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I'm gonna just copy this post I wrote elsewhere.

 

...

 

I recently finished Mushishi Zoku-Shou, and I'm sad to say I was kind of disappointed with it.
 
The original series is my default answer to the question "What is your favorite anime?" I fucking love it. It does everything right for me. Everything!
 
Maybe that's why I'm sorta down on Zou?
 
My problem is basically: it kind of fails a lot of times during the second half at showing Ginko as someone who sympathizes with the mushi... Instead, it's just a very formulaic thing. Some people have a problem -> Ginko shows up -> Ginko helps temporarily, sometimes leaves to come back another day -> problem grows worse -> Ginko helps permanently, and sometimes doesn't succeed in the best way but sometimes does.
 
I took a big break between the first and second half of the season, but I don't remember having this problem with the first half. Maybe because I was so excited about new Mushishi?
 
I did like both of the movies/TV-specials. At least I remember liking them.
 
But yeah I dunno. Someone tell me I'm a bad person so I can amend my opinion, thank you.

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I'm still catching up with School-Live and....

 

NOOOO! Megu-nee!

I thought she'd be the first to die in the show, but I did not expect her to be dead all along.

When you look back, it all makes sense, Yuki was the only one who didn't ignore her.

I'm gonna cry if I find out by the end that Yuki is all alone.

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I just finished binge-watching all of Flowers of Evil.

 

This was an intense experience. It is a disturbing 13 episode series about the despair of being a teenager and not knowing who the hell you are or what the hell you want. It's an extreme, exaggerated example, but... I didn't care. It was captivating? And repellent. I couldn't stop watching, although I wanted to. 

 

(maybe more complete but also more rambly-chain-of-thought impressions i just wrote in my dumb spreadsheet):

YA GOOD: this was... an intense experience. i definitely wouldn't say an enjoyable one. i made the decision (mistake) to binge-watch all 13 episodes in a single day, and it was captivating and repellant at the same time. it was uncomfortable, it was kind of terrifying. but it was never uninteresting, never dull, not even during the six-minute walk sequence in one of the middle episodes. the utter despair of being a teenager and not knowing what the hell you want or who the hell you even are is... something i don't often see captured in any meaningful way. this was definitely an over-the-top, and at times melodramatic, representation of that feeling, but it was good nonetheless. it's hard to say anything about this was likeable - the characters, the rotoscoping, the never-ending cynicism - but it was GOOD. it was disturbing, distressing, and maybe a little disgusting? but good.

 

The ending theme is distressing.

 

 

---

 

I'm now firmly in the camp that says School-Live! is bad and nobody should watch it. I'm still watching it, though.

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Last week, the long-anticipated rerelease of Neon Genesis Evangelion on Blu-ray in Japan, in honor of its twentieth anniversary and the Third Impact, debuted with roughly 23,000 copies sold in the first week, good but probably not what Khara was hoping to get. The really interesting thing is that the rerelease almost certainly pushed the number of total sales for Evangelion over 200,000 in Japan, making it the first anime series to reach that number, as well as the third franchise to break one billion yen (after Haruhi and Gintama, with Gundam SEED likely to follow in fourth place any month now).

 

My first reaction was to be happy, because the modest success of the Blu-ray rerelease, combined with the overall health of the Eva franchise and the demise of the ADV license stateside, makes an expedited licensing and importing of the Blu-rays to America, probably by FUNimation, a substantial likelihood... but maybe not. Past events have shown that GAINAX and Khara try to play hardball with license negotiations if they're enjoying almost any success (see, for example, the alleged two million-dollar price tag for the End of Evangelion license that prompted ADV to pass on it and let Manga get its awful little claws dug in) and the Eva franchise has been languishing with the international embarrassment that is the delay of two and a half years on Rebuild 3.33 coming out... well, anywhere, so I wouldn't blame anime licensing companies coming to view Eva as a poison chalice.

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Not sure what to think of the FLCL remake... original was like a good half of my tween psyche, and its animation quality still holds pretty well.  Also lot of personality of each episodes are pulled from the different people directing each episodes.  And FLCL is all about the execution, as the actual 'story' is kinda like eh?  So to 're-make' the execution part... unless they get all the original directors, doesn't seem too good :x

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Love Live!: The School Idol Movie is playing at a theater near me. What is this? Occasionally The Music Box will play anime but it's generally an Evangelion or Trigun or Escaflowne movie, something that's pretty mainstream. I've never heard of this.

 

Love Live! is a moderately popular anime about a group of schoolgirls who form a pop idol group to keep their school from closing. They succeed, with the second season of the show being mostly a victory lap. I guess the movie is them graduating? It probably won't be very meaningful if you don't know the characters, given how the movies have gone for similar franchises like K-On!, but it's certainly an interesting development.

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Oh yeah. I watched Another last night, on tegan's recommendation. All in one sitting, because I have no life. D:

 
Gotta say, I was genuinely surprised at the direction that went. I don't normally watch a lot of horror type things (mostly just through sheer lack of it appearing in front me, rather than unwillingness to engage), but this one worked for me, a lot. The show throws all kinds of red herrings at you and then a few episodes later goes "haha tricked you didn't we". I liked it.
 
some ending stuff

All the kids finally snapping at the very end felt a little melodramatic. But it's anime, so I expect it, I guess. But man they were incredibly well composed for the majority of the season and then BAM they just went completely overboard and started killing each other.

 
I'm currently obtaining the OVA because Crunchyroll doesn't have it. Obviously. |:
 
OVA follow-ups are the most annoying thing.

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I'm currently obtaining the OVA because Crunchyroll doesn't have it. Obviously. |:

 
OVA follow-ups are the most annoying thing.

 

I like Another a lot (which shouldn't be much of a surprise when the alternatives are Shiki and Higurashi) but I don't like the OVA, not one bit. It explains very specific things about one of the characters that... just didn't need to be explained at all. Like, it's an episode-long flashback and infodump that doesn't uphold the tone of the show very much at all! I wouldn't miss it if it didn't exist.

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Honestly follow-up OVAs are usually junk, so I tend to go into them expecting as much. I'm gonna watch it anyway, but I wouldn't be surprised if I end up agreeing with you.

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Yeah I can confirm the OVA is not good. It serves no purpose whatsoever.

It also features a healthy scene where two very young twin sisters grope each other in a bath tub. Great, anime!

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I dread watching the next School-Live...

The show seems to be heavily hinting that they will go to the basement where zombie Megu-nee is....

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Hah!

I legit hate this series at this point, and it's because all of the characters are so annoying. The worst most generic moe blob shit.

I am stillllll watching, though, for some reason.

Reportedly, the manga is actually good. Not sure I believe, but at the very least it's gotta be better than this.

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I just finished binge-watching all of Flowers of Evil.

 

This was an intense experience. It is a disturbing 13 episode series about the despair of being a teenager and not knowing who the hell you are or what the hell you want. It's an extreme, exaggerated example, but... I didn't care. It was captivating? And repellent. I couldn't stop watching, although I wanted to. 

 

(maybe more complete but also more rambly-chain-of-thought impressions i just wrote in my dumb spreadsheet):

YA GOOD: this was... an intense experience. i definitely wouldn't say an enjoyable one. i made the decision (mistake) to binge-watch all 13 episodes in a single day, and it was captivating and repellant at the same time. it was uncomfortable, it was kind of terrifying. but it was never uninteresting, never dull, not even during the six-minute walk sequence in one of the middle episodes. the utter despair of being a teenager and not knowing what the hell you want or who the hell you even are is... something i don't often see captured in any meaningful way. this was definitely an over-the-top, and at times melodramatic, representation of that feeling, but it was good nonetheless. it's hard to say anything about this was likeable - the characters, the rotoscoping, the never-ending cynicism - but it was GOOD. it was disturbing, distressing, and maybe a little disgusting? but good.

 

The ending theme is distressing.

 

 

---

 

I'm now firmly in the camp that says School-Live! is bad and nobody should watch it. I'm still watching it, though.

 

RE Aku no Hana: I feel like this show probably won't get another season, which is kind of a bummer considering how much of the story's themes are fleshed out after the events of the first season, and how the focus of each character changes. I would recommend the manga, but the art is kind of bad to the point of distracting from the story.

 

I also feel like everything in the story is really ad-hoc and melodramatic (especially later in the manga), but because the subject matter is so grounded and because plotlines are all coherent and consistent, it definitely had impact for me.

 

What do you think about the rotoscoping? I like the idea is that it's supposed to be as uncomfortably familiar as the feelings in the story are (uncanny valley and all that), were it's really distracting and in some places ugly.

 

RE School-Live: Yep, same here. I don't have much more to say about it but yep.

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Me and NS recorded a podcast yesterday and briefly talked about Flowers of Evil, and yeah I touched on basically everything in your post, heh. I didn't mention the melodrama, though, forgot about that... Whoops! (Hopefully the episode will be out in a timely manner...)

 

I don't know if the rotoscoping feeling weird was intentional, but it definitely affected my discomfort with the show as a whole. I want to believe it is intended, but really this is one of those cases where I wouldn't even care if the creators didn't intend something I liked.

 

It's just kinda part of the package. The series is a really good example of something that's greater than the sum of its parts.

 

Also, I feel like the show ended at a very good point. Well, "good" maybe isn't the right word, heh. It felt complete. I kind of want to read the manga, but that crazy sequence of Future Scenes at the very end was basically the perfect end to the series for me, like, yeah, the story goes on, and shit gets even more fucked, so here's a brief taste of just how fucked.

 

So even though I've heard the manga is really good, I kind of... don't want to read it, at the same time. I honestly probably will, some day. But not yet. I need some time off, haha. I mentioned that I binged the entire thing in one day, I think? Well, yeah, it fucking floored me, it's so rare for something to affect me to such a degree, too, just... too much, so yeah, a break, need one.

 

edit: that song goddamn

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RE Aku no Hana: I feel like this show probably won't get another season, which is kind of a bummer considering how much of the story's themes are fleshed out after the events of the first season, and how the focus of each character changes. I would recommend the manga, but the art is kind of bad to the point of distracting from the story.

 

I also feel like everything in the story is really ad-hoc and melodramatic (especially later in the manga), but because the subject matter is so grounded and because plotlines are all coherent and consistent, it definitely had impact for me.

 

What do you think about the rotoscoping? I like the idea is that it's supposed to be as uncomfortably familiar as the feelings in the story are (uncanny valley and all that), were it's really distracting and in some places ugly.

 

In response i shall quote myself from over 2 years & 104 pages ago
 

Anyone watching Aku no Hana? Had my doubt's about the Rotoscoping initially, but it's been used to really good effect so far with some of the expressions on the characters face's genuinely creeping me out a bit.

I'm not sure how much this is intentional and how much because it actually steps into uncanny valley territory at times, showing something that doesn't feel like a abstraction of a human or a real human.

 

My interest in Aku No Hana  initially came from the animation style it employed,  its been a long time since I've seen rotoscoping used but now I've seen the story they chose to tell with it i think it was a good choice. The series also bucks the tendency in anime to romanticise small town rural life, i think because of that (& my own small town upbringing) i sympathised more with the central character than i expected.

In many way hes not that different to the way Syntehicgerbil describes the protagonist of Tatami Galaxy, however instead of going through a typical character development arc, he spent most of the series not learning from him mistakes and instead just making things worse for himself. 

I'm also kinda interested in the way the show treats its protagonist (& therefore its own) earnestness, It tells the whole story seriously while at the same time mocking its lead characters tendency to see his own troubles in a melodramatic way.

 

I also have a vague memory of NinjaS hating the series and laughing at it's increcibly low dvd sales

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I've never seen Perfect Blue! 

 

Also someone finally fixed evangelipoop

 

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I finished Golden Time, at long last.

 

Thinking about it, the biggest recommendation I can give on it is that I want to stay in its world, among the characters with whom I've become familiar, and bask in their interactions. Toradora! had that feeling only a little for me, despite being written by the same author, and I'm almost inclined to invoke Kare Kano when trying to explain how nice it is just to watch people fall in love in the idyllic stretches of time that are our school days.

 

Really, the problem with Golden Time is that it had these charming characters and this pleasant if somewhat vague setting, but instead it puts most of its creative energy and a surprising percentage of its running time into an utterly uninteresting digression into the effects of memory on identity: do you become someone else if you lose all of your memories up until now and, if you get them back sometime in the future but lose the intervening memories in turn, have you traveled through time or just picked up where you left off? By the end of the show, it's clear that Banri's relationship with Kouko, sweet and stumbling and sincere as it is, exists principally to establish the stakes of those identities being kept or lost. It's clever enough, but overall a mistake that squanders good characters to stage a thought experiment that something as mediocre as The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan was able to pull off in less episodes with minimal flab. The flab's the thing, in Golden Time, even if the writers and director never realized it! The whole point of building these deeply flawed, easily lovable characters is to give them the space to live, play, and work together, not to hold them hostage to an incredibly artificial plotline about amnesia, the optimal outcome of which can only be for the entire show not to have been wasted time.

 

A quick look around the internet tells me that these flaws in what I'm determined to say was still a good show are present in its source material, too, and I remember Toradora! having some of the same structural issues (namely, sidelining interesting characters and relationships in the name of chasing down some abstract point about human experience, which didn't bother me quite so much in Toradora! because most of the characters there were awful little shits at one point or another) so I guess the perfect version of Golden Time — with Kouko, the childhood bride who needs to find herself as an adult; Banri, the amnesiac who's unsure of who he is and who he can be; Yana, the ladykiller who's drawn to women who don't want or need him; Chinami, the friendly girl who filters emotions through her camcorder; 2D-kun, the guy who believes in love to the point that he shuns real women; and Linda, whose fundamental complexity never really made itself entirely clear to me — is going to have to exist only in my mind, which is mostly okay in the end, since that's where I reside. I just wish that the anime had preferred the story of Banri and Kouko trying to build trust in each stage of their relationship de novo, over the story of an asshole ghost trying to erase his former body from existence, in everyone else's reality, too.

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