Based on episode 1, Asobi Asobase is extremely good. I can’t believe I didn’t watch it until now.
Skeleton working in a manga shop. Sadly the skeleton seems more of an avatar than being an actual spoopy skellington, as he’s named Honda and the original web manga artist goes by Honda so I’m guessing its at least a little autobiographical. I have an inkling the manga shop in question is Mandarake in Osaka.
So I’ve started watching:
Honda-san, which is comedy diamonds.
Devilman Crybaby, which is fucking bonkers and hits that nostalgic feeling from when I was first getting into anime and, the edgy teenage appeal of ‘oh man a cartoon with gratuitous boobs and violence.’
SSSS.Gridman, goes for nostalgia of elementary school me instead of high school me. Classic dumb tokusatsu monster of the week plot but it’s so much fun and it’s so nicely animated.
Goblin Slayer has some problems, there’s arguments to be made about the first episode’s depiction of sexual assault and whether it’s problematic, but overall I like it. The story of a stone cold killer who does one thing and he’s really fucking good at it, and that is kill goblins. I also sense there is a Terrible Secret of Space brewing.
I finally got to Violet Evergarden. Holy shit. I’ve seen one episode and Kyoto Animation pulled out all the stops. It’s GORGEOUS. Like approaching Ghibli level gorgeous. It’s going to be heart wrenching, my wife and I were both misty after the first episode.
Over the weekend I watched Hanebado!, a manga-adaptation about women’s badminton. The series impresses with excellent animation for the choreography of its matches, particularly in the first episode. I also strongly like the themes it showcases, focusing less on beating an “opponent” but more on overcoming your own failings and psychological trauma. Unfortunately it only so-so executes on this for a large part.
The show has two protagonists and opens with the two facing each other in a tournament where Nagisa Aragaki is absolutely dominated by Ayano Hanesaki despite being two years older, taller and stronger, and despite Ayano only appearing to have passing interest in the match itself, behaving robotically and dismissive (sporting full “Yandere eyes”). This is later revealed because her mother, a champion badminton player had abandoned her.
The following spring Ayano joins the same school as Nagisa, but has since given up on badminton. Meanwhile Nagisa, the captain of the badminton club, has been working her club to the bone, taking out her frustration on her surroundings. Ayano reluctantly joins the club, primarily because her childhood friend more or less forces her into it, believing it would be good for her and she shouldn’t abandon what she has talent for.
While this setup has obvious parallels to other shows such as Haikyuu! and Your Lie in April, this “vanquishing of inner demons” and “do what you love because it makes you happy, not for someone else” are still good concepts worth exploring, but it only kind of works in the show. For Nagisa they work pretty quickly through her issues, almost too quickly, but she has a good arc there and moves forward. For Ayano less so as she erratically makes progress toward becoming a better person only to revert even more so when she is confronted with another character called Connie Christensen, a girl her mother trained after abandoning Ayano. From that point on Ayano just behaves like an absolute and complete asshole in the series, being callously dismissive of her opponents and taunting her teammates, particularly Nagisa, every chance she gets. It gets even worse when her mother returns.
It is also one of the biggest failings of the series in not resolving story-strand with Connie at all, most likely because the manga hasn’t done so either yet. They still try to redeem Ayano to a certain extend with the final showdown between her and Nagisa in the tournament that takes up about half of the 13-season series, but it only kind of works and kind of seems rushed and not really believable.
So in resume, a show for the sakuga-heads, excellent animation and choreography, with aspirations of some great themes, but shortcomings in execution of writing.
I’ve been watching My Hero Academia on and off for a while now, trying to get caught up. Not much to say on the series overall that hasn’t been said before. It is a shonen series after all, but top class at that including some explorations on what a super-powered society would look like, and the parallels it draws to our current society, while still fulfilling the necessary tropes, scenes and expectations for a series of that genre in a masterful way. The anime going the “Ippo” style adaptation for a long running series in being animated toward a season rather than the “Dragonball” style of being on air every week with long-stretched out scenes and story arcs or filler is also by far the obviously better choice.
I finally made it to episode 49 today. I read those scenes in the manga but hot damn, does the anime adaptation knock it out of the fucking park. Literal fucking goosebumps, last of which I felt for a shonen battle series while reading the end of the summit war in One Piece. “Next, it’s your turn!”
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Watching Zombieland Saga. It’s moe trash, but it’s the right type of undead spooky trash for me.
I heard it was good, and I especially want to watch now because basement dwelling assholes are crying about there being a canonically trans character in it.
I thought basement-dwellers were ok with trans girls as long as you don’t tell them “trap” is offensive.
There’s whole mental jungle gym to unravel with that, but apparently the issue here is that someone with poor Japanese skills misunderstood the spoken Japanese in a scene, and accused the Crunchyroll translation team of making up new dialog out of whole cloth for the subtitles in order to make a character trans when they were not. This was done, of course, in order to push the “SJW agenda” etc… In reality, where we live, the reveal of the character being trans was telegraphed for several episodes and the scene in question was accurately translated.
All that said, watched three episodes of Zombieland Saga and can say that its good silly fun so far, and if it has some positive social messages in it too I’m all the more interested.
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Yeah, five episodes in it’s actually really good. I’m enjoying the cute body horror, which is a sentence I never thought I’d type.
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Just watched the most recent episode, and I can’t say that there was any ambiguity about the character being trans whatsoever. She has difficulty while bringing up her deadname and refers to it as “the name she threw away” and that it is not who she is. As I expected, that the original excuse of misunderstanding spoken lines was a lie spread in bad faith to foment the basement dwellers.
Bored at work so let’s review some of the random crap I’ve been watching recently:
Not sure what to say about Top wo Nerae! Gunbuster. Its a classic and easy to see how it laid groundwork for later Gainax shows like EVA, but it is definitely not without its flaws in it being needlessly fanservicy at times and the live story with Smith comes out of left field and with little motivation. It is a bit trashy that way, but entertaining and I like the hard sci-fi elements sprinkled in.
Sweetness and Lightning Is a very cute show about raising a small kid and food. The setup is a bit squicky with a teacher going to his female students house and them cooking together, but thankfully nothing ever comes of that. It reminds me a lot of Yotsuba&! in a manner, and that is a good thing. Decent little timewaster.
Amagi Brilliant Park, a.k.a. Rollercoaster Tycoon the anime, is fun show about trying to reinvigorating a run down theme park inhabited by people from a fairy land who literally need human joy to survive. How they let their theme park become so run down is anybodys guess. The show has some great gags but is far from a must-watch.
Fumikiri Jikan is a 5-minute anime about stuff happening while people wait at railroad crossings. The episodes with a brother and sister convoing only via text message are a bit ugh, and the guy in the bush is gross, but I had a couple of laughs.
School-Live is the infamous moe-girls in the zombie apocalypse show. It of course has a nice twist with the first episode being set up like the typical crappy school club anime show, only for it to be revealed that the character whose POV with been following had mental break and that is their coping mechanism, and in actually the fucking zombie apocalypse has happened. Unfortunately with that the show has basically done most of what it would be worth watching for. There is another twist in the middle, but you could see that one coming a mile away anyhow.
Finally, Tamako Market is a very endearing slice-of-life style show about the daughter of a mochi shop owner who finds a weird talking bird who hails from a southern island. The bird gets fat and decides to stay a bit even though he is supposed to be looking for the bride-to-be for the prince of his island. The characters are really cute in a natural way (i.e. unlike School-Lives rather forced moe-cutness) and also have some deeper layers to them with an undertone of relationships that get resolved throughout the series. One of the plot threads left unresolved is an unrequited love that Tamako’s classmate and neighbor harbors for her, which is dealt with the sequel movie Tamako Love Story which is a very nice genre-shifting follow up.
Update on Zombieland Saga: Watch it. Seriously it’s so good. I have now cried two episodes in a row at a show about zombie pop idols.
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I shotgunned all of Oshiete! Galko-chan! after hearing it’s not what it looks like at first glance, which was that it would be a shallow risque female objectification show, which it really isn’t. It’s another show with good messages, about how you shouldn’t judge by looks, about how girls and women aren’t mysterious ethereal things on a pure pedestal but normal people, body positivity, etc. It has young women talking about their bodies and sex in a way that while funny did not sink to the voyeuristic or salacious.
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Currently watching Laid-Back Camp a.k.a. Yurukyan a.k.a. cute girls go camping. I started it mostly because I saw the OP and it seemed like a fun show for in between. Turns out its an Iyashikei show and just wonderfully tranquil and wholesome. The character art is definitely not everybody’s cup of tea, but the show is filled with absolutely gorgeous nature shots. I basically watch an episode a day in the early morning because its a very nice start into the day, or occasionally right before bed. Not something everybody has to pick up, but if you just want to see time melt away while you are having a nice cup of hot chocolate on your couch, this is the show for you. Also there is a second season and a movie in the works.
In a similar manner because I was looking a show with such a laid-back feeling I started to rewatch Flying Witch recently, watching it in a similar manner. That show and Sketchbook ~Full Colors~ are probably recommendations I would put above Laid-Back Camp due to better character art, more fleshed out and interesting characters and better dynamic, but all three of these shows have a similar vibe.
I also started watching Skull-faced Bookseller Honma, which is a very funny work-comedy about bookstore clerks and shelf-stockers. The animation is very minimalistic as most characters wear masks and other headwear that obscures the face and thus not even mouth-flaps happen most of the time. The style reminds me a lot of Detroit Metal City and in particular Astro Fighter Sunred. As the episodes are only 11 minutes long including opening and closing credits, it is a great show to watch in between.
A show I recently finished is Bokura wa Minna Kawai-sō or as the english title has it, The Kawai Complex Guide to Manors and Hostel Behavior, which was better than I expected it to be. There are still too many boob gags in there and some of the characters are deliberately unlikeable, but as a romance series it has a bit of something to it as there is no love-dodecahedron going on and no ecchi bs constantly happening. It is actually relatively wholesome and the main characters gradually grow towards each other. The show also impresses with a very beautiful art direction for its backgrounds. Hardly a must-see, but better than you would think from the premise.
After recently finishing the english release of the manga for Kuroko’s Basketball, I started watching the anime, but I think I will drop it. The anime doesn’t really add a whole lot, and the action scenes for the actual basketball being played has been rather subpar so far. I’m 10 episodes in and I don’t think its worth watching it, particularly since I’ve read the manga anyway.
Finally there is Kotoura-san a.k.a. Mood-Whiplash the Anime. So this show starts with an interesting premise of a girl that has a low-level psychic ability of being able to read the minds of people in close proximity to her. This manifests in very early childhood and she doesn’t really understand it, starting to blurt out secrets of other people around her, including her parents who both seem to have affairs. She is then shunned for this and abandoned by her parents, entering high school friendless and alone. And then she meets a horny moron who doesn’t care about it and falls in love with her.
Despite the dire setup and the show repeatedly “relapsing” to address stuff like bullying, child abandonment etc. the show is actually a comedy with kind of stereotypical jokes. Now those jokes can and do land on occasion, have illicited a couple of guffaws from me, I admit. However, based on the premise the show could have been so much better by just focusing on the straits the titular character goes through. Instead she is basically over 8+ years of being constantly vilified and ostracized by episode 2 of the show.
We judged the current season instead of doing a Wednesday show last week. Scott’s working hard to get it up for all of you to enjoy.
There are several current shows that look worth watching!
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How I can tell Rym writes lots of emails to business people.
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Or pornography.
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Perche no los dos?
“The Business Strategy team is working hard get it up in time for the shooting date of the money shot”
Touching base changes meaning drastically in the pornography field.