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Thanks for the recommendations fellow readers. Of those titles suggested i think the only ones which were new to me were Oh Edo Rocket & Golden Boy. Of those i think the former sounds pleasantly absurd and the latter a bit creepy.

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Oreimo took a while to get into, it's quite bad. I really liked Kuroneko though, so I liked the weird alternative timeline thing. By the way, the pair-up of the protagonist with Kuroneko is totally canon - it happens in the light novels as well.

 

I am nerd.

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Speaking of awkward otaku pandering, I'm kinda digging Watashi ga Motenai no wa dou Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui! so far. I always like hikikomori or NEET stuff, but the added layer of a female protagonist who is not really fetishized in any way keeps me coming back for more. I mean, Tomoko should be attractive to me, if I know my own moé, but she is just such an awful and miserable person in WataMote that I'm not. I think I find that interesting?

 

Also, 2013: year of the sentence-long title that everyone references using just the first couple syllables. Wasn't FLCL a parody of that back in 2000?

 

Oreimo took a while to get into, it's quite bad. I really liked Kuroneko though, so I liked the weird alternative timeline thing. By the way, the pair-up of the protagonist with Kuroneko is totally canon - it happens in the light novels as well.

 

I am nerd.

 

I'd rather spend time with any girl in the series other than Kirino, but the "first girl" rule is in play here. Even if the show didn't feature her in its title, she was the first female character the protagonist met, therefore she trumps all other love interests. Even if they rock, like Kuroneko. Such is the stuff of "best girl" threads all over the internet.

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Just use the damned English title; fuck.

 

Thanks for the recommendations fellow readers. Of those titles suggested i think the only ones which were new to me were Oh Edo Rocket & Golden Boy. Of those i think the former sounds pleasantly absurd and the latter a bit creepy.

 

Golden Boy is seriously great and not at all creepy. Mainly because Kintaro is a legitimately good and intelligent person despite always making terribly creepy first impressions.

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I had a friend stop watching during the scene where Kintaro visualizes his hand as his penis. Golden Boy definitely doesn't care what you think about it, which can be more of a turnoff to some than you'd think.

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Just use the damned English title; fuck.

PREACH IT!

 

I've been watching the entire Dragonball series with a friend because we hate ourselves.

 

We made it through Dragonball Proper. We just got to Goku vs. Freeza in Dragonball Z Kai. I thought Kai was supposed to cut out the filler. The Goku vs Freeza fight is going to literally be ten episodes, STILL. They didn't do a very good job, I think. (That said, it's under 100 episodes now, as opposed to, what, 260-ish? But they drop the Buu saga entirely, so there's that.)

 

We're also going to watch Dragonball GT AND the movies, neither of which I've ever seen. Did I mention we hate ourselves?

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I've been watching the entire Dragonball series with a friend because we hate ourselves.

 

We made it through Dragonball Proper. We just got to Goku vs. Freeza in Dragonball Z Kai. I thought Kai was supposed to cut out the filler. The Goku vs Freeza fight is going to literally be ten episodes, STILL. They didn't do a very good job, I think.

 

We're also going to watch Dragonball GT AND the movies, neither of which I've ever seen. Did I mention we hate ourselves?

 

But has Dragonball Z Kai been worth your time overall? I have a friend who loves DBZ so much, he's been trying to sell me that Kai is pretty much a whole new series. I know that's a lie, but is it even half the mess that the original cuts were?

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There's zero filler. Um, is it worth my time... I don't really know? Hah. I enjoyed DBZ a whole hell of a lot when I was a kid. Filler, too. It's definitely a more efficient series now, but it still drags on. There've been a few times where I just go, "Nothing has happened this entire episode. What kind of mess was this before they edited it?" I'm mostly watching it now as a novelty. A lot of my enjoyment now comes from laughing at the absurdity. I'd probably stop if I wasn't watching it with a friend.

 

Also Dragonball is so vastly superior to Dragonball Z or Kai that it's insane to me DBZ went on as long as it did during its original run.

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I still kind of have a soft spot for the first season of Dragon Ball, plus that portion of the manga it was based on. I don't know what it is but it's like Akira Toriyama had better drawing skills back then with more construction and appeal than what he later put out. Plus the story is much cuter and imaginative. Beyond that, my Dragonball days have been over since 8th grade.

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Not anime related, but fuck it: this weekend I was at the Dutch Abunai anime convention and they screened the live action Rurouni Kenshin film. It was fantastic, I loved it. Now I'm seriously considering purchasing the delectable Vizbig luxury editions of the manga. It'll cost me 150 euros and will introduce 4 kilograms of manga to somewhere stack, but I'm oh so tempted.

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Not anime related, but fuck it: this weekend I was at the Dutch Abunai anime convention and they screened the live action Rurouni Kenshin film. It was fantastic, I loved it. Now I'm seriously considering purchasing the delectable Vizbig luxury editions of the manga. It'll cost me 150 euros and will introduce 4 kilograms of manga to somewhere stack, but I'm oh so tempted.

 

Do you know think the live action Kenshin is likely to make it onto any of the streaming services (anime or otherwise) in the EU? Living in the middle of nowhere means the chances of getting to see it in a cinema are effectively zero.

 

 

I had a friend stop watching during the scene where Kintaro visualizes his hand as his penis. Golden Boy definitely doesn't care what you think about it, which can be more of a turnoff to some than you'd think.

 

 

Golden Boy is seriously great and not at all creepy. Mainly because Kintaro is a legitimately good and intelligent person despite always making terribly creepy first impressions.

 

Just watched the first episode of golden boy & weirdly it feels like both those statements were 100% correct.

I think tegan had a good point about the protagonist being a good person, it's just he's one with a weird combination of a uncontrolled id and innocence, but it does still fall firmly under the "never want a partner/ family member to walk in while I'm watching this" category of anime.

 

Which brings us back to Oreimo which I took a peak at to see if it was as bad as some had suggested & yes the premise is more than a little cringeworthy, but there is definitely a budget behind the animation. The prevalence of brother/sister combo's etc. in anime and manga is something which I remember making me think that Japanese culture would always remain really alien to me in some ways no matter how much anime i watched. It still does, but having watched From Up On Poppy Hill last year I now kinda get that there is a whole set of historic circumstances behind that cultural fixation, and it feels a little bit more understandable.

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I doubt that a big budget live action film will show up on a streaming site. The good news is; there's a good chance this film will appear on DVD/BluRay somewhere along the line. Or visit an anime convention somewhere, they might screen it like they did over here?

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I just finished Oh Edo Rocket, very glad it was recommended and along with some Saints Row 4 it's provided enough absurd humour to my evenings get me through some tough work. Thanks everyone.

 

Really enjoyed the Dub too, but i was wondering do the other readers generally prefer English translations scripts like this where it feels they are trying to capture the spirit of the work rather than stick to it word for word, or tend to be happier with more literal ones?

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Really enjoyed the Dub too, but i was wondering do the other readers generally prefer English translations scripts like this where it feels they are trying to capture the spirit of the work rather than stick to it word for word, or tend to be happier with more literal ones?

 

I generally prefer literal translations with notes, if only because of my academic background. I'd rather learn how a joke was funny in the original Japanese than be told a different joke that I likely already know in English. Nothing bugs me more than the philosophy of fansub groups like gg or Commie, who reedit whole swaths of Joshiraku and Bakemonogatari in order to make work jokes that they came up with themselves, rather than just translate and explain what's actually being said.

 

That said, I think that Oh! Edo Rocket's official dub is probably the best of the alternatives. The show is fast-paced, with the comedy depending on flow and fluency, so they change it if there's a good English equivalent, but give notes in edge cases. A lot of the stuff that breaks the fourth wall involves internet lingo and memes,but someone in the FUNimation office must have known a scary lot about both 2channel and 4chan, to hear the dub script tell. And then, at a few points, they do wholesale reinterpretation, mostly with stuff like calling the policeman "Hatchobori," which has a really complicated history that's wholly unrelated to the humor of the nickname and impossible to translate anyway, so they just use "pig" instead and leave the explaining to a DVD extra.

 

I don't know if it supersedes the Japanese language track like only a rare few dubs do, but it's certainly worth a listen, which I can't say for most others.

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Really enjoyed the Dub too, but i was wondering do the other readers generally prefer English translations scripts like this where it feels they are trying to capture the spirit of the work rather than stick to it word for word, or tend to be happier with more literal ones?

 

It depends on the series, but I generally prefer the former. The most striking example I can think of is the manga Yotsuba&! The Yen Press translation is clunky and unnatural while the ADV translation was far stronger for taking a handful of creative liberties and avoiding honorifics and untranslated text wherever possible. Its reads like transcripts of actual conversation.

 

Also,

 

“Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog, you learn a lot in the process, but in the end you kill it.” ~Mark Twain

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I had a friend stop watching during the scene where Kintaro visualizes his hand as his penis. Golden Boy definitely doesn't care what you think about it, which can be more of a turnoff to some than you'd think.

 

I just watched the episode where this happens. Perhaps the weirdest thing about it is how casual the whole thing thing seems to be treated. It's almost like "why of course he's imagining his hand is a penis, what else do you expect!"

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I just finished the second season of Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai (translation: I Can't Believe I'd Pass Up an Adorable Goth Girl for My Evil Shrew of a Little Sister).

 

It was the sort of show that I couldn't believe I was watching almost the whole time. I've seen my share of harem anime, but never one where I was any less onboard with the main couple. Literally any other female that appeared onscreen would have been preferable to the toxic and annoying Kirino, even Kuroneko's ten-year-old sister Hinata, who seemed to have a good head on her shoulders.

 

It's especially unbelievable because there are some really and truly enjoyable side characters fighting Kirino for screen time. Kuroneko, Saori, and Manami were all joys to have around, but they all got rejected by Kyousuke because of fiat-by-source-material. It almost makes me want to get a hacked PSP to play the visual novel and actually see an ending with Kuroneko that doesn't leave her in tears. Ugh, anime.

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so is this show unironically about incest or what

tumblr_mdgdrkYEUn1qb8jzfo1_500.gif

 

It starts out being ironic about being unironic, but forgets/doesn't care by the end. It's actually great at the end when Manami, the childhood friend, is like, "You know what you're doing is impossible and also gross, right?"

But everyone else besides the brother and sister is great fun, plus there's a lot of money on display. It's an odd one.

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For reasons unknown to me, I just watched 009 RE: CYBORG, a 2012 movie based on Cyborg 009.  Pretty dumb overall, but there are a few things worth noting:

 

  • The NSA has the ability to create zombie cyborgs (they're basically just reanimated bodies and don't look anything like "zombies" but that's what they call them)
  • At one point America is referred to as being part of an Axis of Evil
  • The actual villain of the movie is

    God

  • Anime Obama

rZ7OorH.jpg

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