[b]Future Movie Club Society![/b]

"I... you... really mean that? You actually want to hear me talk about film?"

Euna Kim blinks with the acuity of a woman who has apparently forgotten how. Her smile is equal parts giddy and incredulous. This is a topic she's tried to broach with a hundred different people to only middling degrees of success. The people who take her classes and the people who like the sorts of movies that get her blood pumping may as well not even exist. 

She slumps down into a chair Cinders has swooped out of nowhere to get for her. She's run her own gauntlet multiple times tonight trying to calibrate it for public use. She ran multiple weight training classes and a pair of self defense sessions with some of her (other) best students before you got here. Most of her diet today has been liquid nutrient solutions out of pure time necessity, something that only works because the main power source of her cybernetics is actually her own biochemistry feeding into a system of batteries that amplify the output to enable the crazy stuff she gets up to. The demands on her metabolism are immense, but it means calories are power for her in a way that most people, including less enhanced cyborgs, can't really claim.

But still, the intake to output ratio has been absurdly skewed in favor of expenditure today, and that was before she got too into Yellow's sparring session. This at the end of all of it? Too much for her. She had a spike of adrenaline and then all of a sudden she entered low power mode without warning. Cinders has already disappeared up into Euna's office looking for the emergency food supplies, Euna herself is just sitting there with that same smile on her face like she couldn't care less about her body's sudden betrayal.

"A movie night is essential, I think. For your training, obviously. I have a lot of files that aren't that widely disseminated anymore after the official platforms pulled them for tax purposes. You know I used to -- actually, never mind. Just give me a bit of time and I'll figure out an appropriate screen to make this happen. But in the meantime you're gonna want to check out the [i]Duelist[/i] trilogy."

She pauses, frowns a little bit in thought, and then nods to herself.

"Yeah. That's a good launching point if you want to make a lot of interesting opponents for yourself. It's a high fantasy swords and sorcery adventure series starring the Eternal Maiden Elvia. She's this part vampire, part dryad swordswoman who's all doom and gloom and serious dour brooding from some shadowy corner or a tree top about the bloody nature of battles and her life and how because she's so dangerous she needs to be alone. But then her sword, Lillyblossom? Is enchanted and can talk, and it's hilariously optimistic and always pushes her to get back out there and keep... ahem. Not the relevant part. Like I said it's three full length movies, all in this incredibly unique, almost melty dream style animation. [i]Duelist in the Mirror Castle[/i] follows her quest to save a noble lady from a witch whose body is made out of a bunch of animated shards of glass - it's got the best one-on-many fight choreography in the series and it does the best job of demonstrating a melee only skill set against someone with proficiency in ranged combat and ambush tactics. 

"After that, [i]Duelist in the Rose Garden[/i] pits her against the mystic arms dealer, Lady Rapier. She and Elvia have I think the only proper no nonsense duel in the whole film set, meaning there aren't any interruptions and it's a pure one on one with two people who use very similar styles and philosophies about combat even though outwardly they are polar opposites to one another. You can get a good handle on the dynamics of large weapon/small weapon and power stances' natural advantage over movement redirection, which is something that most stories get completely backwards because they want to make normal sized actors seem like badasses and it's just... it just isn't true, ok? Being huge and swinging something really hard is just fundamentally the kind of thing where you have to be almost flawless to overcome it. [i]Rose Garden[/i] really understands that, you can tell the director spent time as a stuntman in physical cinema before jumping to animation.

"And then there's [i]A Duel Must End at Dawn[/i] which is... hrm. It's a much slower film, mostly dealing with Elvia's blood curse and how lonely she feels when she can't leave her home-slash-prison to be with the girl she saved in the first movie. Like, she fights some forest monsters and then she rides a giant wolf like it's a motorcyle and that's rad as heck but it's, like... a lot of people call it a skip because it's trying to put the brooding and introspection ahead of the action and it doesn't introduce a new major villain on the level of either of the previous stories. It's still a good case study in how technique falls apart due to poor motivations and how to navigate a life or death situation in the middle of being stuck at emotional low tide and an energy sapping curse, but to be honest with you it's mostly the excuse to finally lay the lesbian shipping on super thick after teasing fans with it for four and a half hours of prior story. The company actually tried to walk back the ending after the fact which is [i]hilarious[/i] given how blatant they were but... ahem. It is still worth a watch from the amateur combat enthusiast's perspective too."