What do ya'll think of Flip Flappers? I heard it was sort of like a newer, yuri FLCL. Dunno if I'd put it up there...

What do ya'll think of Flip Flappers? I heard it was sort of like a newer, yuri FLCL. Dunno if I'd put it up there, but I'm having fun with it so far.

Don't watch the last 2-3 episodes

Why not?
Feel free to /spoiler me, I can take it.

Not that meme again.

It's yuri Evangelion, without budget problems and with mommy issues instead of daddy ones.

...I never watched the end of Evangelion though. Just flat out spoiler.

I give it 15 flips out of 10 flaps, Nyu should have been more useless.

Do watch them but be aware you won't get any flashy over the top animation or action, you won't get some crazy psycho trippy twist, it's just going to be an ok end that ties the loose ends and makes sense from the story's point of view and the thematic angles it had been using. Which you're probably not aware of because they're hard to spot and it took a while for Sup Forums to discuss the show enough to realize them, and then they even had to find director interviews confirming them too and commenting about them to fully make sense of it.

The hype and the wait for the last episodes made some people unhappy when it turns out it wasn't as intense as they had hoped.
And that sort of became a meme of itself.
But rest assured, they're not bad.
If you are watching the show now you won't have to wait for next week's ep at all so you'll be able to go right into the ending once you reach a certain point of the plot, and that actually makes the whole experience of the last few episodes more enjoyable if seen in all in one go.

I loved the show. Wouldn't really compare it to FLCL but I can see why some people would draw some connections.

Loved the episodic nature of the early episodes, and by the time the show hit the plot I already loved all the characters so I enjoyed that part too.

And Yayaka is my wife.

>you won't get any flashy over the top animation or action

How many flips are in a flap?

That wasn't the actual finale though. It was an awesome boss rush, but it was no Mimi.
But it was glorious. My favorite action scenes of the show are those two short fights by henshin Yayaka.
It's a shame we never got to see her fully utilize all her potential while working together with Cocona and Papika.

...

>It's a shame we never got to see her fully utilize all her potential while working together with Cocona and Papika.
That's for season 2, user.
;_;

It's the magical girl anime that answered the questions posed in madoka magica.

You got me there Papika. You got me good.

It was fun to watch. There are so many anime references within it as well, if you're into that.

Which question would that be?

>you won't get any flashy over the top animation or action
What? Half of the final episode was a sakuga orgasm

Can girls love girls? [A: yes]

Will an anime ever surpass Madoka? [A: yes]

Will the genre EVER recover [A: not financially]

It hurts.

don't watch it because budget, and it shows

Biggest disappointment in years

The first episodes were great but the last episodes were god awful. The good things it had going for it before had all vanished, Yayaka's character arc ended abruptly and wasn't given a meaningful conclusion because the show was ended and we need to focus on Cocona/Papika. Speaking of Cocona and Papika, I didn't like them. I could forgive them at the start of the series because they haven't been able to develop yet and Papika's personality was endearing, but now that they've gone through all that, Papika has just gotten annoying and Cocona feels like a dry piece of cardboard. Even the animation quality flopped hard.

It was truly a great show at the start but it definitely fell of it's path, tumbled down, died, and got it's corpse scavenged by a bunch of turkeys. Flip Flappers was just a big flop.

Not fast enough.

There's a significant tone change around episode 9 which some watchers with shit taste couldn't stomach, and production ran into schedule problems for the last two or three episodes. It was AOTY 2016 nonetheless.

it's my favourite anime of the last decade.

wow

Don't forget the huge amount of shitposting at the end of the series. It's the reason why I will never be sure if a post like this is serious or not. There might be legitimate points and an honest opinion, or just a carefully crafted bait.

But FLCL is shit. it's a try hard LOL RANDOM show, which might have worked if it wasn't boring as fuck.

Would you stop making these threads already?
We all know you've been here week for week and now you can't let go and this is just a stupid excuse to make another thread. Guess what, the threads are dead and I'm finally free.
I hope anons remember what the SAGE function is for.

Watching it with a friend, I'm gonna watch the end episodes anyway, getting some mixed messages here, but I've got my own hopes for it. It's been an entertaining romp so far, and I'm a real sucker for sweet, cutesy romance/discovering your own feelings type shit.

Bruh this is the first time I've been on Sup Forums other than for jojo threads. I don't know who you are, but I'm sorry you dislike threads about the show like that. Just figured this was a decent place to ask.
:(

That point is definitely 100% bullshit.
There's no way it could be serious.

The animation got sloppier here and there, and the direction wasn't as tight and precise as it was before.

That's a fact.

It was still fantastic though, I never complained about it.
But I won't pretend it was the best part of the show either.

>Bruh this is the first time I've been on Sup Forums other than for jojo threads
>:(
Yep, it's time to stop posting.

And now Sup Forums is going to get mad at you if you are serious. Sorry about that but that's how it goes.

If not, good job, it seems like a legit outsider's post, it will trigger at least 3 people in the thread.

?

1-9 are 10/10
10-12 are like 7/10

Please stop embarrassing yourself.
Keep browsing the board without posting for at least 2 more years and you'll learn proper Sup Forums etiquette by then.

Mediocre SHIT

I thought Sup Forums was all over jojo though? It's literally why I come here, when I do. Just thought of it as a place to ask about what seemed, so far, like a cute series with interesting visuals.

Would rate it as 8/10
8.83/10 to be precise.

...

It's the emoticon.
It's ancient Sup Forums tradition to frown upon those sorts of things.

...

That is not how you round numbers.

The director tried to pander to casual viewers by making the deepest lore not as apparent as it actually is and towards the end the director couldn't no longer hide it so the deep shit kind of overwhelmed the expectation of a plot resolution.

We're still deciphering the Jungian mythology in it until this day.

Razorblade vaginas were my favourite part of this show

No user, don't you dare say that was intentional and deep too.


Was it?

It is.

Vagina dentata is a direct motif drawn from mythological sources to represent the Terrible Mother archetype in Mimi's unconscious personalities personified by various PI defensive traps formed through Mimi's shards.

Or more simply, it's a straightforward Freudian symbol which represents a fear of change and unwillingness to embrace the world outside one's comfort zone.

It foreshadowed Mimi, for sure, but it's certainly doing more in the show than just suggesting that mommy is the big bad. Friendly reminder that the last time we actually see vagina dentata imagery framing Cocona is episode 4.

She's framed by a smooth-edged circle at the end of episode 5 (lip allegory) and then never framed in that same peculiar way again. The vagina dentata motif is abandoned in favour of a cross-linked bar motif thereafter.

>a straightforward Freudian symbol
But you don't have a source for this, do you?

Jung is canon. Just give up, Frued-kun.

probably just a coincidence

Papika best midwife

This is not vagina dentata motif of Mimi's. This is a simple lip-shaped vagina motif of Papika's. The leaves are not razorblades. They are soft and smooth.

Jung? Freud? This show gets that fuck-ey?

It gets a LITTLE fuckey, my friend.
Strap in.

its shit, yurifags only suck it up because it has some sakuga

and now the studio will go bankrupt

have a nice day

Hh ffs we have had Frued vs Jung turf wars for like several months. Anyway Jung is confirmed canon in the interview. The director was also touting Frued's dream analysis in the talk show.

Only if you want to make sense of it all.

>Frued-kun
>Frued
STOP

It appears that you still have a complex with missing your mother's cock.

This man's ideas wouldn't have had such staying power were he not so goddamn gorgeous.

Nobody has looked that good in a beard in almost 80 years

I would have actually preferred the what I expected with just some sides of what we got to be honest.
That's why ep 3 is still my favorite thing out of the show.

The director was afraid of scaring off people like you so he hid visual cues everywhere and in the end it left us with a rabbit hole that goes deep but he also left us with the vehicle to traverse it.

Or would you rather prefer spoonfeeding like namedropping the second law of thermodynamics?

>Or would you rather prefer spoonfeeding like namedropping the second law of thermodynamics?


Worst case scenario, that would have been terrible.
I'm glad they never went that way.

But I would have enjoyed if magical girl and DBZ type themes had been played up a little more towards the end.

Like with the Mimi fight.

Ep 8 had a good balance of it for me.
In order to save the day they had to defeat the giant monster enemy.
And in order to do that they had to achieve the complete fusion to unleash their final super move. It came accompanied by a cool song and a cool transformation and it all felt really cool.
But in order to get there they had to clear some of the emotional aspects of the show, Yayaka had to get in the robot.
So there was some underlying tension connected to the story and the characters there, but it was expressed by a really cool action scene which was fully played for its cool and that was really the focus and the highlight of the episode, it used action as a vehicle to further the characters and the plot.


The fight vs Mimi felt dull by comparison.
Even the white henshin powerup which was great in theory it lacked the same magical girl visual flair in tone and feel.
And the way the encounter vs Mimi played didn't feel as satisfying, it didn't escalate into a hype conclusion as properly. Not enough character close ups, hype music,special moves,etc.

Mimi's henshin was cool, but it wasn't showcased with enough anime-style direction to hype it up in the same way the show had previously done when something cool happened.
I think it tried to play itself more seriously than before, like during episode 3 where they had them pose and showed the names of their moves too. Also schedule.

So this isn't a complain about the writing as much as it is about the way things were played during some key parts where the cool and over the top stylistic anime aspects weren't fully played out as much as before.

tl;dr

>Get into the womb, Cocona

Ok.
Have this in return.

...

Yayaka's pure illusion.
She needd that hug so badly so many times.

>I heard it was sort of like a newer, yuri FLCL

it is more like Madoka but with lesbians

The amorphous twins probably hug her every day now. She's practically their older sister, after all.

Meme phrases aside, I think the core of the show is a Jungian "psy-fi", where deep psychological and mythological concepts become the mechanics for world building and characterization. The psychological core is represented through a layer of subtle surrealism (I'm not qualified to make the claim but at least this is what nips call it), which is depicted by Kubrickian visual storytelling. The director somehow unconventionally executed the visual storytelling by wrapping it under an accessible facade of sakuga visual fest.
The director took 3 years to read up his Jung and we can tell he's got his bag of tricks. However his ambition was probably muted to some extent by the need to play safe in a directorial debut as he admitted that the sakugafest, the episodic format in earlier episodes, and the yuri elements were meant to help hooking casual viewers. Once the main plot was fully developed those more than casual but less than hardcore viewers found out the episodic sakuga or familial drama were never what the show was really about thus their expectations were understandably upset.

>"psy-fi"
I really like this, I'm going to steal it.

That's not the kind of hug she wants though.

This is

REALLY FEELING THAT WRITER CHANGE

The earlier episodes played out like tropefests too.
I enjoyed trying to decipher where the episode would go while watching them. Which sort of genre, or which sort of twist or anime logic the episode would follow.

But that only lasts until 8.

Pining for impossible love like a tragic maiden isn't what Yayaka needs. Being caught in that spiral is like a kind of emotional death.

She needs to get herself the hell out of Cocopapi and find something within herself or out in the world she can put her passions towards. Save herself the suffering of a one-sided love and a hug she'll never have.

But Cocona and Papika love her.
As a friend.
And when cute girls are friends it's ok for them to hug each other.
Don't deny Yayaka her hugs so easily.

But she should still find something to do with her life, at least for now just to occupy her time. If Salt is still going to continue exploring and studying pure illusion he should hire her as assistant/explorer/bodyguard.
No one would be more competent than her.

>the episodic format in earlier episodes, and the yuri elements were meant to help hooking casual viewers
But they also ended up being the show's strongest elements. And, for the most part, they were what the show as "about" for 9 consecutive episodes. You can't flash an out-of-context image as foreshadowing and then defer any explanation whatsoever for 10 consecutive episodes before blowing the lid open on it. By that point the audience has stopped caring, and the overwhelming majority of the show's content and storytelling has already been committed towards something decidedly unalike to whatever it was you foreshadowed.

That's why people were incredulous towards the dramatic tonal shift. It was simply executed poorly. They tried to set up a twist, but the twist itself fell flat and structuring the narrative for a twist instead of a proper buildup and transition meant that everything after the twist was compromised. Mimi's story simply wasn't a very good story. By comparison, Yayaka's story was much better. By comparison, the standalone stories that were introduced and concluded all in the span of 24 minutes in episodes 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8 were much better.

The Jungian stuff made for a nice aesthetic framework and gave some neat directorial and imagery cues, but the vector through which it intersected directly with the narrative was mediocre at best. Nobody needed for Cocona's mom to show up and transform her lower half into a giant all-consuming vagina vortex of the apocalypse in order to understand that Cocona was struggling with developmental issues associated with accepting change.

Oshiyama went from playing archetypes subtly in a way that built an aesthetic to just blatantly transplanting painfully literal representations of those archetypes into the story as CENTRAL characters defining central character-based conflicts.

You might as well just nail Gandalf to a fucking cross at that point.

How many flips would a flip flap flap if a flip flap could flip flaps?

eight hundred eighty three

But she can't go into PI without the twins, and it's not fair to force them to continue going on PI adventures when they finally have a chance to live normal lives.

Yayaka should find an upstanding and safe part-time job, join the school's basketball team and hang out in the art club room until a certain sempai falls head-over-heels for her and paints her white-walled PI into a colourful canvas of pastel love.

>out-of-context
how?
>You can't flash an out-of-context image as foreshadowing
why?
>committed towards something
says who?
>a very good story
Those who were looking for a good story got their expectations upset, this is exactly what I'm saying and it's more like they missed the point, not the show failing to give them what they wanted.
>a nice aesthetic framework
I don't know what to say. If it's just aesthetic to you the show is really not for you.
>Nobody needed for Cocona's mom
Clearly you were wanting something but the show didn't give you it. Not exactly whose fault.
>playing archetypes subtly in a way
That's exactly my point, the archetypes are always there but to not scare you off in earlier episodes Oshiyama provided you with distractions so you didn't have to look at it.

I'm not that guy and I hate to admit it but I agree with this.
Not entirely, but I see where you are coming from, your point, and it's valid.

Not entirely though.
Mimi destroying everything in her way by turning them into flowers and slamming them with fantasy meat tentacles was awesome.

Yayaka motivating Papika and both of them flying together to save Cocona was awesome.
Her henshin was one of the best scenes in the whole series, but as you said it's precisely because there was a heavy emotional buildup to it.
For the whole duration of the show we saw her grow and develop and show her true layers and it all led to that moment where her bottled up feelings came out all at once and we got some sweet sweet action scenes.

But still Mimi felt like a poorly patched in addition. She lacked the antagonistic nature and background of asclepius. Even though summoning her was the result of their work. And sure in context and with all the details at hand to discuss it there was a lot of stuff tying her to the plot and themes that's true. But while watching the show she didn't feel like enough of a final boss, at least not to me, at least not the first time I saw it.

This is a subject that's been discussed so many times here and I still can't pin point what exactly could have made everything come together for a more satisfying finale.
Was animation lacking? Was foreshadowing and an earlier introduction of Mimi necessary to make her feel more like a big boss? We'll never know.

That works well too.

...

>how?
pic related as one example, though most of the foreshadowing in the first half-dozen episodes also apply because the all commit the same error.
>says who
The entire body of film production for the past 100 years. Show->remind->payoff has been the basic fundamental structure of visual storytelling in film media since before we had english words for moving pictures.

The consequence of not understanding or effectively applying basic storytelling techniques is exactly the response you saw to Flip Flappers. The audience felt alienated because things which had been given so little meaningful presence for most of the series were suddenly the whole story in the final act.

Imagine if Macbeth had failed to introduce Lady Macbeth until act 3. Would a painting of her in the background of a set sufficed as 'visual storytelling'? Obviously not.

The foreshadowing leading into Flip Flappers' final act fell flat. It's as simple as that. They pushed those elements which may have been narratively critical so far into the background that they ceased to have a critical presence in the story. This created dissonance with the final act, which may as well have made the texture of the lichen clinging to rocks in the background of episode 7's PI important for all it actually engaged with the story.

What you call "distractions" became the entire story. For 9 episodes they were the entire story. The story that came after was something else, something that had mattered so little prior that it had taken a back seat to a narrative of "distractions" that unironically told a far better story.

In a sense he's not wrong in demanding the plot be explained in layman's terms and resolved within itself. But it's long past the time when this argument was productive.
>She lacked the antagonistic nature
Mimi's duality is central mechanics of the show. I can tell you that much.
>pin point what exactly could have made everything come together for a more satisfying finale
The casual and fun form of the start had decided that the deep conclusion would not get judged from its intended perspective. If the show somehow started like Lain the end would feel different.

Things like that painting shot might be just cool bonuses for viewers to remember or notice when rewatching the show though.
It also makes sense given context, since we believe Iro was able to somehow be inspired by pure illusion through her paints.

And it's not like they didn't foreshadow Mimi at all.
She was in Cocona's dreams since the beginning.

But perhaps they should have done a better job at foreshadowing her, establishing a dynamic between her and Cocona in her dreams that once we realized she was her mom would make sense and click together without necessarily being so blunt that it would spoil things earlier than necessary.

Some of the themes about the mommy issues could also have been hinted a little bit more early on as well.

Until Mimi appeared and all the background is fully shown it wasn't quite clear what to think of her, we knew there was a "Mimi" and she was connected to both pure illusion and Cocona.
But what was she?
Was she Cocona's past life, and she reincarnated? Or was she her sister, or a part of her, or Papika's past lover? It still felt vague and even in the end there wasn't enough previous indication of it to act as foundation for the mother-daughter dynamics that would become essential to the story later.
They were there thematically through many concepts of the jungian stuff people here have figured out, so we can't say they didn't know what they were doing or didn't do it. But they should have implemented some of that into the context and not just the subtext.

>In a sense he's not wrong in demanding the plot be explained in layman's terms and resolved within itself. But it's long past the time when this argument was productive.


I know. But since it's been brought up I might as well throw in my 25 cents.

>Mimi's duality is central mechanics of the show. I can tell you that much.
Yeah I've been here for the threads about that too, the terrible mother, etc.
Thematically if seen through that lens it all adds up perfectly and makes full sense.

I'm just saying from a story perspective, as an average viewer while watching the show without all the trivia factors to make sense of it. It kind of could have benefited from having a better and earlier sense of buildup to some elements .

I still loved the show though, and by no means do my complains make it any less of a 10/10 to me.

>pic related as one example
Not sure what you're trying to prove with this example. I'm able to draw many parallels but this one doesn't look consequentially foreshadowing to me.
>Show->remind->payoff has been the basic fundamental structure
What makes you think FLFL has been or should follow the basic structure? Or if any work doesn't follow this structure and you somehow don't get it therefore it's bad?
>What you call "distractions" became the entire story
It's pretty strongly implied there is an undercurrent from the apparent episodic plot as early as ep 1. It's your problem if you chose to ignore it.

I think knowing more about Mimi earlier, and having her character be more present through the story would have helped make her feel more like a villain.

As it was, it kind of felt like they just put a face to all of the episodic PIs and called it a boss. It didn't really feel like the antagonist and their conflict was a climax of the adventures the characters had faced, because the connection between the two had been so abstract. I have trouble imagining exactly how this could have been mitigated because the truth is just that you don't look at Mimi's character design and think "Nascent Demigod of the Collective Unconscious." Having the defense traps share her red eye motif was a good decision, but it didn't feel like it was enough. The "eye" design and artistic direction between Mimi and the traps was just too different.

For a walking Jungian archetype, her design is really quite lacking in distinct Jungian cues. I think that maybe having a little more explanation of the Mimi/Salt/research lab background earlier on instead of dumping that exposition in the last 3 episodes would have helped. Making Mimi more active in the dream sequences, and including more dream sequences so that she had more of a chance to leave an impression would have also really helped. If nothing else, the audience could have at least felt invested in Mimi's character during the finale if they had known her since episode 4.

There just wasn't enough of stuff like that. I've mentioned this before, but the fact that they deferred explaining anything by making m,eta jokes about not explaining things, not just once but twice, is genuinely galling. They could have gotten away with that if they had a really sensational card to play, but they didn't. Maybe the director thought he did, but Mimi certainly wasn't explosive enough of a reveal to not only leaving us in the dark, but taking time out to remind us that we were being left in the dark on purpose.

When the sniper scope came up at the end of episode one I seriously thought they were going full EDGE right away but luckily this was not exactly the case

If Madoka "broke" the magical girl genre, positing the genre premises necessarily devolve into a dysphoria. The Madoka-style ending always result in a bitter note, with either the world or the heroine paying the price. FLFL found a way to rebuild the genre on a positive framework. In Flip Flappers, hope and dreams do exist, and the adventure lives on.

>What makes you think FLFL has been or should follow the basic structure?
Because if you eschew the basics of good storytelling then you basically aren't telling a good story. You might as well ask "why does a story need to have a rising action, climax and falling action?"

If you leave notes lying around that say "hey, the main antagonist hasn't been introduced yet," it doesn't make your choice to introduce the main antagonist in the last 1/4 of your story a brilliant one. You just telegraphed your bad storytelling.

Yeah.

Here's what I would have done for starters: In one of the dream sequences, have Cocona interact with her.
But don't make it clear if Mimi is another person or some inner voice.
But make the dialogue itself, if summed up, be something that could easily be said would have come from an over protective and possessive mother.
Think about something that would stunt Cocona's growth instead of helping her, it can be something nice that encourages her to not grow up, or it can be something that scares her of doing so.
But in order to make such a dream-like sequence feel right for the context, make the entire dialogue exchange in the style shaft typically uses for some stuff like monogatari, with a lot of fast cuts and close ups and a somewhat abstract flow and feel to the conversation.

If Mimi had been given a chance to show herself and show what she meant to Cocona, and what Cocona meant to her. And to show her good but also kind of bad nature it would have been easier to understand her role later on.

>but this one doesn't look consequentially foreshadowing to me.
You might want to google "foreshadowing"

Really solid, underrated show. Even on Sup Forums

It's an interesting parallel, but what consequence does it imply? I know, you can have retroactive interpretation but I'm sure none of it will be definite enough to form a consequential connection .