Welcome to another general discussion thread! Feel free to use this thread to talk about things you have watched recently, questions you have, or recommendations you want to give!
As always, remember to be mindful of spoilers. If you want to know more about how to handle spoilers in this community, check the guide here (also linked in the sidebar).
Want to highlight two shows completed this week, both of which have eyebrow-raising premises at first glance.
TsumaSho: Yeah, lol at the official localizations omitting the “My Wife is Reincarnated as an Elementary School Student” part (they don’t want to get cancelled). It would be a really good moving-on story about getting to terms of the MC losing his wife,
spoiler
if they did not deceive Takae about him and his co-worker Moriya getting married. Wow, it’s been a long time since I was royally pissed over an ending. I did ship Keisuke and Moriya, but the more problematic part is the insult to the audience’s (and Takae’s) intelligence that his dead wife would be contented because of a fake proposal. Okabe Rintaro deceived the world. This is but a cheap knock-off.
It’s bad enough for the rating to drop down a notch because of one episode.
Tawawa on Monday: Features not just an age gap and a student-teacher relationship, but also some more “mundane” ones like an office senpai-kouhai and high-schoolers who are childhood friends. Even without the fanservice, its story punches well above its four-minute episode length. They were able to weave different plot (and “plot”) points together into a coherent story. The top-notch voice acting adds to the enjoyment. My favorite is Kayano Ai’s performance as Kouhai-chan. Unironically watched this for the plot.
Tawawa on Monday
I bounced off of this one a few weeks ago. I liked the first episode and (what I thought was);the overall concept, but when the next episode introduced a different female lead who was immediately mostly defined by large bouncy breasts, I was a bit disconcerted, and then when I skipped ahead and sampled some of the other episodes, all apparently featuring different women, all defined by large bouncy breasts, I lost interest.
I’ll have to give it another shot though. It’s not that I dislike large bouncy breasts, but that I tend to assume that when they make such an early and prominent appearance, there’s not going to be much else of note.
I bounced off of this one
ehehe
This week we powered through the first three episodes of Kowloon Generic Romance. Sadly, we both came away feeling underwhelmed. The bones of a great show are there; I dig the aesthetic, KWC is a fascinating locale, and I love a good mystery. But the pacing and tone feel kind of wonky. The big reveals, if you can call them that, tend to be simply stated in the most uninteresting way possible.
Then we crawled through the backlog and ended up putting on Akiba Maid Wars. I had heard this was a fun show a while ago but never sat down to watch it. The first two episodes delivered pretty much exactly what I’d hoped. It’s absurd, hilarious and wildly violent.
I am of course still obsessed with Rock is a Lady’s Modesty. Very excited to see what kind of trouble the younger step sister is likely to cause in the near future.
Started off the week with Gabriel Dropout, which is a barrel of fun. The basic setup is that in order to qualify as full-fledged angels or demons (as the case might be), angels/demons in training have to spend some time on Earth, which is how we end up with two angels and two demons making up the foursome for a CGDCT screwball comedy slice of school life. I liked it all the way through - good characters (none of them are particularly good at what they’re supposed to be), laugh out loud humor, nice artstyle. It’s not quite to YuruYuri or Lucky Star quality, but was well worth it.
Then, craving a bit more screwball comedy, I went back to a long-time guilty pleasure and rewatched Photon aka Photon: The Idiot Adventures. It’s a sort of sci-fi adventure story set on a far distant future Earth with a straightforward comedy hook - every single major character is an idiot of one sort or another. And in fact, their entire sort of quasi-mystical technology is based on “aho energy” - idiot energy. It’s not great by any means, but it’s good idiotic fun.
Then I sort of steeled my resolve and dove into one that I dropped after a couple of episodes about a year ago, because I could see it was going to be a rough ride, and at the time I wasn’t ready to invest as much energy and attention as it was going to demand - Noein: Mou Hitori no Kimi e. I’m about 2/3 of the way through the 24 episode run, and it has been very dense and dramatic, and very good. It’s a sort of Evangelion knock-off insofar as it’s in part a complex and vague science fiction/superpower war allegory on coming of age, but without the religious claptrap - it’s instead all built around quantum physics and multiverse theory. The only real downside to it is that the animation is frankly terrible - an awful combination of cheap fuzzy hand drawn and cheap low poly CGI. But the characters and the story make it worth it.
Then I sort of steeled my resolve and dove into one that I dropped after a couple of episodes about a year ago, because I could see it was going to be a rough ride, and at the time I wasn’t ready to invest as much energy and attention as it was going to demand - Noein: Mou Hitori no Kimi e. I’m about 2/3 of the way through the 24 episode run, and it has been very dense and dramatic, and very good. It’s a sort of Evangelion knock-off insofar as it’s in part a complex and vague science fiction/superpower war allegory on coming of age, but without the religious claptrap - it’s instead all built around quantum physics and multiverse theory. The only real downside to it is that the animation is frankly terrible - an awful combination of cheap fuzzy hand drawn and cheap low poly CGI. But the characters and the story make it worth it.
In all fairness, Noein is ~20 years old. The animation was pretty much state-of-the-art at the time, and I remember it drawing praise from a couple of the more jaded members of the Usenet anime crowd. It just hasn’t aged as well as some less-ambitious shows of the same era.
Mmm… I can sort of see that. There are some impressive special effects that accompany the future technology that were likely dazzling for the time. And the CGI for the backgrounds likely was state of the art (and certainly better than, for example, Initial D).
Still though - the character animation seems pretty poor regardless of age, and the contrast of rough, fuzzy character art with simple, rigid, entirely rectilinear CGI backdrops is distracting.
All that said though, I don’t want to focus on the art too much. It’s a thing I noticed, so I mentioned it, but more to the point, the story is very good and intriguing and (so far) well plotted and paced, and the characters are well developed, and I’ll forgive pretty much anything for a good story with good characters.
Finally sorted out what I will and will not be watching this season.
Dropped:
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I’m the Evil Lord of a Galactic Empire: Unappealing protag who decides he deserves revenge on everyone in existence because of two people.
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Shin Samurai-den Yaiba: Although I found the Detective-Conan-mangaka-draws-Dragonball artwork style amusing, the story really didn’t grab me.
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Dinner-Table Detective: One of the characters really rubbed me the wrong way. .
Barely made it:
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Yami Healer: The first episode was really awful with its 10+ minutes of continuous harem fluff (made worse because I had no reason to care about the characters), and if people hadn’t posted here that the second was much better, this would have ended up in the “dropped” bin.
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Your Forma: Dropping the first story arc from the source material, which would presumably have explained more of the background, really wasn’t the best choice here, but we’ll see where it goes.
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I have hardly had a chance to watch anything this past week. Basically, the only shows I got the chance to watch are not airing this season, but I have been slowly watching together with my wife.
- Natsume’s Book of Friends Season 7 - I finished up the final couple episodes of the season this past week and they were excellent. The final two episodes of this season are frankly, two of the best episodes of the entire show. I hope we don’t have to wait so long for another season again.
- Rurouni Kenshin Season 2 of the remake - Still working through this show and have watched up through episode 17 now (Kenshin just finished his training). My favorite character in this show is Hiko Seijuro, so I have been really enjoying the past couple episodes. I am sad that I won’t see him as much anymore though.
Meta comment: Next week I am hoping to be the OP/ED thread for the season. So, start thinking about it now!
I tried 2 episodes of Witch Watch and enjoyed it, so I’m continuing with it.
I’m also planning to give To Be Hero X a shot.
Is anyone else’s favorite anime The Big O as well?
Weekly ranking roundup:
- Anime Corner - Full Results - Weekly Winner: Witch Watch
- Reddit Karma - Weekly Winner: Apothecary Diaries
Credit to /u/Abysswatcherbel for making the chart for reddit karma and /u/Nooble5 for the Anime Trending chart.
Witch Watch and Apothecary Diaries stay atop their respective charts this week. There is a lot of movement on the AC chart while the reddit chart has stayed pretty stable. One thing I have noticed this season is that the total reddit karma is pretty low (just a bit over 14k this week). That number is usually over 20k. So, that could mean that either the season is pretty weak for reddit users overall, or that there are fewer active reddit users. I suspect the former, but kind of hope for the latter.
