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I read through Yokohama Shopping Trip, and it's nice and all, but the whole idea of spending your days for years on end doing mostly nothing and barely having contact with anyone is kind of really utterly terrifying to me. That may just because I'm at a point in my life where I'm afraid of getting stuck in a rut like that myself, but it still made me really anxious underneath all the relaxing little fun moments. And then towards the end, the two elderly character stop showing up, and both of them were talking about how lonely things were getting and how they're not going to be around for much longer, but Alpha never acknowledges their deaths at all. And of course, the whole reason everything is calm and serene all around is because humanity is steadily dying away, and you know that Alpha's going to be all alone for longer and longer until they're all dead, waiting forever for customers that will never come by, on the behest of an offhand order from a man who could probably be long dead. Gives me the shivers.
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May 10, 2015 20:08
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 05:32 |
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Dungeon Meshi is really cool, but I keep on thinking it's basically Rutabaga: Adventure Chef but japanese, and with far more worries about cannibalism. I also read Cross Game lately, and it's now pretty much my favorite sports fiction. I don't care or know anything about baseball, but they presented to sport in a way that at least fooled me into thinking I understood everything, and it didn't fall into the rut of cliches most sports things get stuck in, because it was, at heart, a fun story about some kids growing up together while loving a sport. It was a really nice piece of work. It made me go look up other things Adachi Mitsuru's did, and I found Katsu! which does a similar thing with boxing, and Q and A, which sort of does something similar with track but it's mainly about a guy being haunted by his wacky ghost brother.
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Jan 23, 2016 04:10
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Really I'm more mad at myself because every single time I still end up liking it. I know it should be getting old to me by now, but it's not. I'm a real sucker for "here's this fantasy world, here's how it all fits together as a complete ecosystem." Whether that's people catching food for lunch, a girl turned giant spider, a magically apt slime, a strong goblin, a mysterious body-posessing spirit, a bitter antisocial nerd who everyone hates because he doesn't get a weapon, a guy who hates goblins, or a world where everyone's name is their job. Having the main character be a transplant from the real, modern world is a really cheap and lazy narrative device, but it does give an excuse to explain the world to the reader, and it's not a particularly new contrivance.
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Mar 8, 2018 05:11
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Shield Hero Is probably mostly bad, and definitely comes out of an unhealthy worldview and mindset, but it kinda makes me weirdly sentimental about when I was a lot younger and was filled with bitterness and hate, which may also be a bad thing. The whole setup for it was definitely bad, it would've been better if they had some kind of fantasy J Jonah Jamison instead. It's a little fun that over time, people start giving him the "Hey idiot, if you keep doing nice things for people, they'll like you, despite your past reputation" shpiel, but there is something that's kinda philosophically wrong about all of it that I can't quite put my finger on. Has anyone recommended The Girl From the Other Side - Siúil, a Rún yet? That's something that's really different.  It's all about a little girl being taken care of by a terrifying cursed shadow skull person. It's a very different style from most manga, either children's storybook or like 19th century cartoon like Little Nemo. It's very decompressed storytelling with a lot of mystery about what exactly's going on.
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Mar 17, 2018 23:26
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I enjoy it, but That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime is a lot like One Punch Man, in that it kinda forgets its gimmick at a point and becomes straight fantasy. I'll bring in another recommendation: Giant Spider & Me: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale.  Very simple premise, girl living on her own in a shack in the forest meets a weird giant spider that helps her out.
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Oct 15, 2018 17:05
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So they're just starting to publish in addition to licensing? Weird for them to phrase it like a streaming service would. Sounds like a good thing. "Faux anime" visual styles can be hit and miss, but what I really like about manga is the formatting. Longer-form storytelling than you'd get in something published just issue-to-issue, more focus on creator-control rather than executive mandates or complex IP-juggling, and most importantly, no crossover events or random staff changes uprooting everything in a story you were just following.
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Mar 17, 2019 17:16
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I definitely fell off with following Bleach while it was starting to be more of a battle shonen, so I don't really know how much it went back and forth. I do still feel like manga still generally gives creators more control compared to here in the US where most comics are big corporate properties that regularly shuffle their creatives around (so you get art wildly changing in the middle of a story or the characters just randomly forgetting the plot as writers get swapped around), and even if a writer can manage more than a few years on a single title, they'll be periodically interrupted by poorly written linewide crossover events. Anora posted:I think this was basically the start of the current trend of harem anime being more about T&A then actual romance. It's not the worst offender of it's genre, but it's not that good. I think I've decided that the best harem anime is Oh My Goddess, which doesn't really focus much on romance either, and it's mainly about cars. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 23:30 on May 22, 2020 |
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May 22, 2020 23:25
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I really liked Tenchi Muyo as a kid, but that was before I knew what sex is, so while I remember a lot of cool stuff, I don't actually remember the stuff that was the central point of the work. Although I think some of that was also the Toonami dub trying to play down some aspects. Washu still had a fairly mature-sounding voice, so I never noticed that she was supposed to look and sound like a kid instead of just being a short adult. Jackard posted:That's a harem? I've only read the books but I though there was just the one romantic relationship Technically it's before the concept of a Harem Anime really got developed, but it still followed the format of a bunch of hot girls collecting around one boy for improbable reasons. I think some of them come onto the male lead a few times as well. Tenchi Muyo is supposedly the first "proper" harem anime with multiple girls being portrayed as viable options for the protagonist that never really gets around to choosing one of them. It was originally intended to be a more straightforward romance with Ryoko as the main female lead, but then they changed things, birthing a genre. I also have a bad habit of reading manga that I go into expecting it to have some light romance and then multiple romantic interests pop up without any tension to turn it into a proper farce or drama, but by the point I realize, I've got sunk cost, so I'm not sure whether to stop or keep going. RareAcumen posted:My standard for harems is just give the protagonist a personality, please for the love of god. "Reverse" harem animes predate harem animes because originally they were meant to be about a romantic possibility space targeted at women rather than sexual possibilities directed at men. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 01:38 on May 23, 2020 |
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May 23, 2020 01:35
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That one's kind of a hard read. There is some severe mental illness going on there to get through. Probably if that was a real person, it would be a whole assortment of syndromes instead of just Asperger's. Also, I feel like some people will be extremely upset by the dog kicking. Which I guess is probably the point.
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Sep 3, 2020 21:19
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I'm gonna throw down some of my favorites here. The Pharmacist's Monologue Mangadex's translation at the beginning is a bit garbage, so by all means seek out the official version. A young woman gets kidnapped and sold into service at the Imperial Court of China as a maid in the imperial harem, and manages to benefit from her extensive pharmaceutical knowledge. I feel like this one has a bit of everything. It has a lot of detective work, but there's not a million murders. It has a lot of romance-associated stuff although that's not exactly the focus. It's funny after it gets rolling, and there's some neat dramatic moments too. The main character, Maomao is mostly unconcerned with romance, and it's a really interesting perspective on detective stories because she's intensely aware of the power structure of the society she lives in and uncomfortable about getting others in trouble. She also likes her job as a food taster a bit too much...    Spy x Family It's a story about a family unit where everybody has secret identities. The father is a spy, and created the family because his new important mission needed a child to be enrolled in a school to help him come into contact with the reclusive father of another student. The mother is an assassin who agreed on the spur of the moment because she needed a cover because an old unmarried woman would arouse suspicion. But it's not Mr. and Mrs. Smith, because the adopted daughter is actually telepathic and aside from just the general farce, a lot of the humor is driven by her reacting and doing goofy kid things in response to the things people are thinking instead of what they're saying. It's really funny.   I Opened a Café in Another World Girl gets spirited away to another world where the food is terrible, so she has to use her amateur cooking knowledge to make a cafe to spread new delicious food! just as the goddess intended There's a lot of isekais out there of varying qualities, and while some are about big adventures with dire stakes, there's a whole lot that are just kind of relaxing, either because their cheat ability removes all tension from the story or because they decide to make a life for themselves that doesn't involve the whole classic murderhobo thing. There's also a lot of them where people have to reinvent earthly cuisine, but I think this one is pretty measured about it. Also the manga does a good job of showing her acclimating to the new world, she gets adopted by a noble couple. It's just nice.     Guns and Stamps This one is more of a comedy, it takes place in sort of an alternate version of Russia called the Grand Duchy that's in some kind of war with the Republic. It's not about the battles though, it's about a logistics department near the front where one paper-pushing soldier is extremely dedicated to her job unlike everyone else around her. It also has a lot of scenes detailing the vehicles of this alternate world if you're interested in that kind of thing, and the author has made a couple other manga with similar themes.   And in a very similar vein, there's The Dragon, the Hero, and the Courier, which is a similar kind of story, except it's about a mailman (mailwoman? mail-elf?) in a fantasy world, and it dives more into economics. 
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Oct 22, 2020 01:56
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 05:32 |
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I feel like most manga if it actually gets the chance to have a real conclusive ending it ends up as some half-baked rushed thing that gets tacked onto the last arc. Like endings only ever seem to come as a result of the series getting cancelled or the artist getting bored. The only one I've seen that really led into the ending and really felt natural and satisfying was Fullmetal Alchemist. I guess there's also a bit of an exception for a lot of series where instead of being a big adventure it's kids in high school and the story ends up with more natural pacing because it's just sticking to the rhythm of high school, going through the seasons and semesters until the time's up. And coincidentally what comes to mind with that is Silver Spoon, another series by Hiromu Arakawa. Although that one kinda broke the mold as well because it had a heavy focus at the end with what came after graduation before it ended.
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Apr 27, 2021 01:35
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