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Okay, I feel like making a hard sell: The World is Mine (Action, Drama, Mature, Psychological, Seinen, Supernatural) "Meet Mon, a violent killer faithful only to his own eruptive desires, and his timid companion Toshi, a demolition-devil with a fanatical thirst for destruction. Their killing-spree across Japan is destined to intersect the path of the enormous 'Higumadon,' a mysterious beast on a Godzilla-like rampage from Hokkaido to Tokyo." Essentially Natural Born Killers + kaijū flick. The art is the complete antithesis of the 'cuteness' that defines much of anime/manga and has a lot of the ordinary ugliness that I personally feel best demonstrates what actual people look like, so give this a shot if you've ever found that cute aesthetic off-putting. Also, most will find the violence, rape, and initial aimlessness repulsive, but I would still give it about 30 chapters before completely giving up on it. And if my obviously glowing recommendation doesn't spur you on to read this, here's two reviews that outline things in more detail albeit with some spoilers.
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Feb 2, 2015 20:24
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Daler Mehndi posted:I didn't understand the dialogue. Maybe it's a translation issue. A shame because I actually liked the art. But I can't follow the story as it is. robots never sleep posted:Beyond the action and characters, TWIM also received recognition for the frequency and accuracy of the portrayal of regional Japanese dialects. Much of the story takes place on the north end of the main island of Honshu, in the prefectures of Aomori and Akita, northeast of Tokyo, and Arai took special care to recreate the accents and speech patterns of the local people, despite the fact that he himself was raised in the big city, where there is no accent. This feeling of geography is very important to the manga, which uses an almost ludicrous amount of Godard-esque (or would that be Anno-esque?) subtitles, announcing the time and place at every scene change. In this way, the events of the story are given a strong documentary-like realism, a grounding that helps further reinforce the sheer scale of what is portrayed. It is often difficult to follow the dialogue, for a variety of reasons. The regional dialects of Aomori and Akita can be quite unfamiliar compared to standard Tokyo Japanese, and require an acclimation period before the patterns sink in. As well, Arai's voice as an author carries some peculiarities. In moments of quick action or extreme emotion, his characters will often break down from full sentences to choppy, blurted interjections. It's hard for me to tell if these are simply attributable to the idiosyncracy of the writer, or are perhaps a depiction of the slowing of time during sequences Arai wishes to emphasize (thus breaking the comic Golden Rule that you have all the time in the world to give your speech before the next panel advances the sequence). In addition to these more fundamental language issues, Arai also bogs down some of the pacing in the middle of the story with extended technical discussions about things like the military chain of command, political maneuvering and manipulating public perceptions, things that he himself admits he did not understand before drawing the manga, but were necessary to give it the serious portrayal his subject deserved.
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Feb 3, 2015 16:17
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Sad Mammal posted:I'm trying to read The World is Mine too, and yeah, some of this stuff is nigh-incomprehensible.
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Feb 12, 2015 19:19
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