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Fena: Pirate Princess Episode 11 Discussion


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Today is a long-awaited day, at least for me. After twenty-odd years of living under my parents' roof and four months of staying in hotels on weekdays and coming back on the weekends, with the only times I've been able to watch the block live being weekends where the folks were out of town and I was on my own, I have finally begun living on my own full-time in an apartment ninety miles from my birthplace (but within the same state, conveniently enough). Meaning I can now livewatch Toonami without having to worry about bothering other people I'm living with! Which are none. Though I do have neighbors, so I'll show some decency by keeping the volume down and the blinds drawn.

The inaugural episode to this new regular livewatching lifestyle will be tonight's sole non-DC Fandome premiere, the penultimate episode of Fena: Pirate Princess. While I won't deny that I've had fun with the series, I do feel that there's definitely a waste of potential in there, and that's not normally something I give a shit about when others bring it up. But having read others' opinions on the series and how full of vitriol they are compared to what the people who worked on it were hoping for, and to a degree act like there is, I get it. I get that, for being an original anime with infinite possibilities, Fena feels limited and prone to squandery compared to what it could have been.

The two barrels of entertainment that were the old guys from the first two episodes, present in just those two episodes, left on Goblin Island never to be seen again. Fena showing personality from minute one and a desire for autonomy in her own right, only to be relegated to a living, breathing plot device whose only purpose is to act as a guide to Eden. O'Malley and her crew being supremely entertaining adversaries in both design and personality (if not a little on the lawlzy side of blatant bitchery), only to be yeeted from the plot at the halfway point in a manner that, while leaving the door open to their return in the final hour or a hypothetical season two that likely won't come to pass, is fatal enough outside of classic "if there's no body, they could still be alive" logic that them being dead for real wouldn't be a surprise in the slightest. And last episode, which focused entirely on reaching Eden and traversing through it to the destination from the "Vice Versa" tune to such a degree, that it felt as if nothing happened at all. There are many other things that others have brought up elsewhere, including Abel being boring and kinda skeevy as a villain, the Goblin Knights being uninteresting as support protagonists, et cetera, but I choose not to elaborate on those, because I don't care about them as much as other, more unforgiving people do.

To get down to brass tacks, I want to like Fena, at least on the same level to which I liked Nakazawa's other original anime. (Y'know, the one on Netflix.) But with the course the series has taken since the double-up premiere, it certainly isn't 10/10 worthy, and I'm starting to feel it isn't even worthy of a 9/10 on my IGN levels of skewed scale I use for everything because I'm too lazy to make realistic readjustments. And unless this episode and the one following do things I'd find redemption-worthy, no matter how out of left field or unexplained they are - Otto and Salman returning, some of O'Malley's crew surviving the flaming wreckage, Kei showing up to fight Abel, the Goblin Knights, or both at once, literally anything - I'm afraid Fena's gonna finish at an 8/10 on the Poke scale, thereby making it a more disappointing I.G anime than freaking Shining Hearts. And believe me, dropping a point from that show due to Rick's wishy-washiness about the past and the actual plot not being as comfy as the moe baking adventures of the first half was painful enough. Having to put Fena lower than that because of actual faults in its potential - a point I didn't even take off from decently known disasters like Eureka seveN AO and Dimension W - may actually hurt worse.

That said, I hope my live commentary of tonight's episode proves a useful enough insight into what it's been like to watch Fena in recent times of reading negative reviews I've often avoided in the past, and in some cases avoid to this day. It may be the only thing that gets me to the finish, beyond my autistic compulsion to complete what I start, at least anime-wise.

Edited by PokeNirvash
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10 minutes ago, elfie said:

😡

Waiting all day for someone to post this thread and that someone turns out ot be one of the many members I set in the Ignored setting.

Screw off.

You screw off. That attitude won't get you anywhere in life.

Edited by PokeNirvash
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5 hours ago, PokeNirvash said:

Today is a long-awaited day, at least for me. After twenty-odd years of living under my parents' roof and four months of staying in hotels on weekdays and coming back on the weekends, with the only times I've been able to watch the block live being weekends where the folks were out of town and I was on my own, I have finally begun living on my own full-time in an apartment ninety miles from my birthplace (but within the same state, conveniently enough). Meaning I can now livewatch Toonami without having to worry about bothering other people I'm living with! Which are none. Though I do have neighbors, so I'll show some decency by keeping the volume down and the blinds drawn.

The inaugural episode to this new regular livewatching lifestyle will be tonight's sole non-DC Fandome premiere, the penultimate episode of Fena: Pirate Princess. While I won't deny that I've had fun with the series, I do feel that there's definitely a waste of potential in there, and that's not normally something I give a shit about when others bring it up. But having read others' opinions on the series and how full of vitriol they are compared to what the people who worked on it were hoping for, and to a degree act like there is, I get it. I get that, for being an original anime with infinite possibilities, Fena feels limited and prone to squandery compared to what it could have been.

The two barrels of entertainment that were the old guys from the first two episodes, present in just those two episodes, left on Goblin Island never to be seen again. Fena showing personality from minute one and a desire for autonomy in her own right, only to be relegated to a living, breathing plot device whose only purpose is to act as a guide to Eden. O'Malley and her crew being supremely entertaining adversaries in both design and personality (if not a little on the lawlzy side of blatant bitchery), only to be yeeted from the plot at the halfway point in a manner that, while leaving the door open to their return in the final hour or a hypothetical season two that likely won't come to pass, is fatal enough outside of classic "if there's no body, they could still be alive" logic that them being dead for real wouldn't be a surprise in the slightest. And last episode, which focused entirely on reaching Eden and traversing through it to the destination from the "Vice Versa" tune to such a degree, that it felt as if nothing happened at all. There are many other things that others have brought up elsewhere, including Abel being boring and kinda skeevy as a villain, the Goblin Knights being uninteresting as support protagonists, et cetera, but I choose not to elaborate on those, because I don't care about them as much as other, more unforgiving people do.

To get down to brass tacks, I want to like Fena, at least on the same level to which I liked Nakazawa's other original anime. (Y'know, the one on Netflix.) But with the course the series has taken since the double-up premiere, it certainly isn't 10/10 worthy, and I'm starting to feel it isn't even worthy of a 9/10 on my IGN levels of skewed scale I use for everything because I'm too lazy to make realistic readjustments. And unless this episode and the one following do things I'd find redemption-worthy, no matter how out of left field or unexplained they are - Otto and Salman returning, some of O'Malley's crew surviving the flaming wreckage, Kei showing up to fight Abel, the Goblin Knights, or both at once, literally anything - I'm afraid Fena's gonna finish at an 8/10 on the Poke scale, thereby making it a more disappointing I.G anime than freaking Shining Hearts. And believe me, dropping a point from that show due to Rick's wishy-washiness about the past and the actual plot not being as comfy as the moe baking adventures of the first half was painful enough. Having to put Fena lower than that because of actual faults in its potential - a point I didn't even take off from decently known disasters like Eureka seveN AO and Dimension W - may actually hurt worse.

That said, I hope my live commentary of tonight's episode proves a useful enough insight into what it's been like to watch Fena in recent times of reading negative reviews I've often avoided in the past, and in some cases avoid to this day. It may be the only thing that gets me to the finish, beyond my autistic compulsion to complete what I start, at least anime-wise.

Congrats...That must feel great.

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44 minutes ago, CountFrylock said:

Yeah i saw that...apparently Alice's VA Also thought the regular schedule was tonight and had to delete a tweet about it when someone informed her that nope it's batman movies tonight

kind of weird they didn't see anything about it until now

I was about to correct you but then I realized it's Fena not Alice, haha.

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