I love some good sports anime. Not quite up there with Ping Pong or March Comes in Like a Lion for me, but way closer than I expected. All the drugs/alcohol stuff & gestures at talking about gender & race early on set off some flags, but in almost every case I think they handled that stuff with a lot of nuance. The directing style also kinda caught me off guard, the color palette and music and camerawork are very modern-prestige Netflix house style, but the way the show cut away from a lot of dramatic moments and underplayed other ones was surprising. Usually I can see where the drama is telegraphed, but there were a lot of moments where the show just chose not to be unrealistically melodramatic about stuff & I really appreciate that. Also, shoutouts to Anya Taylor Joy for being great in general but also playing Beth as a more realized character than the usual biopic Autistic Genius thing.
I like the runway shows and the designers all seemed cool and interesting, but the fake reality show drama (fake time pressure, repeated and over dramatic storylines) was very naked and spoiled a lot of it to the point where i wanted to fast forward thru most episodes. Probably less of an issue if you watch a lot of reality shows but I don't.
I was a bit bummed out that the core relationships that the drama stems from are pretty basic, but I guess that they were kinda necessary to have some grounding for all the crazy complex ideas to bounce off of.
The reveal about the name was real dumb, I really enjoyed that. The show has moments of obvious humor, like cuts & angles $ awkward interactions you'd see in a comedy, but it comes off as almost off putting in the context of the usual heavy droning abstract music, people staring into the camera mournfully aesthetic. The effect of that is unnerving and it feels like it should throw the tone off balance, but personally I found it made me more engaged. It's like the show telling me that it's not trying to be realistic or recreate known human emotions and dilemmas. Everyone talks so plainly and slowly & with a consideration that people in real life (or in most movies) only ever find briefly. The 'drama' of the show is mostly about people coming to terms with big metaphysical realizations, so I guess it makes sense that they just say what they think a lot.
I appreciate that the focus was always on the character reactions. The twists and revelations are presented as being wild and huge, and I guess I haven't seen all of them in the specific arrangement they have here, but each of the individual beats and ideas are common to a lot of sci-fi. The drama isn't "what are they going to do" it's "how would that affect a person". Like for as much as dweebs like Elon Musk will talk about 'what if the world was a computer simulation' or whatever, they never really extrapolate past that into the things that would be actually interesting to think about. I don't give a shit if Deckard was a robot or not, but it's really interesting to think about what it means for the world around him if he was, right?
It's consistently funny in offbeat, unexpected places & I love the relationship between the main two and the focus the show puts on them. The Adam stuff felt a bit flat, tho. It wasn't really clear to me why his turn happened & the kid stuff in general was the least developed despite being kinda the driving force of the plot. The horsemen stuff, similarly felt like the show kept telling me it was important but I never really felt that it was anything other than a chance to insert some more jokes & commentary.
