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The Aquatope on White Sand EP 24 | Full Length (Patreon)

Published:
2021-12-17 05:46:09
Imported:
2021-12

Content

I went on a long rant towards the end ;w; whoops. I blame everything on Kai.

T'was a long journey. Thanks for sticking around :)

Files

aquatope 24 full

Comments

ProfBasara

Since it's finally finished, I suppose I'll give my overall thoughts and conclusion too. Potential wall of text incoming. I guess I'll see after I hit post at the end. :) Before I get into the rest (Since I know I have quite a few feelings about this show. :P ), I just want to say that the visuals in this anime are very, very good and it really contributed to that relaxing feeling the show had for me. There's so many beautiful shots that are just perfect wallpaper material, usually a couple per episode at least. Not enough good things to say about that aspect of Aquatope. With that said... I really enjoyed the series as a chill weekly watch, but I definitely agree that the 1st cour was stronger. It felt like they bit off more than they could chew with the 2nd cour. If they just focused entirely on the new cast or only brought a couple of the Gama cast besides our protags, things could've been more focused instead of trying to get in screentime for *all* of the Gama Gama crew, and then fit in the new characters and flesh them out, all over the course of 12 episodes, even less when you consider the finales are more just wrapping things up more than anything. Bring Kuuya and Karin, *maybe* Kai as well, and the rest can be a cameo here and there if you really want. The reason I'm on the fence with Kai is because it feels like he didn't really do much of anything during the 2nd cour. He usually interacted with Kukuru here and there, mostly to be her punching bad, annnnnd that's pretty much it. It feels like his character reached its conclusion back in the 1st cour and they had nothing left for him. He chose not to tell her about his vision because he felt like that's not what she needed at the time and he valued her growth over his personal feelings, which in hindsight I suppose could also be attributed to him not confessing to her. In any case, I feel like he could have been mostly written out of the story after Kukuru moves to TIngarla and nothing of value would be lost. Kuuya kind of just remaining who he was is fine and he's one of my favorites, but they basically off-screened his growth of interacting with females over the 2-year time skip with an offhand remark by Karin. I still think they could have done something with him and Kaoru where he realizes that women aren't much different after thinking she was a dude for awhile and interacting with her normally beforehand. Didn't even have to be romantic. But instead it was just used for a one-off joke and then that was it. Speaking of characters, the whole Suwa thing. It's another case of what they did (Brief explanation of why he is the way that he is and them moving on) being acceptable, but it's not really satisfying either. He was intentionally written in an antagonistic way for the vast majority of the 2nd cour, where they're practically begging you to dislike the guy. For the longest time, he was the biggest source of conflict in the show, especially once the Chiyu situation was resolved, to the point that I know someone that said no matter what his reasons were, it was no excuse for basically killing Kukuru's passion and driving her to depression and they wouldn't forgive him. The resolution is "Well it was just tough love. Oh, and also he dealt with failure in the past and didn't want it to happen again. Oh, and we don't get this information from Suwa himself, it's explained by someone else in a minute." Cool. As someone who really enjoyed Marina, it was unfortunate to see her not get any real focus. In hindsight, I'd have probably taken giving her a focused episode and having Akari's development happening mostly on the sideline, since, as you said, her character is pretty easy to understand and didn't really need an episode dedicated to it. She was a part-timer who was just there for the job, and by the end she grows to truly love the aquarium. Pretty simple. But again, this is really a problem of them just getting too ambitious with the 2nd cour in my opinion and trying to juggle too many things at once. The mystical nature of Gama Gama and the first cour was definitely part of what made it special, and that aspect getting completely dropped until the final episode of the 2nd cour was noticeable and just made things feel off. I'm assuming that was intentional to push the feeling that Tingarla had a different vibe and that things were different now (Gama Gama was literally the high school fun to Tingarla's college and becoming an adult phase), but I think they could've executed that better without complete moving away from what made the 1st cour unique. They also went from not really talking much about sea life preservation to *really* hammering it in within the last 3 or so episodes. As you mentioned, there was no easing into it or bringing it up gradually throughout the series. It was just BAM, you should really care about the sea and help out. Which I'm fine with them pushing, but it was pretty jarring and sudden. Pretty minor, but the yuri bait (And to an extent, the yaoi bait if you count Kuuya early on) was to be expected. After awhile, you get pretty good and telling whether or not they'll commit to the yuri/yaoi ships or not, and that's fine. They did very little to kill anyone's head-canon if they want to perceive things in that way though. If anything, they just kept adding more fuel to the fire with how much Fuuka did, and how Kai was written after the first cour. Overall, I'm not a big fan of number scoring, but using MAL''s system, I had Aquatope at a 9 during cour 1 and I felt the same throughout a good amount of cour 2. But I do think it started to falter a bit towards the end, with the final 5-6 episodes, so I think I'll put it at an 8. I'm still glad I took the time to watch it and I never had a bad time with any of the episodes, but there's still plenty of potential that I don't think they capitalized on. ...Yeah. This was definitely a long one. Apologies in advance. Now that it's over, I'll probably use the free time to check out Uma Musume before the next season of anime really gets underway. :)

ikerot
>>73882432

Haha no worries! Yeah, I ended up doing multiple takes because I lost myself in my own rant somewhere along the way, so I forgot talking about the good points of the anime (whoops). I'll have to write it in the description of the YT edit later lol. Animation-wise, the anime's well done. I liked the music as well. I thought they sorta dug themselves in a hole with the implication of a new aquarium and how gramps was going to give them his recommendation to the new place. It fits and it was understandable why the old Gama Gama staff moved to Tingarla, but it was still a hole. The thoughts of Kai being written out of the story and no value would've been lost is hilarious. We could've pulled the "My dad needs to get surgery" a lot faster, but they had to use that as a device to let the viewers know that Kukuru no longer wants to be an attendant. That is an interesting thought on Kai no telling Kukuru about the vision as him not telling her his feelings. Still makes me upset because now I'm just gonna mull over what the hell is Kai going to do with the rest of his life. Will he ever find a new girl who will love him? Or is he gonna stay as Kukuru's punching bag forever? What a sad fate. Everything was going by as fast towards the end (and I lost steam) that I didn't even realize that development on Kuuya. It most likely flew over my head because it was Karin who was talking to him and I knew he was fine around her for the most part. If they showed me him talking with a different girl, I would've picked it up. I never thought Suwa was the one who "killed Kukuru's passion and drive", but I can see why they think of it that way. He put a lot of work on Kukuru and Kukuru, in turn, worked a lot of overtime. This all tumbled down to her sad episode. These sort of characters, I knew had to have some sort of reason (like with Chiyu) to be who they are. We also see him cool down through the 2nd half and even get to the point where he would recommend Kukuru for the attendance position. It just sucks knowing that we had to hear it from someone who isn't Suwa. I wanted this man to OPEN UP! Speaking of "easy to understand" character, I guess the anime thought the same of Marina hahaha. They gave us a tiny bit of information about Marina in EP 17 and was like, "Yeah. That's about the most you'll get from her. She's a foreigner who has difficulty speaking Japanese, and that's why she loves the aquarium." Yeah, I had the same idea of the different environment and feel between Gama Gama and Tingarla. It made me realize that there was a good reason to pray and give offering to the tribal child around ep 13 or 14. Kukuru could've done it since she was facing difficulty. Or maybe she was like, "Eh, I did this all the time few months ago and look what happened to Gama Gama?" xD And then changed her mind towards the end. Either way, it could've fizzled off as the situation at work got better. I have the same feel about the journey. There wasn't an episode I didn't like. Hah! Have fun with Uma Musume (S2). It's better than I expected. Will prob finish it up next week.

ProfBasara

Yeah, no idea what Kai does now. I'd like to think he would've come to terms and moved on over the time skip, but who knows? I also think Karin being the one who mentioned it makes the line slide under the radar more, since their relationship was already established. It makes sense that things would change and that he would grow over two years. I just wish they could've had at least some of that be on-screen. I wouldn't say that Suwa was directly responsible for all of that, but the added pressure of all the work she was getting didn't help, especially when combined with her already not caring for the position at the time. And not getting anything from Suwa himself wasn't the biggest let down. We see him gradually become less hardened towards Kukuru, but we never really get into his head or even see what he's doing usually. We just have to head-canon that he's really busy all the time. And thanks, will do. And thanks for all the responses throughout the series!