The Potted Lid

Mecha Marathon – Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack

Several years after the events of Mobile Suit Gundam, Char Anzable is the leader of Neo-Zeon and still wants to drop a colony on the Earth. His long-time rival and fellow Newtype Amuro Ray is out to stop Char. Between them is Quess Prayana, a rebellious Newtype teenager in need of a mentor. She finds one in Char who convinces her to fight against her Earth-born family, a move that only ends in…

Mecha Marathon [Surplus] – Mobile Suit Gundam SEED

Why hello. Sorry I’ve been AWOL. I’ve been busy with life things–moving, new jobs, moving again, family drama. You know the drill. Things are calmer now, calm enough to watch an old favorite of mine. It’s not an official part of the Mecha Marathon, but have a write up about it anyway.  One year after the Bloody Valentine tragedy, where a nuclear missile destroyed a civilian colony, a covert ZAFT…

Broken Blade is six hours of anime hell Morike never finished but don't tell the others that

Rygart Arrow is the only non-magic user in a population capable of magic. One day, he is called away from his farm because his old friend Queen Sigyn of Krishna discovered an ancient golem (mecha) that cannot be controlled with magic. Rygart activates it in time to dispel a covert scouting squad of military golems paving the way for a larger invasion force from the bordering nation of Athens.…

Classic vs. Cult-Classic: Defining Cowboy Bebop’s Pop Culture Status

A space opera, a noir, and a western walk into a bar. There is no punchline for this joke, but it’s the best way I can describe Cowboy Bebop. Episodic, as whimsical as it is serious, and surprisingly diverse in the background, Cowboy Bebop premiered in North America on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block and went on to inspire a generation. I hear it mentioned in the background radiation of my life…

Mecha Marathon – The Vision of Escaflowne

On the evening Hitomi Kanzaki confesses her love to the captain of the track team, a bright light transports her to Gaea, a world where the Earth and Moon hang in the sky. There she meets Van Fanel, newly crowned king of Fanelia and the only person capable of controlling the ancient guymelef Escaflowne. After the destruction of Fanelia by the evil Zaibach Empire, Hitomi and Van set out to…

Mecha Marathon – Gargantia on the Verduous Planet

In the retreat of a failed battle campaign against an alien enemy, Ensign Ledo of the Galactic Alliance is separated from his company and sent through a wormhole. He wakes up six months later on Gargantia, a city on Earth made from a series of interlocking ships. Cut off from everything he’s ever known, Ledo starts a life on Gargantia but assimilation proves difficult when you can barely speak…

The Lost Potential of Firefly: Knowingly Adding Nothing to the Discussion of this Cult Classic

Firefly details the misadventures, both legal and illegal, of the cargo ship Serenity and its crew as they avoid detection from the bureaucratic Alliance and earn a living doing odd jobs on the intergalactic frontier. Firefly was originally released in 2002, fifteen years ago, thus putting it into the “retro television” category albeit just barely. Regardless, Imma write about it. Fight me.…

Morike reviews Aldnoah.Zero as part of her Mecha Marathon.

Fifteen years after Heaven’s Fall, a cataclysm that destroyed the Moon, relations between the Vers Empire on Mars and the United Earth are almost nonexistent. Princess Asseylum of Vers descends to Earth as a gesture of goodwill but is assassinated shortly after landing. Caught in the crossfires of the battle that ensues are Inaho Kaizuka and his classmates who must use their limited resources to…

Stargate SG-1 Seasons 1 and 2

In a dusty storage room underneath Cheyenne Mountain, a group of soldiers dodging patrol play a game of poker. They are the unsuspecting victims of Jaffa from the alien warlord Apophys who captures one of the soldiers and injure the others. An investigation of the incident leads to the restarting of the stargate program. A hastily assembled team including Colonel O’Neill and Captain Carter goes…

An Introduction to Morike's Mecha Marathon

Hello and welcome to the world of geekery that is The Potted Lid. We’re reviving the site and how we do things here, which means a few of us are embarking on projects that may or may not prove to be a little too ambitious for the amount of free time we have in our daily lives. I’m talking, of course, about my own project: the Mecha Marathon! The Mecha Marathon is an in-depth look at the mecha…

I've been thinking of starting a new series on this blog. I normally try to finish things, or make sure that I've consumed a substantial bit of them, before I write about them here. However, someti...

These are according to sleepy Morike who finds snowboarding kind of boring and used the family’s phone data streaming Olympic coverage at work.

1. Hockey

fight fight fight fight fight fight fight

aww, fighting’s not allowed. Puck.

2. Alpine skiing

The…

Dudes! It’s been, what, a year? I should get better at writing for this blog. My inattentiveness aside, I’m here to recommend some anime. Buckle up, readers, because no where in this post will you see the words Fullmetal Alchemistagain. All links take you…

Every once in a while on the “FMA” tag on Tumblr, you’ll see someone with a strong opinion for or against either FMA animes. The most common ones I see (or, more accurately, hear about) are against the Fullmetal Alchemist series made in 2003 (hereafter…

Welcome to Part II of "Why the Buu Saga Might Not Suck"! This time, the thesis is that the Majin Buu Saga presents an encapsulation of Dragon Ball in both its whimsical and serious aspects. The Buu...

I think a while ago I said I was done with FMA posts on this blog, but what do I know? I’m just a hopeless fangirl that recently dug up this gem from the depths of Tumblr. So I hope you enjoy FMA as much as I do, because there’s more coming. Trust me on…