Walnut-Sparks

that was probably intended for people younger than I was when it first aired

Just started watching Akazukin Chacha about seven years after it was first brought to my attention by AMV Hell 3.  It's a cute and lighthearted kids' show about a little girl and her two friends staving off attempted murders on a near-daily basis.

Seriously though, I'm now ten episodes in and all the endings are exactly the same, including most of the same stock magical girl transformation and attack footage.  Even if it was intended as a joke, the producers must've noticed that it'd get boring after a while.

Other than that, it's not bad, if you enjoy extreme, cartoony silliness, which I do.

Dorothy may be my latest anime crush.

this "The Real Cost" ad campaign is stupid.  Food is a mix of hundreds if not thousands of chemicals.  You can't scare me with numbers.  How's about you educate me on what these chemicals ARE and what they DO.

I don't even smoke and this pisses me off.

The more I think about the central maxim of Fate/stay night - the idea that saving one person always means sacrificing another - the more I become convinced that it's only there to add the verisimilitude of depth, because it's obviously not true as a universal principle.  Simply picturing a few scenarios will reveal that there are as many where it's not true as ones where it is - you may have to choose between rescuing one person or another from a burning house, or there may be enough time to save both.  You may have to kill one person to stop them from murdering someone else, or maybe you have a taser on hand.  You can argue about what's more likely (how many people do walk around with tasers?) but the point is that the maxim is only invariably true in a fictional setting where circumstances are manipulated to uphold it.

You may object that a story in which the hero isn't forced to make difficult choices and has enough time and resources to save whoever they're in the position to save isn't a compelling story, and that's absolutely true.  The problem arises when the story pretends that one must always make such choices, that it's not circumstances but some sort of natural law.  Suspension of disbelief is strained.  I find myself wondering why the story makes such nonsensical assertions.  And I may be wrong, but the only explanation I can come up with is that for whatever reason, Nasu felt like the story should have a philosophy or make some sort of profound observation about life - and it fell flat.

I still like the story, but there are aspects of it that I can't swallow, and that's the biggest one.