/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Continuing from >>21120268, 300+ ML videos from the third week of Feburary 2019. This is somewhere around where things start to get ugly. Most of the drama revolves around the appearance of the season one protagonist, Kaban-chan, and the events of episodes 5 and 6. Were people delighted to see a beloved character from the previous season take center stage again?

February (Week 3) - The Lights are Going Out Across Japari Park

At this rate Zeno's paradox says I'll never get to the end of February given that this particular post covers half as much time as the previous one. Unfortunate. I do plan to try and try to speed through this as much as possible. Incidentally, the answer to the previous question was no.

2/15* Connecting the Stars GothicxLuck Official MV

2/19 Kemono Friends 2 Episode 6 "A New Dawn"

2/19 Theory of Kaban-chan being the mastermind (https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm34656520))

Episode 6 aired on Nicovideo at 02:35 and this video was submitted at 08:46, so one can conclude that instead of going to sleep after watching his late-night anime like a normal person, the uploader of this video instead stayed up all night messing with AviUtl to make this video just for you.

- Thesis: "Perhaps Kaban is actually the mastermind, manipulating friends from behind the scenes?" The first of a number of "theory videos" created about season two, this one being one of the few serious theories that were presented before the whole train went off the rails. Episode 6, in some sense, left a lot of room for speculation. A massive laboratory? Dismantled Lucky Beasts? Beast friends? Friend experimentation? Could it be that the person behind all of these sinister events was... Kaban-chan? The theme of episode 5 was "animals under the control of humans," after all. Perhaps the strange events and inexplicable decisions we've been seeing up until now were just all part of a plan. Perhaps the characters were are drugged and put to sleep... with their TEA. How else can you explain Kaban doing nothing to help while Serval and Caracal were attacked in their sleep, by a vial of dangerous Cerulium carelessly left on a table? Isn't that a little too convenient? And if that's the case, is that really something the something the Kaban-chan we know would ever do? Is she even Kaban-chan at all? After all, she calls herself "watashi" now, and referred to Lucky Watch as "that thing." Is that really the way someone would refer to a comrade of many journeys? Perhaps this person who calls herself Kaban is not Kaban-chan at all, but simply some person - or, perhaps, something - that has taken to calling itself Kaban-chan. The tofu thickens.

Honestly the whole thing is sort of a vacuous conspiracy theory but the person who made this video was clearly having fun, it did highlight some things that people thought were off about the episode, it's possible that parts of this theory actually might have some explanatory power behind it, and it did so way more politely than what's up next.

2/19 Der Fuhrer appears to be upset that the leaked Kaban-chan storyboard was real (https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm34656550))

- Why rant about something when you could get Hitler to do it for you? The first of many Downfall parodies to come, where Der Fuhrer delivers an unhinged rant about everything he hated about Kemono Friends 2 after learning that a storyboard leaked months ago was real. Up until now even the videos criticizing Kemono Friends 2 have been somewhat "professional" about it, but this one chucks that all up the window and simply starts unloading on the staff, singling out producer Hosoya, scriptwriter Matsumoto, and director Kimura for an avalanche of insults along with an original sprite animation that rolls in IP creator Mine to boot. The bashing itself isn't exactly a new phenomenon, as people had been doing so on various anonymous ghettos for a while, but if my reckoning is correct this is it's first major showing on Nicovideo. The majority of the hatred is unloaded onto director Kimura himself, who is taken to task for, among other things, blocking people who criticize the show, a poorly chosen quote about how "it doesn't matter who the director is", referring to S1 as a two-person journey rather than a three-person journey, generally dunking all over S1, lackluster animation quality, an avalanche of specific criticisms of various points of the show, and overall a proclamation that this guy was roughly as bad as Stalin.

There's a second half to this featuring the Joker, subbed in Japanese in the style of Downfall that I'll get to in another post since it won't quite fit here. (Vader choking that one guy and Pennywise luring Georgie to his death are also popular scenes for radical subtitling.) It's a testament to the excellent acting in the original that the Joker "sounds" so reasonable while saying rather insane things that it doesn't even feel unnatural.