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Anybody watched anything from the Winter Season? It all looks a bit lame imo. I watched Space Dandy, and that was excellent. Any suggestions?

I think saying that it's a far from eye catching lineup is a pretty fair assessment. That said The Eccentric Family probably ended up being my favourite show of 2014 and it didn't seem particularly compelling in previews etc.

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Anybody watched anything from the Winter Season? It all looks a bit lame imo. I watched Space Dandy, and that was excellent. Any suggestions?

 

I don't have any suggestions. Despite bitching about Chuu2Koi, I watched the first episode of the sequel, which was an impressive if misguided effort to roll back all of the emotional beats of the last couple episodes so they can have more moeblob. I'm downloading the next season of Silver Spoon because I hear the first one is amazing. Beyond that, I'm just watching KILL la KILL's second half.

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Since I've been sick like a dog for a week, I've watched a ton of anime on Cruncyroll.

 

Poyopoyo and Chi's Sweet Home, short stories with cute cats...

 

Ghastly Prince Emma Burning Up, which fitting enough I watched while burning up with fever.... What the hell is this... oh, it's from Go Nagai? Now everything makes sense. It's his craziest show yet!

 

Beyond the Boundry It's the story a "younma" hunter and a half younma with a fetish for glasses, which is what the female hunter wears, hilarity and death ensues?

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So I've started watching Attack on Titan. 10 episodes in, and I absolutely love it. It's an excellent mix of high-action and adventure tempered by a seriously scary situation. If this is almost any other anime, I can bet I would be dreaming of swooping around in those weird belt-thingies and having lots of adventures. But the desperation of humanity and terror of the Titans cuts right through that and really hits home the fact that this is incredibly dangerous and potentially a painful and violent end, something often overlooked in other anime that inspire thoughts of action and adventure in my mind. 

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I watched the whole "High School of the Dead", a.k.a. "Love Hina with Eiken-esque boobs... also zombies". I'm sorry, there is no way you'll convince me this show is NOT a harem comedy, it's just so stupidly hilarious. The cheesecake reaches and probably goes over the "ecchi" line and STILL they had to have a "shoehorned boobs" character.... so yeah, a show with giant boobs decided to add a character that is completely unnecessary with BIGGER boobs and more ecchi and cheesecake... 

 

And I'm not kidding with the "Love Hina" thing, two of the female main character are exactly the same as two of the main female characters from Love Hina... but with comically large breasts... I kinda love it for all the wrong reasons... It's so dumb.... it's beautiful! X3

 

I go on for ages on how beautiful dumb this show is, but I also want to talk about a LEGIT show:

 

Polar Bear Cafe:

 

It's a cafe run by a polar bear and frequented by other animals, like a yapping penguin and a lazy panda who works park time at the zoo... as a part time panda. I'm not sure how it works.... 

 

It's like it's dumb animal trying to act like humans and fail, Mr. Penguin is just a business man that like sardines a lot, for example, it's just a slice of life show with animals that are pretty human, but still animals. It just works... somehow! 

 

I... LOVE... IT!

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My wife and I need to get back to watching Polar Bear Cafe. I think we're 20 or 30 episodes in.

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I tried watching High School of the Dead on the insistence of a friend but I found it gross and just all kinds of weird, tonally. There's this trend in anime of series that set out to be gratuitous almost for its own sake, shows like Elfen Lied (which I disliked), Higurashi (liked), and Mirai Nikki (despised), shows that try to put on a false face of maturity by presenting as many horrible things as possible. These shows tend to be pretty tone deaf, but HSotD was downright tone retarded. I mean I get cheesecake, but it's utterly confusing to the senses to have scenes of shameless ecchi cut right alongside scenes of horrible, depressing violence. I just don't understand how I'm meant to react to that on any level.

 

Anyone following Ghost in the Shell: Arise? I enjoyed the first episode but the second one is a noticeable dip in quality. I wouldn't have minded if the animation was the only thing to suffer, but the action scenes border on Matrix-level ridiculousness at times. I always liked how restrained and terse the action was before, so it's hard not to be pessimistic about the remaining episodes. Not to mention the plot seemed like it was mostly just ticking a bunch of boxes from the GITS play book.

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I think High School of the Dead is fucking godawful. But it embraces its godawfulness in a way that I find somewhat endearing. I found Elfen Lied to be utterly boring and dumb and dumber, and NOT in an endearing fashion.

 

Also wait what there's a new GITS? Neat. I'm looking it up n-- Oh it's a reimagining. Hmm. I hated the original GITS stuff. Really enjoyed SAC. Guess that means I'll have to give this a shot.

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I tried watching High School of the Dead on the insistence of a friend but I found it gross and just all kinds of weird.

There haven't been many shows where I have hit a scene mid episode and been so downright disgusted that I switched off there and then never to return, but HSotD is one. I think I can honestly say it inspires a legitimate hate in me.

I watched the whole "High School of the Dead", a.k.a. "Love Hina with Eiken-esque boobs... also zombies". I'm sorry, there is no way you'll convince me this show is NOT a harem comedy, it's just so stupidly hilarious. The cheesecake reaches and probably goes over the "ecchi" line and STILL they had to have a "shoehorned boobs" character.... so yeah, a show with giant boobs decided to add a character that is completely unnecessary with BIGGER boobs and more ecchi and cheesecake...

And I'm not kidding with the "Love Hina" thing, two of the female main character are exactly the same as two of the main female characters from Love Hina... but with comically large breasts... I kinda love it for all the wrong reasons... It's so dumb.... it's beautiful! X3

I go on for ages on how beautiful dumb this show is.

I honestly feel this is giving it waaaay to much credit. Even disregarding the character designs the way the female characters behave towards the male ones makes it pretty much irredeemable.

It's not a show like Kill La Kill which has Cheescake but mocks it's male characters reaction to it, it was (at least up to the point I left it) one that nigh on worshiped them.

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Well, but I like SAC. Why are they remaking it?!

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Oh, it's not really a remake, it's a prequel. The first movie is about Motoko's first meeting with Aramaki and a few of the other central characters.

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Well, but I like SAC. Why are they remaking it?!

Oh, it's not really a remake, it's a prequel. The first movie is about Motoko's first meeting with Aramaki and a few of the other central characters.

 

Yeah, but it's also about rebooting Mokoto as a sex object. One of the producers explicitly said in an interview that they were making her younger, more flawed, and more vulnerable to bring out the moe.

 

I'm pretty lukewarm about Arise myself. It shares none of its production crew with either the movies or the show, except the procession of key-animators-turned-directors, and it shows to me. The plots are ropey, the procedural elements is played down in favor of mystique and tension... I don't know. Maybe it'll look better as a whole at the end of 2014.

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Really? I didn't get that impression at all from the first two episodes, she's just as assertive as ever, if anything she was more overtly sexualised in the original series. Not that I ever had a problem with that since it was never played up as a weakness or just for cheesecake or whatever. I agree about the plots, they've generally been weaker, but the first episode was pretty serviceable in comparison to ep 2, especially since it was more of an introduction/origin story. (Full disclosure: I love the plots in SAC but they tend to confuse the shit out of me until I've watched them through 2 or 3 times. Still gotta rewatch 2nd GIG.)

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Man, Crunchyroll sure has a lot of short 3-4 minutes anime shows now.

 

AI-Mai-Mi is show about a manga club were "zany stuff" happens, I wouldn't call it random, because it has it's own logic, it was short and sweet.

Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories: I quit this one, I don't mind crude animation, but the stories always end in a jump scare of before the real scary stuff should happen.

Chitose Get You! This was rather cute and funny too, an 11 year girl falls in love with the same man her teacher does, her friends are kinda weird too once you get to know them too.

Dark Side Cat: Imagine a show about a "hero" who just destroys and annoys everywhere he goes and in the end accidentally helps someone, imagine if it looked like a bad flash cartoon. I quit this one too. Like I said I don't mind bad animation that much, but the show is just not good.

Shamanic Princess: It looks like a very generic old school anime I'd rather watch a guy do a video review of that what the actual show. Which is what I think I'll do.

Muromi-San: For some reason, a mermaid keeps pestering a teenage boy. The boy is the straight man and it's mostly about him reacting to how mythical creatures really are and they said history really happened. It was probably my favorite of the batch.

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I think High School of the Dead is fucking godawful. But it embraces its godawfulness in a way that I find somewhat endearing. I found Elfen Lied to be utterly boring and dumb and dumber, and NOT in an endearing fashion.

 

Pretty much what I felt about HotD, It felt like a B Movie in the good way. It was a fun series. 

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Just giving my 2 cents about GitS-Arise: I see it as a new take on the characters and universe because it is as different from the TV Series than the TV Series was from the Movies which themselves were very different from the original manga. So the Ghost in the Shell 'franchise' is used to letting the creator shape everything as they want.
I actually like that approach a lot but, beside the new explanation of Motoko full synthetical body, Arise has been hugely underwhelming: it feels like a second grade techno thriller with no meat on the story (despite 50 min episodes) and no inventivity in the animation or the direction.

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I've quitted Kanokon, sometimes I enjoy dumb anime, I think I didn't enjoy because it was a generic "ecchi harem" thing, but not "bad" enough to be enjoyable? I guess they have to be High School of the Dead bad for me enjoy them. *shrugs*

 

PES. What is this, a Toyota commercial turned into an anime? Oh, it's exactly that? Blergh. XP

 

Tsuritama: It's a show about a kid with terrible social anxiety and an alien... who wants to go fishing... and it was one of the best and most touching animes I've seen lately! Which is crazy seeing how technical they get with the fishing stuff.

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I have to say that I liked both Kanokon and HSOTD. For reasons. Probably if I re-watched Kanokon I wouldn't enjoy it at all, as it was one of the first animes I watched.

 

Tsuritama is an awesome show! I loved it a lot! Even went to Enoshima when I visited Japan coz of it! XD My friend said that it was famous for otakus as Tari Tari is also located there, but I haven't watched that.

 

Recently re-watched the excellent FLCL. That show is amazing. The story is great, the animation is great, but the real stand-out for me on that show is the music. All done by The Pillows (bar a few) and it's fucking phenomenal. The three OST albums that came from that are some of my favourite albums. 

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I've quitted Kanokon, sometimes I enjoy dumb anime, I think I didn't enjoy because it was a generic "ecchi harem" thing, but not "bad" enough to be enjoyable? I guess they have to be High School of the Dead bad for me enjoy them. *shrugs*0

 

I mentioned Mirai Nikki above, but I'm still not quite sure why I watched the whole thing. I mean I quit watching a lot of decent anime/shows part way through because they're a bit boring or something doesn't click with me or whatever, but I breezed through MN despite thinking it was utterly terrible. Sometimes bad is it's own form of compelling I guess.

 

I started watching Michiko and Hatchin thanks to the recommendation earlier and it seems pretty neat so far!

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I'm beginning to get the feeling that it'll be really different rewatching KILL la KILL a year or so later, considering how much every episode since maybe the fifth or sixth has raised my opinion of the show. This latest one was great, even (especially) the (slightly uncomfortable) caricatures of each Kansai city. I never know what any episode's going to bring, you know? I've certainly left several (very) incorrect predictions in this thread alone. That's special, I think.
 
Also, I like the show's "theme" song more than is reasonable, particularly 1:02-1:36:
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmgA3moScyA

 
 

Just giving my 2 cents about GitS-Arise: I see it as a new take on the characters and universe because it is as different from the TV Series than the TV Series was from the Movies which themselves were very different from the original manga. So the Ghost in the Shell 'franchise' is used to letting the creator shape everything as they want.
I actually like that approach a lot but, beside the new explanation of Motoko full synthetical body, Arise has been hugely underwhelming: it feels like a second grade techno thriller with no meat on the story (despite 50 min episodes) and no inventivity in the animation or the direction.

 
Yeah, those are basically my thoughts as well. You can feel the absence of Kenji Kamiyama and it hurts. I like the idea of a younger Mokoto, who actually gets overconfident and makes mistakes sometimes, but so far it's done nothing to distinguish or elevate the OVAs.

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I loved in the latest episode when it would play that section of the song you cite as your favorite every time she'd show up on her motorcycle. And then abruptly end it. And then start it again.

 

It's a pretty good thing.

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I'm beginning to get the feeling that it'll be really different rewatching KILL la KILL a year or so later, considering how much every episode since maybe the fifth or sixth has raised my opinion of the show. This latest one was great, even (especially) the (slightly uncomfortable) caricatures of each Kansai city. I never know what any episode's going to bring, you know? I've certainly left several (very) incorrect predictions in this thread alone. That's special, I think. Also, I like the show's "theme" song more than is reasonable

I love the way each major character had their own theme within the show, it's such a great detail and such a old fashioned thing to do.

In some ways that attention to detail is both what I love and hate about the show, because as much as I want to excuse some of its cringe worthy moments as mistakes or whatever, the amount of thought that goes into everything else makes me think they have to be purposeful. (For instance: I recently discovered that the eyepatch of one character is a very distorted Kanji which relates to her name.)

Honestly though Anime character design confuses the feck out of me at times. I mean look at Ryuko's & Ragyo Kiryuin's eyes in Kill La Kill, both utterly different from every other character. My hunch is one of those is a design choice that means nothing, and the other is a key plot hint, but there's really no way to tell which is which. It's almost as if they don't want us to be able to see the Forrest for the trees.

In the end though given the utterly desolate state of this seasons offerings (I'm not sure there's a single new show that has caught my eye) there's not really gonna be much else to talk about until Mushishi S2 hits or The Wind Rises gets out on DVD

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There is one good show this season, after watching a fair few:

SPACE DANDY - It's really, really, really good. Enjoyably hectic and funny. It's a highlight of my week. this, Kill la Kill and Kuroko, but space dandy is so enjoyable. I love it.

 

The rest:

My Sister is being unusual - starts of with the main protagonist getting (not sure if that's the right word) a new sister due to his father re-marrying "Well at least they're legally allowed to fuck" I said jokingly to my missus. Only for the best friend of the protagonist to basically say the same thing, and then for it to be the actual plot of the show. She gets possessed by some ghost in the form of a chastity belt, and then there's a highly awkward scene where she masturbates with her possessed ghost lady. With convenient beams of dark and big heart-shaped locks covering up anything explicit. Then we turned it off - 7/10.

Aside: correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought chastity belts were meant to stop you masturbating. I guess that's where the ghost lady comes in useful?

 

Nobuguna - This started off quite nice about a day-dreaming lady. Then it goes sci-fi and shit. She has the DNA (or "E-GENE") of Oda Nobugana (famous Japanese Feudal lord), and when these bunch of people touch these shitty balls their "E-GENE" is activated and they get super powers. She discovers her power and then shoots a bunch of alien bugs. Other people with the "E-GENE" is Jack the Ripper, Newton and Ghandi. Although what fucking weapon Ghandi will use to fight with I'll never know or care about. Dropped after the first episode.

 

Noragami - homeless god who nobody remembers does stuff. Completely unforgettable and generic. Fights monsters which are manifestations of emotions. Not heard that one before. There was something about a cat. Pretty crap. Dropped.

 

Sitting next to Seki-kun - Short about a guy who sits in the back of the class and procrastinates, narrated by the lass next to him, and tries not to get involved, even as his exploits gets more and more ridiculous. This is pretty funny actually, I like this show. Also the ending song is cool.

 

Sekai Seifuku - Not really sure what this one was about. Some lass who took over the world and get followers or something? I enjoyed the first episode, which was more than what I can say for a large majority of the others. Will probably watch another episode before deciding whether or not to drop it.

 

Chuu 2 Koi 2 - More moe-blob stuff. I predict this season will be bad as there is no second book to base it off (the first was loosely based on the first book of a light novel series), so it'll just be moe filler, I'm guessing. It'd be nice to see their relationship advance. I don't really care for anything else or the what looks like a new character from the OP.

 

Witch Barristers - This started and it looked ok, then had to go to bed. Saw an article about it on Sankaku Complex though, so I am weary. It's also one of the few shows this season that's on crunchyroll for us brits, so I'm even more weary.

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I find Space Dandy decidedly really fucking boring and that's the saddest thing I think I've said about anime in a long time. I was really looking forward to it, but it's just a dumb guy running around looking at tits and ass and eating food.

 

OH YEAH SO GREAT.

 

And unlike Kill la Kill, I see nothing there that has the potential to redeem the show.

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