Ran

That's true. Pretty sure they did the same with "The Witness", where all backdrops and such were hand-painted but they must have roughed out the 3D design to apply lighting and reflection effects. Regardless of just what these crazy Euros are doing, it's very impressive and I think a real way forward towards getting high-quality animation paired to compelling stories. Malazan's another that would look incredible in this sort of approach.

Excellent comparison to the Mayor and Faith. Yeah. If Jinx is drawing from the Batman universe, the "industrialist" Silco is a twisted Bruce Wayne-meets-Ra's al Ghul if Ra's was more a class warfare guy than an environmentalist. @Jeordhi Interesting. My understanding had been that doing 2D backdrops can speed up the process compared to building and texturing the environments in 3D in detail.

My take on it was that Silco's relationship with Jinx was not sexual from his side, but that Jinx acted out and vamped due to confused attempts at intimacy which Silco accepted (though with what read like a discomfort on his part) so as to continue to be able to depend on her and manipulate her to do what he wanted. Why this sexualized approach to intimacy from her? Where did she get the idea? I think it's obvious enough that in winning her over after Vi goes to prison, Silco probably did not set much in the way of boundaries and let her feel like she was in a symbiotic relationship. Powder's very high-strung and dependent behavior would have been deliberately focused entirely on him, leading to unhealthy developments.

"Solid" feels right. It's giving me The Expanse but nothing really remarkable has happened as of yet, nothing to wow or even really engage deeply with. The most significant event of the episode is getting the locations of all the asteroids being used to bombard Earth, and I guess it's funny to see how quickly Marco just says, "Okay, the fight's here now." Oh, okay, one other thing: Drummer and Liang Walker, the Golden Bough-Free Navy guy plotting to hit the supply depots. That was interesting and promises some future action to come. (On a down note, I feel sorry for the young actress in the prologue. She was fine with what she was given in the first episode, but she was extremely one-note and with uninspired dialogue here. Shame. On the bright side, the "strange dog" design is pretty cool.)

@Fez I do think there's something to the idea that this stylization is more a European thing. (Mielgo is Spanish, BTW.) I do think that part of what may be happening out of these European animators is that they don't have the size and resources of the huge animation studios in the US, and so they've taken an approach that blends 2D and 3D more explicitly in part because of cost-savings but also just for the aesthetic. Arkane and Fortiche and Mielgo and others are all exploring Non-Photorealistic Rendering techniques, basically.

Very interesting. One thing I found is an interview where they explain that part of what makes it looks as it did was that the environments are all 2D, hand-painted rather than completely 3D (ditto textures being done by hand to get that painted effect)... which happens to be the thing that Alberto Mielgo was doing in "The Witness" and seems to have been one of the marks he left on on Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse when he was developing its look in pre-production. In fact, Hideo Kojima remarked at the connection when he gushed over how Arcane looked last month.

Per one of the writers (Amanda Overton), in the initial episodes Powder is 11-12 and Caitlyn and Vi are 15-16, and then they jump 6-7 years so Jinx is supposed to be between 17 and 19. I agree Powder seemed a bit younger, but guess she was a late bloomer.

Yeah. It was solid on that score, but it was fairly straightforward and simplistic, and a narrative we've had many times before. Like I said, I very much enjoyed it, but I'd be cautious about going overboard in stating its virtues just because it could get people's hopes up for something much more complicated than it is. This is not The Wire of animated social commentary.

Agree on Powder/Jinx. Terrific performance by Ella Purnell (and Mia Sinclair Jenness in the initial episodes). Also quite liked the performance for Silco, by Jason Spisak. They really manage to convey feeling and emotion on the faces of the characters without ever triggering the "uncanny valley", probably due to the more painted texturing rather than attempting photorealism. I haven't seen any information on how much the project cost. Must have been a very pretty penny, though, probably on par with a prestige drama per episode.

Looks like Chengdu is going to host the Worldcon in 2023, if reports are right. Much drama around this.

Same. I know nothing about LoL besides it being a DotA clone, but came to realize awhile back that they've been doing a lot of world-building efforts and trying to go transmedia with it (I know a writer, Joey Yu, who has done some work for Riot/Tencent in this regard). This series really worked very well in establishing its setting and the idea that it's part of a larger world (highlighted by the arrival of Councilor Medarda's mother from Noxus) Also same. I mean, I heard people remark that it featured two champions, re: Vi and Jinx, but I didn't realize there were others because of the way people talked a bout it. I think maybe in part because Vi and Jinx are the ones who are actually in LoL, whereas the other are in the Legends of Runeterra collectible card game? But anyways, now that I know, it's interesting to see how they'll play with it. I do think they will be cautious about killing champions off in their stories, because of fan backlash... but OTOH they could tie it into the game and surprise people if the game interacts with the next season somehow. Yes. Why adapting beloved fantasy to animation starts to feel a lot more appealing than all the compromises that come with live action adaptation.

I would not go that far, re: best CG animation. "The Witness" from Love, Death, + Robots exists after all, and baffled and amazed even fellow professionals with its technique. Truth be told I think this show has taken some cues from Alberto Mielgo (who was also instrumental to developing the look and feel of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse). But it's very impressive, anyways, and in particular I thought the action sequences were very well done. Great design aesthetic for the characters and architecture as well. Some thoughts I posted on the Watched thread: Story and character-wise, it's a bit derivative here and there -- Jinx feels like a blend of Harley Quinn and the Joker, and there's dialog that's cliched and hoary -- but it's genuinely very solid, and combined with the vocal performances, character and setting design, and the visual effects... it's definitely one of the big surprises of 2021 for me. Ends on a hell of a cliffhanger, though, I will say that much. I'll be very curious to see what they cook up next. As I understand it they do mean to follow-up the story. One other thing I noticed about it is how it became increasingly more mature in its storytelling, which makes sense as it goes from the "YA" opening trio to increasingly dark and serious matter. I'm not sure how I feel about Heimerdinger as sort of cute Yoda-y type guy. He does have a serious role, but the character design and voicing and manner makes him incongruous with all the more grounded matter around. I feel like maybe delving into his past more might have lent the gravitas to the character that the characters around him obviously felt, but which I don't think the audience could really mesh with and just had to take it on faith.

I actually raised this point in the other thread, before digging into it further. I do think it is a potential factor, since WoT in particular has had a lot of splitting and a lot of volumes. What we can say is that in 2007 Tor offered the figure of 14 million copies in NA and 30 million "world wide". IF you assume "world wide" includes NA, then it's 14 NA and 16 million not-NA respectively, which fits the "rule of thumb" that popular series with many translations tend to sell as many outside of NA as they do inside NA. How does that work with the foreign situation? Either Tor counts "books sold" as being complete sets of each novel (doubtful, of course marketing wil l be happy to inflate numbers while being technically correct), or the fact that buying a big series is simply more expensive because of the split volumes situation that it actually greatly reduces total readership -- you don't get an equal number of outside-of-NA readers as you would if one book = one book on both sides of the pond, and this negatively impacts sales. OR The 14 million NA and the 30 million "world wide" -- where "world wide" means "not-NA" -- means 44 million copies sold. This would mean that Tor counts just plain books -- 3 sales of the 3 volumes of Lord of Chaos in Germany = 3 books sold -- and then the "rule of thumb" doesn't quite work for Big Fat Fantasy Series that get split up into lots of volumes overseas, and instead it makes more sense that for every 1 book sold in NA it's ~2 books sold overseas. In which case, the "12 million" sold of the Jordan-Sanderson books as of 2018 must be 4 million NA and 8 million non-NA, assuming those books got similar splitting treatment to its predecessors. Which means we can now account for 56 million books sold in total. And so I'm left wondering where the other 34+ million are. That would mean that between 2007 and 2018, the first 11 books sold on average 280,000 per year each, which is either ~140k or ~93k NA per book per year depending on how we factor in the foreign portion of sales. But... the problem with this is, PW's end of year lists of who sold over X amount each year doesn't list any of these books outside of the year they were published, and it goes down in some categories to 50k+ sales getting you on the list. (Of course, one would not get an even distribution -- as Wert says, you should see substantially more copies of The Eye of the World showing up to make a larger fraction of that average, but this actually makes the lack of it appearing on PW's end-of-year lists even more notable if we're to believe it's a strong perennial that's selling many tens of thousands of copies per year.)

A short Christmas film directed by the great Luca Guadagnino, starring John C. Reilly as Santa Claus. It's a commercial project, for the retailer Zara. Filmed on location at St. Moritz in Switzerland. Very cozy, cute little film.

What is the mechanism by which PW's info from Tor and distributors can be so wildly wrong, then? I cite direct quotes over years where the progression of NA book sales were steadily increasing at the rate of ~780k per year, and then somehow in the decade between the sales tripled. Just to quickly quote what I wrote: No one has better sales data on their own books than a publisher, as you noted re: Sanderson. The exact number of books printed and sold are absolutely under their control. Short of them deliberately lying back in the late 90s through the mid-2000s, which seems crazy (why undersell how well the books have done when marketing them?), I can't see how this is possible. Yes. 14 million + 16 million is much more reasonable. At which point Jordan had over 30 million, so was firmly the #1 seller for Tor. I don't see the objection. Goodkind, like Jordan, was a NYT bestseller at a certain point, debuting at #1 and all. They were very similar in sales, however bizzare it may seem now, but Jordan was ahead of him. It's worth considering that publishing in the 70s and early 80s was different than it was in the 90s. Paperbacks were much more disposable (in part due to some tax-related issues in the U.S. that the Supreme Court only changed at the end of the 70s) and print runs were much bigger. In 2016, Random House/Del Ray reported that they had "26 million copies in print" in North America, which I absolutely believe is true... but a big thing here is that "copies in print" is not at all the same as "copies sold", which is another issue with some of these things. Like the 2000 estimate of 10 million copies in print of WoT is not the same as copies sold, as well. Salvatore has done in 50 books what Jordan and Sanderson did in 14. Is this really strange? That absolutely has to be a global figure for the sales of his books, or at least how many of his books are in print. If we just extrapolate that average backwards, that would suggest 56 million copies sold/in print worldwide for the whole series. I'd be willing to run with that instead of my lower estimate, but that's still a damned far sight away from 90 million.

This thread and the Sanderson-related marketing doublespeak reminds me of a post I made last month calling into question the sales figure estimates for the Wheel of Time series. Figured I linked it here to see if anyone wants to take my research efforts further and see if they can find any other reliable information on how many books the series has sold. The best Tor figure for national and global sales I can find was in their 2007 press release announcing Sanderson would complete the series: 14 million NA, and "over 30 million" worldwide, which I take to mean 16 million+ in the rest of the world. The question is how many more books sold between 2007 and now. Werthead had some information on the sales of Sanderson's WoT books from his agent. As I indicate, I am really dubious of how the figure jumped from 30 million in 2007 to over 90 million now, and I suspect the number is actually in the low 40 millions at this point in time.

@Kalsandra That's why I wondered whether the railguns fired things at significant percentages of C or not. Ceres is 14 light minutes from Earth, and a little under 8 from Mars (assuming Mars has similar railgun defenses). I'm thinking the TV show's third season has messed with my brain on these things, given how they depicted the use of the railguns against the Martian platforms and how quickly everything went. All wildly compressed down for effect. Is this plot from the books or something that TV show made? Wonder how the books handled it, if that was the origin of that part of the story.... probably place the stealthed platforms much, much, much closer to Earth than the show depicted. (Although, then again, the Belters need not be the only one who think of launching things months ahead of when they'll strike. Wonder how long it would take railgun slugs to go from Earth orbit to Ceres... *Googles* ... Probably north of 7 months, at 12.5 km/s. Loooong time to avenge the destruction of Earth and try to damage the Free Navy, if Avasarala would even agree to it.)

My guess is Amazon is done with the show, and Alcorn hopes to convince some third party to take over producing the series down the road, much as Amazon took over from Netflix. There may be some clauses tying the 6 seasons to Amazon's platform exclusively for X amount of time, and after that point Alcorn can shop it elsewhere. It does risk the heavy-lifting of trying to get all the regular actors back in to make it happen, but it's not impossible. @Corvinus85

Alcorn appears to believe there's the possibility down the road of resuming the series to wrap up the story, perhaps with some other network than Amazon. Even if they're wrong, reminding people there's more story to be told is a nice plug for the books if nothing else.

Also a confusing bit. They mention they haven't seen stealth composite-painted asteroids in months, so that's another reason that makes it seem odd the Earth fleet is still tied up in orbital defense. Speaking of stealth composites... with Laconia established they've lost their in to getting a hold of Martian surplus, and Mars must have cracked down on anyone who thought they could fill a gap. Laconia is either not yet setup to make military surplus available beyond simpler products (there was a mention Medina Station needing titanium but that the "Laconian pieces" were harder to install than expected, suggesting they're armoring up the station in titanium plating or titanium reinforcements) or they're able to produce surplus but are refusing to sell it to Marco now that they have gotten what they want. Fair point on Ceres -- it would take planet-buster type weapons. But we know Mars had those mobile missile platforms that they use to strike Earth. I'd guess Ceres would be having a pretty bad day if a MIRV with a score of nuclear warheads inside of it came at them. (Part of why I was focused on Ceres is that I'm going to assume spies on Ceres would lead everyone know that Marco was there. Realistically any sort of long-range shot would be too late, unless the railguns accelerate things to some appreciable fraction of C. But if they do... then a bunch of tungsten sabots smashing into Ceres could cause crippling damage and might by sheer luck manage to get Marco. Season 3's drama with the mobile platforms kind of made it seem like they do go very, very fast, but this may be handwaving for the purpose of making television.)

Strong agree on Keon Alexander, his performance is charismatic as hell. Re: Mars, guess I'm amazed that they could decommission their fleets so quickly, and how much of what they did was decommissioning right out and scrapping rather than mothballing (as the US did with a good chunk of its naval fleet following WWII) after having taken years to build them up. I guess one issue is that the show has not conveyed just how many people from Earth, Mars, and the Belt have gone on to settle the Ring worlds, so it's not clear how much of that exodus impacts things for Mars specifically. Am I wrong about the idea, BTW, that even with its fleet tied up the US could attack Ceres with long-range interplanetary weapons? Surely those must exist, right? My assumption has been that that's what they did against Pallas station.

I guess they can't be expected to leave Mars entirely undefended if the Free Navy has a go at them, I suppose. Between that and supporting Earth... sure. Though at this stage it's starting to feel like the scale of the disaster is such that maybe they should risk a few extra rocks hitting Earth to be able to actually do something to stop the attack.

The deaths of billions of civilians at the hand of Marco Inaros and his supporters has to be weighed a bit here. Moral high ground doesn't mean much when it's literally an extinction-level catastrophic event. I feel like that's the thing that kind of turned my mind. A few million dead and a couple of lean years, okay. But life as we know it on Earth basically being destroyed over the course of the impact-induced "nuclear winter"? I think that changes the moral scale where you need to do something. Hell, even warn them that you're going to blow them away. Fuck, they can end up stuck being the ones swatting down long-range torpedoes (if they exist?) I assumed Pallas Station was struck by some sort of long-range torpedos or massive railgun strike rather than by Earth ships, which IIRC were already pulled back by that point to defend Earth. Is that not possible Forget the stations, getting access to the Ring Gate and 1,300 planets is going to be much more vital to the survival of the human species... but you're not getting to them until you starve the enemy fleet of resources and can then just jam them up with your own forces so that you can win back control of the Gate. (I will say I did like that the MCRN is supporting Earth against the Belt. That said, I don't understand why they are completely locked up defending Earth -- they ought to be able to spare a few... unless Marco has flung some at Mars as well? Though that's less likely to cause serious issues, for obvious reasons.)

Two more thoughts: Why is Earth not putting bounty on Free Navy ships? Surely the Rocinante isn't the only independent ship out there. There are multiple private security companies, surely some of them operate combat-capable private craft to escort VIPs or protect assets? And the incentive of fat bounties might have led factional opponents to the Free Navy to actually have a chance, especially if the bounties could be turned into supplies to continue the fight (I'm going to guess part of the reason that Golden Bough, etc. have been falling to the Free Navy has to do with the situation we see with Drummer's crew -- they've been denied access to safe ports and now depend only on what they can scavenge). Finally ... it's one thing after nine rocks are sent at Earth, and only 3 successfuly hit, to hold off on attacking Ceres, Tycho, etc. Avasarala was totally right. But the way it's described they've lobbed scores more asteroids at Earth, and while most have been splashed it looked like that impact map suggested a dozen or more still made it through, either broken up or entire. If it's been half a year, that means they're launching them weekly, if not daily. At that point, have to be honest, it seems like the only sane response is to strike vulnerable targets like Ceres and other Belter stations to destroy the Free Navy's ability to resupply. What can Marco do about it? Sling more rocks? He's doing it anyways.

Jared Harris does. But it ties into my critique of last season — the reaction of the OPA leadership up to and following Fred’s death is completely invisible, the same way the Martian government response to things was completely a mystery. It’s understandable that with the limited run time they could not fit it all in, but it’s still a structural flaw to the last season.