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I also interpreted the Borus fight as a sort of pity-fight on Saitama's part, but I agree with gorm that Saitama making a conscious decision to hold back is a stretch.

 

There are other times in the show where he hits people in nonlethal ways, lets people do their moves on him for a little bit, just to entertain them and himself, briefly. He IS sympathetic toward Boros, and tries to let him have a moment at the end, but he wasn't "holding back" anymore than he usually does. For Twig's interpretation to be believable for me, I would have liked to see him actively try and look like he's fighting. What actually happens is Saitama is just as bored as usual, but mildly surprised that Boros is as strong as he is. He's not bending over backwards to make this enjoyable for Borus, nor does he feel compelled to put any real effort in. That's why Borus says it wasn't even a battle. Saitama wants to be nice, but he still doesn't really care.

 

The brilliant thing about it though, is that I DO think the scene intends for you to draw the tragic comparison between Saitama and Borus. It wants you to want that narrative, of a mutual loneliness that might inspire some real satisfaction in both characters. Then, in the spirit of the show, it takes it all away. Both Borus and Saitama got NOTHING at all from the fight, and Borus says something like: "So much for the prophecy."

 

So in that sense, gorm, i dont think it breaks any rules. The core identity of Saitama isn't that he only uses exactly one punch, but his infinite strength negates all purpose out of a shounen world where strength is the source of purpose. Saitama can't have rivals or enemys like Borus, he can't make inspiring speeches in the face of all odds (like the bike rider guy, the best scene in the show) because there's no chance he can ever lose. I don't understand why Saitama throwing a few more punches makes this core tragedy any less true. As long as Saitama doesn't try (and he didn't), the show still works. 

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Yeah I thought the same as Gorm since it appeared to raise the stakes of the plot artificially in the same way regular shonen shows do. But in the end I felt that the language used highlights a different goal. If one "serious punch" was all it took to defeat this near omnipotent destroyer of worlds, then it makes Saitama's actual, present strength (not his potential strength) incredibly vast and unknowable, which makes his ennui seem even stronger. Saitama's goal isn't exactly to become stronger but to feel the thrills of life he had before he become super strong.

I just wish this series was more about him eventually giving up on the hero fantasy, and undermine the idea of "a good death", rather than purely showing the horrible loneliness that this lack of purpose inflicts.

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I guess I have information you people don't have. Because he's definitely holding back. U:

 

It's also worth noting that Saitama always says he's a hero for fun. (More specifically, he uses the word "hobby" a lot, but hobbies are supposed to be fun, so!) He doesn't do it for the glory. He (we can only assume) did have fun, in the beginning, before he gained this ultimate power. But once he did and he realized no one could challenge him anymore, he started getting really depressed. Once he stopped having fun as a hero, he realized how little else he had going for him. No companionship, no other hobbies, etc. It broke him down into what we see at the beginning of the series. (Okay, the second half of this paragraph is me filling in the blanks, there's no proof this is how it went down. But it makes perfect sense to me.)

 

And part of this series is him discovering that he can have fun in other ways.

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As much as I love the idea of Simoun on paper, an anime that is explicitly about a society in which our understanding of gender is more fluid and in which religion can literally be weaponized for mass destruction (further explained by Ogiue Maniax here), I am finding it almost impossible to watch. Between a protagonist who spends most of her time in her room, refusing to fight, while the rest of the cast waits patiently for her to get her shit together and a plot structure that seems to threaten the cast constantly with front-line combat at the end of one episode before pulling them back at the beginning of the next, it's just not a show that inspires enthusiastic or sustained viewing. I'll get through it, eventually, but at this point I'd almost rather resume my efforts to push through Space Runaway Ideon, which has some actual historical merit to it.

 

Instead, I'm watching the second cour of Natsu no Arashi and enjoying it a lot! I know I didn't post in here much about the first cour, beyond to say that it was an interesting pastiche from every stage of Shinbo Akiyuki's career (with Arakawa Under the Bridge and Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru having the closest overlap), but once I finished it, I liked what it had to say about the relationship between the horrors of the past and the idylls of the present enough to write up a blog post about it. The second half of the show has proven interesting along those lines because the characters have reached a basic sort of equilibrium, by the end of the first half, and are now just pleasantly interacting with each other in various contexts. Unlike so many Shaft shows, which are aggressively about something specific, Natsu no Arashi is basically a sandbox for Shinbo to do whatever he wants to do, so there's a heavy dose of Shouwa nostalgia that's sometimes positive and sometimes negative but usually something to do with hime cuts, strawberry everything, and recreating album covers from the eighties and nineties. I really can't recommend it enough, even though it's definitely minor Shaft.

 

Also, there was yet another retrospective/comparison of Rebuild of Evangelion with the original Neon Genesis Evangelion, this one focusing on compositional elements from both works and coming down surprisingly hard on the side of the Rebuild movies as the "superior" experience. The long-awaited release of 3.33 in the West really did open the floodgates of opinion, it seems...

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Watching Gatchaman Crowds and I'm enjoying it.

I'm especially enjoying the Moebius aesthetic that in the sci-fi/otherworld architecture. They even have crystal people! I wonder if this is a nod to the crystal era of Moebius? I may be looking to deep into that aspect.

EDIT: SHIT! Even the paper birds that JJ is using is totally a Moebius nod!

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I finished the second cour of Natsu no Arashi. I don't really know how to feel? Part of it is probably just finishing a series that is freighted so heavily with nostalgia, but part of it... I don't know.

 

The big motif throughout the second cour is when thirteen-year-old Hajime will feel the first stirrings of love, thereby setting down the road to adulthood and leaving the titular summer of Natsu no Arashi behind. For the first half of the cour, this is mostly expressed through the character of Jun, a young girl who cross-dresses as a boy around Hajime because she values his friendship more than the romantic feelings that she also harbors, and that's fine. For the second half, the focus is on Hajime's immature crush on Arashi, the ghostly girl who's subjectively three years older than him and objectively sixty, and... I don't know. There is a succession of incredibly affecting "first kiss" moments between the two, each dangling in front of the audience the possibility that here is the beginning of the end for the idyllic playtime of the anime, but none of them quite stick, and then the final episode is basically the first and last episodes of the first cour remixed, which is concluded with a post-credits button where Arashi muses that her summer "isn't over just yet."

 

The overarching thesis of Natsu no Arashi is that the past is an immutable object that influences the present more than the present could ever influence the past, even were you given the power to travel through time. Things happen and you can't just make them unhappen, right? So, even though I'm disappointed by the show's careful preservation of interpersonal stasis between the characters to the very end, because I crave resolution as a viewer, I understand what I'm being told is that the present is the thing to which I should be paying attention. Today, right now, there are goofy antics going on. Tomorrow, the next day, or the day after that, Hajime will have actual feelings for a real, living girl and leave Arashi to her ghostly eternity. That moment in the future is already determined, but for the moment, the moment that happens to encompass the entirety of the anime, trying to anticipate it is like the recurring scene of Hajime trying to write a happy ending where he, at age eighteen, confronts Arashi with his boyhood crush for her undiminished and she finally reciprocates it in the way he wants: the words for it just aren't there, no matter how he looks.

 

Yeah, I like Natsu no Arashi, more than it probably deserves. Hell, more than anything that hinges on "time-travel hijinks" probably deserves.

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I've been watching Kill la Kill over the past couple weeks with a friend and we finished it up over the weekend.  I know it was talked about quite a bit in this thread but I'm too lazy to reread any of that.

 

In general I liked it.  The story and characters were interesting for the most part.  I like how it messes with expectations, except for probably the ending which seemed like a fairly standard way to wrap up an anime.  I would have enjoyed it much more if not for the excessive fanservice.  I feel like I can't even accurately call it that.  At times I felt that watching a straight up porn would have been more honest.  I get that nudity is central to the main concept of the show but I still felt pretty skeezy.

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The third season of Sailor Moon Crystal is very good and such huge improvement on every aspect, not that I dislike the first season, despite some problems here and there, and the second season was already much better. But, anyway, the third season, the Mugen Infinity arc is so good and Haruka and Michiru look amazing (even the end song is about them, and I loved the Utena vibes visuals I spot there).

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Even though the second season of A Certain Scientific Railgun is actually somewhat terrible—mostly because it imports a bunch of characters and their attendant pathos from the main series A Certain Magical Index rather than remaining a side story without that baggage, as summarized in several Karmaburn posts on the show (especially the middle one)—I am going to propose that Saten Ruiko is not only Best Girl in a show that's absolutely full of badass girls, but possibly Best Girl in all of anime.

 

My argument, in three parts:

 

1. Saten regularly greets her best friend, the shy and studious Uiharu, by flipping up the latter's skirt and remaking upon the underwear that she's wearing.

 

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Rather than mocking her for her childish taste, as the trope usually plays out elsewhere in anime, Saten seems to be genuinely interested in what underwear appeals to Uiharu, often congratulating her on particularly cute or mature selections.

 

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Very few circumstances are able to dissuade Saten from performing this friendly duty.

 

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2. When a rumor begins circulating that prepaid cards, still full of tens of thousands of yen, are being hidden in alleyways all over Academy City, Saten decides to sniff out the truth... literally.

 

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She makes no effort whatsoever to be dignified in this pursuit.

 

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She even takes the city's youth under her tutelage.

 

railgun-7-4-saten-sniff.jpg

 

3. In the finale of the second season, when the most powerful psychics in Academy City are charged with defending an exhibition hall from an onslaught of twenty thousand combat mechs, Saten is there on the front lines, even though she is ranked as a "level zero" without any psychic ability or even potential.

 

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She acquits herself admirably.

 

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Later, she pilots a giant robot while shouting the cry, "Battle panties!"

 

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Ladies and gentlemen of the forum, I rest my case.

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In a world without Mako Mankanshoku you may have been right.

 

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But

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in This World

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You are Sorely Mistaken.

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: P

I haven't actually watched much anime for a loong time. As an edgy teen I used to watch darker ones like Monster, Berserk, Gilgamesh, Desert Punk (not dark at all early on), Darker Than Black, FMA, Death Note, etc. But haven't done much since. Watched Attack On Titan, Kill La Kill and One Punch Man since 2013.

The Boy and I loved Kill La Kill. We hated some moments quite intensely but overall I took it for playing with a lot of the dumb tropes of anime rather than just enjoying them. Sure it also ate it's cake too like Spring Breakers did. But We loved both of those in their own way.

KLK really did save anime for me. For all it's faults.

One Punch Man reminded me that other anime are still good.

I'm trying to watch FMA Brotherhood now since Boo says it's his favourite anime. It's been long enough that I'm not bored from the show going over the other series plot points for 10+ episodes. Also looking at Jojo's again but it's sidelined for now.

I might take a look at Soul Reaper, Tokyo Ghoul, and Black Butler some time but I'm not sure how much I'll like at least two of those.

I'm excited for new Berserk anime this year. I'm able to deal with the weird 3d/2d animation blend they're going with but I'm still disappointed they're doing it.

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In a world without Mako Mankanshoku you may have been right.

 

Hah, Mako is great, but she's the "wacky" character from a hyperreal comedy, so she doesn't get the same points from me that Saten does for being funny, weird, and charming in an anime that's as dour and self-involved as the second season of Railgun.

 

Honestly, the only thing that kept me going through Misaka's absurd martyr complex and her budding feelings for human spitball Touma was the prospect of returning to the strengths of the first season: namely Kuroko, Uiharu, and Saten. Even Kuroko's somewhat rapey affection for Misaka, hitherto a black mark on my enjoyment, would have been better as the show's defining element than Misaka's self-flagellating guilt that she allowed a research hospital to scan her genome when she was a preschooler and now that hospital is systematically slaughtering thousands of clones of her in the name of some nebulously evil plot.

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Ok so i realise the "best girl" trope is pretty widespread but:

 

A: What criteria does a character need to meet to be declared a legit "bestie"? Is it just a fun quirky comedy sidekick character in a anime? Does the anime have to be a bad anime? 

&

B: Is there such thing as a "Best Boy"? 

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On 4/22/2016 at 8:04 AM, Codicier said:

Ok so i realise the "best girl" trope is pretty widespread but:

A: What criteria does a character need to meet to be declared a legit "bestie"? Is it just a fun quirky comedy sidekick character in a anime? Does the anime have to be a bad anime?

&

B: Is there such thing as a "Best Boy"?

 

If the anime's good, the character of the Best Girl embodies everything that's interesting and exceptional about it. If it's bad, she either embodies the parts that could have been good or is a repudiation of what makes it bad. I wrote a blog post about this in Working!! over a year ago: https://thecrabflowerclub.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/best-girl-yamada/

 

I would argue that there's no Best Boy for the same reason that it's "feminism" and not "humanism." There's not quite the same tendency in anime for the majority of male characters to be caricatured piles of useless garbage, to the point that enjoyable ones need to be celebrated, although there could probably be a spin-off meme, Best Potato, for harem anime...

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I just finished Erased, I thought it was pretty good although most of the last episode a little far-fetched.

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Wow, Bakuon! started as such a cute series about a bike club, when suddenly.... It went FULL ECCHI!

 

The previous episode had "the bath scene", but the latest episode has them being disrobed by a drunken teacher, but to top it off they end the episode with the girl cleaning their bikes in bikinis...

 

But it doesn't end there, the protagonist suddenly decided to clean her bike with her breasts.... *facepalm*

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I'm not sure why you're surprised given the chick in the yellow!

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Tanaka-kun is Always Listless amazes me for being 20 minutes of nothing but jokes about this guys lethargy. Fittingly, it is also great to fall asleep to.

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Yesterday I watched Hosoda's The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Pretty amazing.

I was expecting something more magical, but the choice to have the time-traveling bits be a symbol for her being able to review all her decisions and possibilities in life was surprising and fun. Also the parts where she's just goofing around and misusing her power to play infinite karaoke. From a storytelling perspective I loved how this mechanic showed what the limits of her willingness to experiment was. Like, a declaration of love by Chiaki was clearly off the table, she wanted none of that. Coupled with her endearing defiance, this was a Good Time.

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AnimeNewsNetwork published a short interview with Sadamoto Yoshiyuki, a character designer who's been with GAINAX since the beginning. He talks about EvangelionFLCL, and the sequel to Royal Space Force: Honneamise that he's doing with Yamaga.

 

A lot of the comments are saddened by how tired and uninterested Sadamoto sounds (burnt out on Eva, dismissive of the new FLCL, etc) but I love the apparent honesty of someone who's not beholden by a corporation or an audience to be unfailingly positive about the industry. I am reasonably sure that this is what Sadamoto is actually thinking and that's cool to me.

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I don't mean to sound elitist, but this is depressing: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10154067682497745&id=70101247744

Nozomi/RightStuf asked people for the license of their dreams, and the overwhelming answers are "more Bleach" and "more Berserk." Do these people, presumably fans of anime, not know the difference between anime licensing and anime production and between companies that do one or the other?

Also, Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei is the only correct answer to post.

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