action of autobot vs decepticon and focus on the fact that they’re a team unit and focus on the members.
I surmise a part of this is that transformers the brand the franchise is so reliant on the eternal battle of Optimus prime vs megatron that most shows cannot focus on anything else because they are the most marketable guys aside from bumblebee. You had another guy and his name was Hot Rod but they're afraid of his power so they don't use him.

Transformers anthology focused on subgroups would rule There are so many characters so to my brain this has become the new hot shiny thing I will be obnoxious about for years to come

The thing is with combiners is that there is so many guys and they all have to be individual enough to not just be like a weirdo hive mind which would probably feel like shortcutting writing them as characters rather than just being the combiner. I’ve read that one of the comics gets around writing combiners by making them slowly lose their individuality which could be interesting but knowing comics it’s probably dropped until it’s brought back into the plot again.

I’ve begun watching The Batman (The cartoon). Looks like Teen Titans(same design studio since WB and CN are the same overlapping group/company? Maybe there’s an artist who gave similar designs since the crowds look similar. Like with TFA and Mystery Incorporated and Ben 10).
I think the funniest part of Batman as like a character and concept is that he can just do all of that. Like other guys have superpowers but it’s always been explicit that Batman has tools (tm) not powers. When technology stops being indistinguishable from magic when does the line stop because Batman having a billion doohickeys might as well be magic but replaced with science. I have no knowledge on comics so I probably won’t be saying more on that.
I like how since it’s a children’s cartoon they can’t kill people so instead the jonkler uses his evil laughing gas to permanently freeze people into smiling. Sometimes I wish shows on streaming services had a shuffle button (minus the two parters). A lot of old shows were made to be watched in any order as stand alone…ish.
Bane just looks like the red guy from Ben 10. The Batman (tm) is defeated Suspicions large bat shaped robot shows up.
The joker really did cause a lot of havoc. He's got the joker gas and the joker putty. He doesn't have powers either, he's just a clown. The uh, the penguin guy was there too, he's got the power of birds. I think the secret identity thing is cool to balance but that's because I mostly know batman as a concept more than as a thing, like, I've only watched one batman movie. Catwoman was there too. The last thing I would've expected was the clayface from this show, in 13 episodes they had like a whole finale arc on the development of batman being the guy hunted down and now batman is hunting the guy down.

The riddler be like “solve my riddle”
This guy is really just out here blowing up bridges if you don’t solve puzzles Where do they get henchmen from in Batman anyways Bro has the scepter. That’s literally just magic. There's quite the rogue's gallery for batman plus detective Yin working alongside batman while both fight against clayface is an interesting dynamic. No clue what was up with her new partner, he was kind of incompetent. Commissioner Gordon seems like he'll be a new guy to add to the whole vigilante aspect he's got going on. The people of gotham adore the dark knight.
I think in the movie I watched Gordon was black and he’s white in this one and I’d probably be like, killed on any other social media for saying this but whenever people start clamoring that a character is a different race I gotta wonder the question of “is being white integral to this character in terms of role, personality, and plot?” Honestly it’s probably just racism and misogyny whenever there’s complaints about the race or gender thing. I’m overthinking what is an obvious answer. So a lot of stuff being followed up with season 1 is pretty good but also a lot of these episodes kind of blur between batman and his secret identity followed up with Alfred, Clayface made a return, Detective Yin and Batman are working together and more or less this is a serialized show where every episode's pretty much able to be aired as is. Honestly, these seasons are pretty short, only 13 episodes...
I gotta wonder where the rest of the bat guys are so like, Robin is probably gonna pop up.
Magic is real in Batman, they've got puppet masters and spell casters and zombie people. I did not know all this, I did not know that the batman had such a varied cast of weirdos he just beats up. Comics into cartoons are cool...

Surprise!!