anime

[Twig]

http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2015/07/08-1/soul-eater-manga-author-prepares-to-launch-new-sf-firefighting-series

 

"SF Firefighting Series" from Soul Eater creator

 

yup gimme

 

er well this is manga tho but whatever

[N1njaSquirrel]

Last season ended.

Punch Line was I don't know. Middling? More story than I expected. Less humor than I expected. Fanservice throughout, although, I dunno, it didn't feel pandering? Even though it obviously was. Not worth watching, IMO. Maybe someone can convince me to hate it. (Or love it???)

Sound! Euphonium was great. Oh man oh geez. I will fight you, NS! I got right emotional for that last episode! (Although, admittedly, although I liked the character arcs, it's mostly because of the concert band angle.) Kumiko is me, except she realized she loved playing her instrument far before I did, and I realized far too late. ):

Challenge accepted! Let me just finish off hibike euphonium!

Also yeah, punch line was a bit of a fart in the end. A real shame too. I liked the character design, and the animation studio is one of my favourites. Oh well. :/

[Gormongous]

Wait, Working!! is getting a third season this summer? Jesus, what is dead really can never die. At least the final manga volume is out this month, which makes this season most likely the final one, too.

 

Also, I've been watching Jormungand, after a couple of people made fun of my (admittedly shameful) affection for Upotte!! and told me that Jormungand, an anime about an international arms dealer, is a truly good anime for gun nuts. I am here to say, on the record, that twelve episodes of Jormungand have led me to judge it as a thoroughly average show without much to recommend it, even to gun nuts. I have made a list of things that I like about Jormungand:

• The title is a cool reference to a less-appreciated corner of Norse mythology.
• The child-soldier protagonist seems dumb at the outset but actually turns out to offer an interesting perspective for the viewer.
• The guns themselves are drawn and handled quite accurately, even if the context of their usage is not.

That's it. Every other part of Jormungand is sub-Black Lagoon junk, and regulars to this thread will recall that I don't have a high opinion of Black Lagoon anyway. Really, the biggest failing of Jormungand is that it has too many recurring characters (the arms dealer Koko Hekmatyar, the child soldier Jonathan Mar, and eight other bodyguards, plus a pair of CIA agents on their trail and at least one other long-term adversary), clearly a legacy of an overly conservative adaptation from the source manga. These bodyguards have names, favorite weapons, professional specialties, and personal quirks that the anime struggles to present to the viewer in a digestible fashion, but except for maybe Koko, Jonah, and the two lead bodyguards Lehm and Valmet, it never really comes through all the over-the-top action that is also being shoved to the fore. They're all just geniuses with hot tempers and weak morals, in different shapes and sizes, no matter how many five-second flashbacks the anime makes to photographs of family or memories of their younger selves crying.

 

Yeah, Black Lagoon also suffered from over-the-top action overshadowing the character work that was actually intended to be driving it forward, but there were scraps of interesting stuff that still managed to emerge: Rock's increasing indifference to violence and the effect of this on his mental state, Dutch's lazy approximation of a moral code, and Benny's Judaism, vanishingly rare for an anime that's not about Judaism or other biblical topics... There's nothing like that in Jormungand, as far as I can tell. Jonah has some angst that could be interesting or could be boring, depending on the time that it's given, but everyone else, even the supposed enigma of Koko Hekmatyar, is that dime-a-dozen caricature of a violent psychopath always filling anime about "the mob" or "mercenaries" to the brim. You've seen them in Black Lagoon, in Baccano!, in Trigun, in Gungrave, in Gantz, in Golgo 13, in Madlax... 

 

You get the picture. There's nothing too special about Jormungand in any respect. It pretends to be a travelogue, but it's careful never to locate itself more precisely than a continent and a cardinal direction, rendering its attempts at local color somewhat empty. It pretends to be an ensemble piece about teamwork in combat, but since it can't spend that much time on its characters, the only way that it's able to convey the effectiveness of Koko's bodyguards is by never handing them a loss or even a setback, which works a little bit but also totally destroys any sense of stakes in the show's many drawn-out firefights. It pretends to care about weapons and the international trafficking of them, but it seems more concerned that any actual details might detract from the vague glamour inherent in dropping off a shipping crate full of "the latest tech" and having soldiers cheer or drool. Honestly, it pretends to be a lot of things, and if it were even a few of them, it'd be a great show. Instead, it's a lazy and ultimately generic adaptation of what I have to assume is a much better manga about an arms dealer and the kind of people with whom she surrounds herself, trading almost entirely as an anime on the thrill of wacky dudes (and ladies) shooting highly detailed firearms at each other and then maybe hugging after everyone else is dead.

[N1njaSquirrel]

Man I was so excited for working!! This season. Knowing that it's ended will hopefully mean that we get some closure on the plot lines. They nearly did in the first episode! I loved the first two seasons. Here's hoping for a great third.

[Gormongous]

Man I was so excited for working!! This season. Knowing that it's ended will hopefully mean that we get some closure on the plot lines. They nearly did in the first episode! I loved the first two seasons. Here's hoping for a great third.

 

I am in it for Yamada and Yamada alone!

 

 

 

Did you watch Servant x Service, NinjaSquirrel? I honestly thought it was a tighter show with less cartoonish characters than Working!!, even though it's the same manga-ka, but for some reason it lacked a little of the magic for me...

[Gormongous]

Fuck yes, the first moments of the first episode of Working!!! have a great Yamada moment.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhnfSVpX2hY

[N1njaSquirrel]

I did start watching Servant X Service, but I went on holiday and never finished it. I'll have to pick it back up!

 

I totally agree with you regarding the lack of magic it had. I think that it was because of the setting? A resturant is much more prone to interesting things happening instead of what is essentially a normal work office.

 

Yamada is great. The first episode of season 3 perfectly reminded me of everyone's charachters, their flaws and likes, and is a perfect set up for the rest of the series. I don't think there's a single bad charachter in it either. I like them all.

[Gormongous]

I did start watching Servant X Service, but I went on holiday and never finished it. I'll have to pick it back up!

 

I totally agree with you regarding the lack of magic it had. I think that it was because of the setting? A resturant is much more prone to interesting things happening instead of what is essentially a normal work office.

 

Yamada is great. The first episode of season 3 perfectly reminded me of everyone's charachters, their flaws and likes, and is a perfect set up for the rest of the series. I don't think there's a single bad charachter in it either. I like them all.

 

Servant x Service is good in a lot of the same ways as Working!!, but fair warning that it's definitely a different sort of alchemy that's a bit less for it. Working!! and its subsequent seasons are funny because the characters themselves are ridiculous, they don't necessarily need to be combined with each other to produce situations that make them funny. Seriously, every time Yamada opens her mouth and says something awful out of her own cluelessly needy entitlement, it's funny enough to me that the other characters' (usually negative) reactions aren't even really needed to get me laughing. Actually, Working!! is one of the few shows where everyone's persistent cruelty and disregard towards a given character hasn't poisoned it for me. Yamada's never actually hurt or offended by the resentment and dislike of others, so...

 

I will say, Working!! was something I wouldn't recommend to people for a long time because its commitment to keeping its characters in stasis for the sake of comedy was really tiresome to me, especially when the characters have a fundamentally gross trait that they aren't permitted to grow out of or into. When it was just two seasons, Inami was always going to be comically violent towards men, Takanashi was always going to be a supposedly harmless pedophile, and Satou was always going to have a weirdly hostile relationship with the object of his secret crush. Still, just knowing that there's going to be an ending that'll probably involve some kind of change or growth already improves my opinion of the entire franchise.

[N1njaSquirrel]

So Prison highschool might be the best thing this season so far. It's sold as a hyper-sexualised thing, but it's actually a really good comedy anime.

 

Admittingly all the jokes are generally sex related jokes, as it's about 5 desperate guys in a female-only school, who are then put in 'prison' for peeping. But the hyper-realistic art style really plays into the visual comedy aspect of all their reactions. I would strongly reccommend it to y'all.

 

I'm still planning to check out monster musume. I'll report back to you on that too.

[Gormongous]

So Prison highschool might be the best thing this season so far. It's sold as a hyper-sexualised thing, but it's actually a really good comedy anime.

 

Admittingly all the jokes are generally sex related jokes, as it's about 5 desperate guys in a female-only school, who are then put in 'prison' for peeping. But the hyper-realistic art style really plays into the visual comedy aspect of all their reactions. I would strongly reccommend it to y'all.

 

Honestly, the whole "all sex jokes" thing in certain anime seems to land way more often than it rightly should. I watched all of Seitokai Yakuindomo, which is wall-to-wall jokes about mishearing something to be dirty or assuming someone to be a pervert, and I'd say maybe eighty percent of it was genuinely funny. Seitokai no Ichizon is much less even, but otherwise has a similar bizarre effect. I think the reality is that, whenever you're making a comedy entirely based upon sex jokes, titillation becomes almost useless for driving character interactions, so the writers have to get a lot more clever than "soft" comedy shows.

[N1njaSquirrel]

I guess sex is like a universally understandable thing? So that's why it works so well? I haven't watched the two anime you mentioned, but titillation is definitely really high in Prison School . But I think that the comedy really plays to that in a way. I dunno. I guess this is the opposite to the soft comedies, and kinda like the anime version of the inbetweeners.

 

I didn't watch monster musume yet, but I did check out Himouto! Umaru-chan and that was pretty funny.

[Zeusthecat]

I'm maybe 5 or 6 episodes into Clannad and it is kind of boring me to death. I am only watching this for the harvest of tears it will allegedly produce at some point but so far it seems kind of dumb. It's not exactly terrible, there's just not much of anything going on.

 

Luckily, it looks like one of their friends may actually be a ghost.

[jennegatron]

I guess sex is like a universally understandable thing? So that's why it works so well? I haven't watched the two anime you mentioned, but titillation is definitely really high in Prison School . But I think that the comedy really plays to that in a way. I dunno. I guess this is the opposite to the soft comedies, and kinda like the anime version of the inbetweeners.

 

The Inbetweeners has a scene in it that I point to as the pinnacle of juvenile body humor.

[BobbyBesar]

I read some of the Prison School manga because it was listed as being like the #1 ranked manga in Japan at the time, but found its sexualization gross and the characters variously unappealing or boring. But I could see how it might appeal to a particular age group in the Japanese audience since it seemed to play up tropes of high school life, and the sexuality stuff felt familiar enough to relate to as a young teen. In fact, it hit enough check boxes there that it felt pretty pandering.

I was actually wondering if it was going to become an anime.

[Gormongous]

I guess sex is like a universally understandable thing? So that's why it works so well? I haven't watched the two anime you mentioned, but titillation is definitely really high in Prison School . But I think that the comedy really plays to that in a way. I dunno. I guess this is the opposite to the soft comedies, and kinda like the anime version of the inbetweeners.

 

Yeah, the lack of titillation is important for me to be able to focus on the humor in a sex-based gag comedy. If it's trying to be funny but also sexy, then it just feels like the ickier parts of Bakemonogatari to me. Diff'rent strokes, I guess!

 

I'm maybe 5 or 6 episodes into Clannad and it is kind of boring me to death. I am only watching this for the harvest of tears it will allegedly produce at some point but so far it seems kind of dumb. It's not exactly terrible, there's just not much of anything going on.

 

Luckily, it looks like one of their friends may actually be a ghost.

 

I hope it pans out for you. I watched all of Anohana under similar assurances from friends and acquaintances that the show would turn me into a faucet, but... I don't know, it just never happened. It was an incredibly slow-paced show about teenagers being petulant assholes to each other because of unresolved grief, with which I felt some sympathy but not nearly enough to feel anything else along with it. Generally speaking, I don't trust anyone's recommendations about emotionally affecting shows anymore; the two most affecting shows for me are Evangelion and Utena, neither of which is very high up on the lists of tear-jerkers that get passed around anime forums every so often.

[Zeusthecat]

I hope it pans out for you. I watched all of Anohana under similar assurances from friends and acquaintances that the show would turn me into a faucet, but... I don't know, it just never happened. It was an incredibly slow-paced show about teenagers being petulant assholes to each other because of unresolved grief, with which I felt some sympathy but not nearly enough to feel anything else along with it. Generally speaking, I don't trust anyone's recommendations about emotionally affecting shows anymore; the two most affecting shows for me are Evangelion and Utena, neither of which is very high up on the lists of tear-jerkers that get passed around anime forums every so often.

 

We'll see how it goes. Between Kids on the Slope and this, I'm coming to realize that I have a pretty strong disdain for shows that focus too much on juvenile romance and high school drama. There are things I really liked about Kids on the Slope but seeing dumb immature kids acting like dumb immature kids is really grating. I probably would have loved that kind of stuff when I was like 15 or 16 though.

 

As far as what I find emotionally affecting, it is really hit or miss and just comes down to my current mood and how invested I am in whatever I'm watching. I'm not sure if there's really any rhyme or reason as to why some things hit for me and some things don't. There were certain parts in some of the earlier episodes of Attack on Titan that almost had me bawling. Steins;Gate had me regularly shedding tears, especially in the last few episodes. There were even a few episodes of Space Dandy that had me a little choked up (especially that World Without Sadness episode; that one was really powerful for some reason). But then shows like Full Metal Alchemist, Cowboy Bebop, and Ghost in the Shell had absolutely no effect on me whatsoever. There should have been some tears but they never came.

[N1njaSquirrel]

Luckily, it looks like one of their friends may actually be a ghost.

 

Yeah, wait till the end of that arc for minor tears. It gets a lot better after that.

 

I'd love to hear more about your opinion on Kids on the Slope. I really loved that show. I did't feel it's aimed at kids either. The pre-war setting made me feel it was for a much older audience. I really liked the muted ending of that show too.

 

Yeah, the lack of titillation is important for me to be able to focus on the humor in a sex-based gag comedy. If it's trying to be funny but also sexy, then it just feels like the ickier parts of Bakemonogatari to me. Diff'rent strokes, I guess!

 

I dunno if it's trying to be particularly sexy, just a lot of TnA. There was a fair bit of trademark beam of light censoring in the first episode alone. I guess. Idk. I would say maybe watch the first episode, but then you might doubt my tastes forever! :'U

 

Also I have heard a lot of good things about Utena. I shall have to put it on my list to check out.

[Twig]

the two most affecting shows for me are Evangelion

I for one was definitely affected by this anime.

[Zeusthecat]

I'd love to hear more about your opinion on Kids on the Slope. I really loved that show. I did't feel it's aimed at kids either. The pre-war setting made me feel it was for a much older audience. I really liked the muted ending of that show too.

 

I kind of loved and hated Kids on the Slope. I've forgotten all of their names at this point but I really liked the way the show started with the main character sort of unintentionally befriending the school bully and then finding out that they shared a love of music and spending every day after school jamming out together. I think the dynamic between those two characters was really heartwarming and there was a lot of really interesting character growth.

 

Then at some point I felt like it just devolved into typical emotional teen angst. Pretty soon there was a love triangle, then everyone started giving everyone else the silent treatment, then the love triangle turned into a love pentagon, and then everyone started hating each other and they all went their separate ways never to see each other again because their immaturity ended up ruling out in the end. But they at least had that one shining moment where they saved the school talent show (this was probably my favorite scene). And then by random chance they reunited for one last jazz session in a church after they were all grown up.

 

I guess I just wanted the show that continued to flesh out the relationships between the main characters and show their journey through high school as they learned life lessons from each other and stayed best friends. Instead I got the show where I felt like they all devolved into immature kids acting like immature kids.

[Codicier]

Its strange I basically agree with most of the things you said about Kids on the Slope apart from the fact you say you wanted them to flesh stuff out more.

For me I really liked how their lives came together influenced each other deeply and then flew apart.

I had always wondered if they picked the kind of music not just because the director had a love and affinity for it but because it'a a style of music where the players roles are not set in stone, where they come in to each meeting far from certain that what they are doing is going to work. This idea that it was a kind of music which was not about being a virtuoso, but about developing the empathy to hear what the other person saying and then the bravery to try to respond to it.

Idk it just felt like this idea of a music with risk to it, where things can go wrong and can go right all in the same performance.

I'm not sure anything but a bittersweet ending would have worked for me.

[Zeusthecat]

Yeah, that's totally fair and I like your perspective. Even with that interpretation though it's hard to get past a lot of that teen drama. I guess having a love pentagon/triangle basically being the cause of most of their woes towards each other felt really uninspired and cliche.

[Gormongous]

We'll see how it goes. Between Kids on the Slope and this, I'm coming to realize that I have a pretty strong disdain for shows that focus too much on juvenile romance and high school drama. There are things I really liked about Kids on the Slope but seeing dumb immature kids acting like dumb immature kids is really grating. I probably would have loved that kind of stuff when I was like 15 or 16 though.

 

As far as what I find emotionally affecting, it is really hit or miss and just comes down to my current mood and how invested I am in whatever I'm watching. I'm not sure if there's really any rhyme or reason as to why some things hit for me and some things don't. There were certain parts in some of the earlier episodes of Attack on Titan that almost had me bawling. Steins;Gate had me regularly shedding tears, especially in the last few episodes. There were even a few episodes of Space Dandy that had me a little choked up (especially that World Without Sadness episode; that one was really powerful for some reason). But then shows like Full Metal Alchemist, Cowboy Bebop, and Ghost in the Shell had absolutely no effect on me whatsoever. There should have been some tears but they never came.

 

I hear you there. Even though I like romance-driven anime, I've moved pretty concertedly away from shows that are not either i) about college- or adult-aged people (Golden Time, certain parts of Honey & Clover), or ii) about the challenges of being in a relationship rather than the challenges of starting one (Kare Kano, certain parts of Bakemonogatari). Even in other shows that aren't expressly about the romance, like Bakuman, the tendency towards chastity and love triangles as the dominant dynamics between characters quickly turns me off of a show.

[Twig]

I feel like I've done a poor job of selling Rokka, so let's just say that Adlet, the self-proclaimed strongest man in the world, fights like some kind of trickster, and one of his moves is to snap his teeth together, using some contraption to breathe fire.

 

Check out the end of this preview.

 

 

Also he has a sword that he presses a button and the tip opens up, spilling out caltrops. He's a real fiend, that Adlet. I love it.

 

(but then the main lady protagonist, the one with the bunny ears, has some kind of rope bondage shit or I dunno what going on so ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff)

 

[Twig]

Also I think maybe I want to mention The Heroic Legend of Arslan? It's a Japanese twist on a legendary Iranian hero (I believe entirely fictional), and it's very well animated. The story is kind of, hmm, bog-standard stuff, but I'm enjoying it? The sword fights are kind of great, and there's lots of political maneuvering going on among all the factions, and the main character is fairly likable after a point (he starts out as ignorant baby prince, but then gets better). It started last season, and is still going. 14 episodes so far.

 

Weirdly, the manga is only ~25 chapters in, and I was reading that, but the anime has already surpassed it. I'm kind of surprised they started the anime so soon, and there's a game coming out... I guess it's really popular??? I dunno. The manga comes out really slowly, too, it's definitely not a weekly thing!

 

Anyway, check it out if any of that sounds interesting? I'm liking it a whole heck of a lot more than I thought I would. It's not always exciting and it's kind of slow at times, but I find it fairly consistently interesting, even if, so far, it's not all that deep. It does take a few episodes to really get going, though.

 

(My main complaint so far is the introduction of magic, although it does seem to be fairly rare, so far, kind of like, ah, Game of Thrones. Up until a few episodes ago, there was the priest lady who said she could listen to the djinn on the wind, but there was no indication it was going to become something tangible. Then suddenly bam earth sorcerer. Ah well. It's not omni-present, so as long as Arslan doesn't level up and learn how to control the djinn, I'll be happy.)

 

(Actually my other main complaint is the fucking female priest lady goddamnit her outfit. What the fuck Japan, can't you make a normal lady wearing normal clothes?)

[Gormongous]

I watched the two episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Arise - Alternative Architecture that weren't just cut-down scenes from the OVAs. Honestly, for the most part, they were markedly better than the OVAs, which try to do the intense inter-departmental rivalries of Stand-Alone Complex but lack Kamiyama Kenji's command of the material, but they were also much worse in one respect: I really dislike how hard the Arise reboot is also pushing an intra-departmental rivalry between Kusanagi as expert and practical leader of the unit and Aramaki as her superior and bureaucratic liaison.

 

For some reason, Ubakata Tow tries to convey the tension between civil and military authorities, a popular theme in Japanese sci-fi, almost entirely through Kusanagi perpetually sniping at Aramaki whenever they're speaking to each other. I know fictional works where a competent subordinate's dislike and mistrust of their desk-bound superior is the main element driving character development, but that dislike and mistrust has to be justified at some point, lest the subordinate appear to hold grudges and have poor judgment that undermine their supposed competency. Kusanagi supposedly hates Aramaki because he's not military (which means nothing to me as the viewer when I see her repeatedly flout the chain of command anyway) and because he doesn't always assign her how she'd assign herself (she literally claims to be the world expert at any operation that Aramaki is planning and then insults him if he relies on actual experts), but neither of these are justified, because Aramaki's judgment always proves to be correct, especially insofar as the leeway that he should be giving to Kusanagi. Kusanagi just comes off as hotheaded, petulant, and a poor judge of talent, both others' and her own. These are not traits that I'm particularly interested in seeing in the protagonist of a procedural.

 

It's just really frustrating to me, because whatever your complaints about Ghost in the Shell: SAC, it had its character relationships down pat. The working relationship there between Aramaki and Kusanagi was a joy to watch, because of the respect and trust that underpinned it and allowed it to function effectively, and to replace that with a Kusanagi who hates Aramaki for no reason even though he typically turns out to be right in the end is a huge step down.