(L) Ergo Proxy

[MrProphet]

I can't say anything about the names right now, but I must say that I just love to listen to Atsuko Tanaka's deep sexy voice (she plays Derrida).

She is one of my favourite seiyuu's, that's for sure. 8)

[monir]

She screams RESPECT everytime she is involved in a show given the roles is of a badass female. What is GitS without her? Yeap, she has been my favorite Seiyuu before I even knew what Seiyuu meant. She is pretty hot too for a 40+ year old.

[7Th]

Originally Posted by orion

It wasn't just Lil that was different. The crowd in the mall also had a decrease in animation quality.

Not a decrease, but a different animation focus, more stylish and focused on movement dynamics but less realistic. This noticieable disparities were also present in Samurai Champloo, but for me they're more a plus than a problem.

[mentis]

What was the song in the first eps playing on the radio and who is the composer?
Also is the italian poem from the first eps famous as I it seemed the character River from Firefly mixed some of it in to her ramblings.
Thanks

[MrProphet]

Originally Posted by mentis

What was the song in the first eps playing on the radio and who is the composer?
Also is the italian poem from the first eps famous as I it seemed the character River from Firefly mixed some of it in to her ramblings.
Thanks

It's stanza of a poem by Michealangelo.

Basically, an unknown poet wrote a poem celebrating one of Michaelangelo's creation, the statue of "The Night", praising it for its life-like features, saying that it was almost as if the statue is ready to come alive.

Michaelangelo wrote a reply, saying that in such terrible times it is in fact better to be a lifeless statue, not to have any feelings and emotions. That poem is the epigraph of the series, shown in the beginning of the first episode.

Quite telling, if you conside the whole Proxy/autoreiv subplot.

[physics223]

His name is spelled as Michelangelo. His full name is Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. He is also known as Michelangelo Buonarroti. Just clarifying what MrProphet said as his spelling was inconsistent ... unless he's talking about a different Michelangelo.

He is known for his Sistine Chapel ceiling design, and also for a few sculptures, like David and Pieta. He is among the most prominent artists in the Renaissance.

[Tamatebako]

Originally Posted by mentis

What was the song in the first eps playing on the radio and who is the composer?[...]
Thanks

It was a part from Bedřich Smetana "The Moldau" (Original "Vltava") and this is a part from "Ma Vlast" ("My Country").
The part from "The Moldau" describes the following scenario: In the night, the moon is reflecting in the water. Nymphs appears.

(Sorry for my bad english, but I'm from Germany).

Here at "Moonlight Nymphs" you can hear the beginning.

http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Palace/5825/moldau.htm (Real-audio player required).

[Deacon Blues]

Romdeau? Lawl... Real? rofl...

[MrProphet]

For some reason, several websites, including Wikipedia and ANN list Atsuko Tanaka as voicing Lacan in this series.

This is not correct. Atsuko Tanaka is acting as Derrida's seiyuu.



http://www.wowow.co.jp/anime/ergopro...ast/index.html

[orion]

Episode 3...Wow!!!

Gorgeous opening animation and a romantic OP! (from what I could make of it.)

@MrProphet: But wouldn't a biomechanoid be picked up on physical exam? Certainly Vincent would have gone thru some, especially after being arrested. What about a genetically altered human? You would have thought that someone would have noticed. He has an amazing eye color. Wow!

Pino is so cute in those pjs!

I hope that we learn more about this "new" Vincent.

Spoiler:

I think that Pino's mom was Raul's partner. He kept looking at the baby carriage in ep. 2 and he was playing the piano in ep. 3. So what do you guys think?
What was Ril thinking? Using her phone like that, didn't she think that she would be followed?

[MrProphet]

It makes no sense.

1) Raul makes absolutely no remark at his supposed wife and child being murdered before his eyes. None whatsoever.

2) Pino makes no remark about him when he arrests Vincent in episode 3, even though she is always harping about the "father".

3) He has enough on his hands to be stressed about (Proxy, Ril, dealing with the Sages), so there is no surprise he is tired and depressed (hence the "piano scene").

[wao]

Yes!! Episode 3 was great.(Although I agree that it was annoying that the episode was rather dark and I had to strain my eyes to see what was going on.) I was unsure about this series in the first 2 episodes - sure it had the nice gloomy atmosphere and the posthuman setting which are fine by me for now, but it just felt a little too cliche - more than that, it felt like it was missing some "X-factor" that would make me want to watch more of it. And it has come in the form of Vincent Pino - I'm extremely interested in his character now.

Spoiler for dumping everything in here:

I like the OP - I still think the 2nd Blood+ one is better because I feel there was a bit of an overuse of the typical "woohoo lots of photoshop brushes and text!" stuff here - and when I saw the first character come on... I was like "Holy !@#$ this is VINCENT?!" (Click at your own risk - might be spoilery!)

After watching that I was excited throughout the whole episode - the last part was especially good.

Spoiler:

Seeing Ril looking through the closing gap with that complete shock that... Vincent has eyes :P They're a beautiful colour; and I'm absolutely dying to see what happens now! Silly episode previews not showing any images. Bah. Open your eyes more, Vincent.

(Oh hey, more symbolism - opening your eyes changes you from the typical brainwashed 'good citizen' to a Cool Intelligent Person like Ril! Yay.)

I'm pleasantly surprised, really - I love it when shows do this kind of thing... I was kind of interested in Vincent from the start - surely they couldn't kill him off, he's listed high in the cast list, yet he seems killable. But ooh... it wasn't to be...

And I hope Iggie gets whacked somewhere in the series, he annoys me.
Also, I was doing mini "yes!"-es throughout the whole Council Of Mysterious People session - hearing The Major everywhere is always good for your ears So dripping with coolness...
By the way, I think ANN and Wikipedia et al put Lacan because that's in the show credits itself, MrProphet. Well this is what my copy of ep 3 credits showed. Er, ignore the scribbles >_>

Finally, I do hope

Spoiler:

we get to see more of Vincent and Ril together - it would be really awful if they couldn't get that misunderstanding cleared, and more importantly I think Vincent needs the help - didn't you hear him crying "Come and save me" in the OP? :P I liked the way the camera moved around him in a dramatic way there. Okay, I admit, I liked the bit where Vincent sounded thankful that he got to hear her voice before (he thought he was going to) die...

EDIT: I was looking at the pictures for Vincent's and Iggy's seiyuu on ANN, they look surprisingly a lot like their roles. Iggy especially!
EDIT2: Seems like the Japanese watchers call the show 串 (skewer) - kushi (from erugo purakushi) Alternatively so far I've seen people call it プラッシー... Although I'm not surprised that it doesn't seem too popular - I think to them perhaps they've seen enough of these kind of shows and have given up on it... or they'd just say "ah, another psychological pretentious show riding on the trails of Eva"... But more importantly they can't identify with the show well because it's... well, you have to admit it was created with overseas fans in mind. It doesn't have an original work like GitS either.

EDIT3: I just realised that in episode 1 the person who's getting up is Vincent, not Ril. How silly of me... d'oh. I'm such a slow coach. Aah, now I understand what everyone else's been discussing about.

Spoiler:

Consider the flow of events with relevance to Vincent (I apologize if this has been mentioned before - it must have been):
-Michelangelo's epigraph - it's better to sleep than be awake in such terrible times.
-Vincent wakes from his sleep. (alarm clock, brushing teeth)
-Vincent symbolically stops at a red light with nobody around, so hard that
-Vincent falls down. (Close up of him lying on the floor.)
-"At that moment, everything came back to me"
-We see a demon-human at the doorway with the pendant Vincent had.
-Cut to dream-like sequence ("At that moment, everything came back to me"?) that's in the ED. It was also ...elsewhere, which had linked it to Vincent.

So there are (some of) those clues MrProphet was talking about which they were beating us on our heads with.... I hope it's a red herring, pretty please.

Well, reading whateveryone has said, I guess it's a case of distinction between "what is a conscious being and what isn't" - if you refer to Descartes' Cogito ergo sum, then simply by the act of thinking about your existence, you have proved it, since existence is a precondition to cognition. You assumedly can't think if you don't even exist in the first place.
So in a world where androids are so similar to human beings in many ways, you have two things to compare that blur the line between machines and humans:
-Humans that are so brainwashed they're like androids
-Androids that have "awakened" - gained something that seems like cogito so that they act like humans. Opening your eyes...

All of this, of course, has been explored in countless science-fiction stories, but I didn't come in expecting some wham-bam original concept...
The proxy thing might be superficially referring to how many Autoreivs are acting as proxies for their human counterparts. See how Iggy is controlling Ril's life. But on a deeper level, the connection between the concept "Proxy" and the actual phenomenon of non-conscious beings gaining consciousness, is still not entirely clear at this point of time (to my fuddled brain, anyway). Except for the bit where the cigar-smoking monster is always around the praying Autoreivs: perhaps they're acting as a proxy because he himself is unable to do something.

[WabukiSensei]

Something that's been bothering me....

Spoiler for question about ending of ep2 and start of ep3:

What the heck happened to Vincent? I thought that Proxy creature was about to kill him, then in episode 3 we see him in a train and escaping like a fugitive (my japanese sux so I can't understand any of the stuff). Could anyone shed some light about this?

[MrProphet]

Originally Posted by WabukiSensei

Something that's been bothering me....

Spoiler for question about ending of ep2 and start of ep3:

What the heck happened to Vincent? I thought that Proxy creature was about to kill him, then in episode 3 we see him in a train and escaping like a fugitive (my japanese sux so I can't understand any of the stuff). Could anyone shed some light about this?

Spoiler:

The person on the train (and in Vincent's nightmare) didn't look like Proxy to me. The new guy seemed to have spiky reddish hair, while Proxy has white hair.

And it's weird that they've changed the seiyuus around...

Spoiler:

EDIT: If Vincent is a proxy and if Raul is a proxy (totally unconfirmed, but Raul is acting rather weird, so why not?), then this show becomes the carbon copy of Bladerunner, which would seriously suck. Consider this: a replicant (android) disguised as a human comes from far away and enters the city. Dashing police investigator hunts the android down and is troubled by the fact that something is wrong with himself. In the end we learn that that the investigator is an android in disguise himself.

Really now, Dai Sato is way better than this, so don't let the show go down that way!

[wao]

I wouldn't put it past Dai Sato to do that, personally speaking, but I ain't going to discuss Dai Sato for now...

Now that you mention spiky red hair it really reminds me of that thing from the beginning of ep 1 that was holding Vincent's pendant.

[DaFool]

So why is the doctor Daedalus such a young boy...and he seems to have the hots for Lir.

It's amazing some of the discussions going on here...I thought I was well-read and knew my literature...but damn!

[WabukiSensei]

Originally Posted by MrProphet

Spoiler:

The person on the train (and in Vincent's nightmare) didn't look like Proxy to me. The new guy seemed to have spiky reddish hair, while Proxy has white hair.

Spoiler:

umm that didn't really answer my question... I'm just wondering what happened between the ending of ep2 and beginning of ep3. Wasn't Vincent about to get killed by that creature? Then suddenly in ep3 we see him running away, as if the ending in ep2 never happened

[orion]

And another question....

Spoiler:

Why would they send all those men after an android the size of a 3 yr. old? How does Pino know all this info anyway, like where the airlock was and how to operate it?
I still think that Proxy was trying to activate (deprogram) Vincent and not kill Vincent. His right eye did shine blue at the end of episode 2. What do you guys think about that? Maybe, Vincent was a mole placed in Romdo for some reason.

Maybe there's more than 1 person roaming around with this pendant. It was associated with "Moscow", whatever that is.

[MrProphet]

Originally Posted by wao

Now that you mention spiky red hair it really reminds me of that thing from the beginning of ep 1 that was holding Vincent's pendant.

Perhaps the Spiky Hair is Vincent's "Inner Proxy"? 8)

Vincent is obviously schizophrenic, since he can't rememeber what the hell he is doing at times. Perhaps the monster is his other conscieseness?

As for the men that hunted Pino, i assume it's just a spandart operation procedure. After all, autoreivs are androids, maybe they can kill a person if they go berserk. Even cute and cuddly ones like Pino...

PS: I think "Moscow" (or "Mosc.", I don't remember) was in Vincent's file, indicating a place where he imigrated into Romdeau from.

[MrProphet]

Originally Posted by wao

I wouldn't put it past Dai Sato to do that, personally speaking, but I ain't going to discuss Dai Sato for now...

I remember a time when mainstream culture was plagiarising ideas (stylistic, plot, etc.) from anime left and right. Now it seems like the wellspring of originality has dried up.

Of course, I hope it's not true, but I fear that it is...