It suddenly made me laugh out loud when I put together that it was Sudo, of all people, who noted that Kanata likely considers it a point of pride to not swap paint, and that he likely learned that from his mentor Takumi.

He knows all too well that Takumi not only wouldn’t do it, but could and would make you regret trying.

And broadly, this series is much better when they’re in the cars. It still drags on too long, and it gets tedious watching the same cliched actions and hearing the same cliched thoughts. (Seriously - how many times is somebody going to register shocked surprise when they get passed by Kanata going what seems to be too fast on the outside, then turning it into a drift? And when are they finally going to stop saying, “Well I have [some enormous amount of] horsepower, so he can’t beat me!”?) But still, it’s better than when they’re out of the cars.

And I have to note too - though fat shaming isn’t generally on my radar (not that I approve or anything - it’s just never been a part of my life either direction), the way this series is using Marie as pathetic comedy relief is starting to piss me off.

Yeah - I’d have to say that I’m being too cynical, since I didn’t see anything there I’d disagree with.

And I hadn’t considered the scale of CR’s competition - that’s a good point.

But then we’re back to it not making sense…

I agree.

I suspect there’s a fair amount of fault to find with this (I haven’t entirely digested it yet, so I’m unsure how much of the apparent missing context is genuinely missing or just things I didn’t pick up on), but I suspect that most of it can be traced back to the screenplay. The direction was impressive, and I too would like to see what he can do with a different project.

Hm.

Lots and lots of symbolism, even by this series’ standards.

The latter part was presented as if Yuki was flashing back to her experiences in the games, preparatory to the final showdown with Kyara, but an awful lot of that was from later games - we saw them earlier, but that’s only because the timeline of the series wasn’t linear.

And on that note, I actually planned to read the LNs starting a few weeks ago, but then discovered that Candle Woods is the latter half of the first volume. I suspect that the producers wanted to end this adaptation with the end of Candle Woods, probably much like the presumed ending of the first volume of the LN, but that didn’t provide enough material, so they padded it out with games that actually appear in later volumes of the LN series and rearranged the timeline to accommodate it. And presumably just hoped that people wouldn’t notice that Yuki seemed to be flashing back to things that technically hadn’t happened yet.

The last scene was certainly a surprise, and I would assume that was straight out of the LN, and is addressed in later volumes.

In any event, now I’m going to read the LNs and hopefully learn some more. It’s likely that a lot of what was just symbolism in the adaptation is actually just background to Yuki’s thoughts in the LNs, and her thoughts provide the context that seemed to be too often missing in the adaptation.

Then when I catch up with the LNs, I’ll undoubtedly watch the series again. It was certainly different and intriguing, but I’m not sure how well it actually worked.

I dunno… granted that I’m extremely cynical, that just doesn’t sound like corporate behavior. I would more expect CR to just count on exclusive licensing and the convenience of siccing governments on pirates to protect their market share from any possible ill effects of downgrading their player.

I mean - Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to specifically describe a process involving online platforms and a combination of private users and business customers, but really the broad process is common to pretty much every corporate product/service in existence, and undeniably including streaming services.

Again though, I’m extremely cynical…

That was my first thought, but it doesn’t seem to hold up. The only pirates I would think would be significantly inconvenienced are ones that are doing fansubs of languages CR doesn’t support. If it’s a language CR supports, then the only difference is that the pirates would offer hard subs instead of soft, and while yes, that does mean having to host multiple copies of the same video, each with their own hard subs, that seems more the sort of thing that CR wouldn’t do, since corporations will institute policies solely to save fractions of cents. Pirates, ironically enough, generally aren’t that greedy, so it seems they’d be more likely to just go ahead and host multiple copies of hard subbed videos if that’s what it takes, and that’s the way it goes.

Now that said, I had noticed over recent years that hard subs are increasingly rare and most sites only offer soft subs, but I just assumed that was because they were ripping them straight from the originals, while hard subs are still done the old fashioned way, by fansubbing groups. But I guess it’s possible that the fact that most of the pirates have gone to soft subs exclusively means it would be more of a hassle for them to handle hardsubs than I’m thinking it would be.

I dunno - it just seems odd, still.