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It's very possible that when (volumes 1-2)he has to literally decapitate his girlfriend he snapped out of it for a while. There's this reaction in the face of overwhelming despair where your brain chemicals can go absolutely haywire(I have had this happen) and sometimes you can get a period of...uneasy calm and clarity, where your thoughts are oddly at ease because you're in such shock that your mind just kinda blanks out, is the best way I can describe it. It's possible that he had that and was coming back down off it when he was in the woods before he met Hiromi, and then after that he's not really had a chance to "settle" in the short time period since. I dunno, it's all speculation, it could equally be that Hideo was initially planned to have serious issues before Kengo Hanazawa decided to take the story in a different direction and focus on that rather than Hideo's mental issues. But yeah, feel free to post reactions to other stuff. If you like conjecture, I'd love to see you take on Qualia the Purple. Hell, live-react to me on Steam if you do, that's always hilarious
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Aug 27, 2014 22:40
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I'll be splitting up my sampler packs into individual recommendations, both for easier reading so it's not huge chunks sparsely, and also so I can mention things as I finish them. Parasyte(8 volumes available at Amazon) - Action, Drama, Horror, Manga, Psychological, School Life, Sci-fi Parasyte is a gruesomely violent horror/drama from the mid-90's about parasitic creatures who appear one day and infest many humans by burrowing into their ear canal and entering their brain. From there they replace the head of their victim and proceed to devour humans as they learn about earth and society. While very intelligent and immensely powerful, they have no emotions and exist solely to keep themselves alive at the expense of all others. The story follows Shinichi Izumi, whose right arm was infested by a parasite that failed to enter his brain. As time goes on, he learns to get along with the parasite and begins investigating the hundreds of horrifically grotesque murders happening all over the place as the other parasites begin feeding and learning how to hunt humans without being caught. This series is a really interesting read, with many strong characters and extremely tense moments. The parasites themselves are terrifying nightmare creatures, looking normal one moment and turning into a variety of biological weaponry the next. It's not a super long series at only 8 volumes, and it's pretty strong throughout. The struggles of Izumi and Migi(his parasite) are very well portrayed, as is the way Izumi changes over the course of the series. You can read it at Kissmanga since I don't recommend things to folks blindly, but if you read the first few chapters and enjoy it, please buy the actual books, they're pretty cheap on Amazon though some seem to be out of stock and have absurd prices from secondary sellers. Captain Invictus fucked around with this message at 09:56 on Oct 1, 2014 |
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Oct 1, 2014 09:53
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May is the sole reason I don't recommend Gunsmith Cats to people. Everything else about the series is great, but she has always been one of my least favorite anime characters. Everything about her is just creepy.
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Oct 3, 2014 09:23
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I have to agree on certain points, (parasyte ending spoilers)I feel the DBZ character-looking Final Boss was out of place in this series, but I also feel that actually killing him was handled with the proper amount of gravitas and moral struggle that I enjoyed the series for beforehand. I also feel like the final chapter was literally just to finish off the escaped killer dude because the author forgot about him and wanted to tie up loose ends, but it resulted in a ~happy end~ which I'm okay with. Overall, the ending to Parasyte wasn't flawless, but I'm okay with it.
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Oct 5, 2014 10:00
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You're in luck, there's a new volume out that has yet to be translated, so there will be even more to read soon enough.
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Oct 11, 2014 09:33
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 A Serious Time(Majime na Jikan) - Tragedy, supernatural, seinen Kazusa, a popular high school girl, was walking across the street one day when she was struck and killed by a car whose driver had died at the wheel. They awaken in the same world but as spirits, surrounded by other people who have passed away in the area. As ghosts, they are unable to interact with the human world in any way, though sometimes through intense emotions from ghosts, supernaturally-inclined humans can sense them slightly. Spirits can either descend into loathing and hatred of their former life and unfair death and become a black, miasmic spirit doomed to eventually disappear, or attain enlightenment and leave this world, losing their spiritual bodies and disappearing; to heaven, the netherworld, or simply vanishing altogether, nobody knows. The story follows Kazusa as she comes to terms with her terrible death, witnessing the impact on her friends and family, and her attempts to do good even in death. This story is short and to the point, a mere 9 chapters long, but it's a well-told tale of sudden tragedy, trauma, acceptance, and moving on. It's a short but emotional read, I highly recommend it, especially if you've experienced similar tragedy in your life. By the end I felt very...peaceful. A wonderful read.
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Oct 17, 2014 09:59
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I linked it to Batoto because the ordering on Kissmanga is hosed up and when I hit "next" it put me like 12 chapters ahead and spoiled something for me. That's my biggest beef with KM, the ordering on chapters can get super hosed depending on how the chapter is named.
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Oct 18, 2014 22:52
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I have not read either, but I was spoiled on DN and also heard it shits the bed about halfway through. Liar game I can't speak for. And if you feel something deserves to be in a list of quality series, feel free to make a recommendation using the same style of description in the OP! Example image, link to buy/read, genres, summary and your personal thoughts on it.
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Oct 21, 2014 08:32
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I didn't say she ruined it, I say she's the reason I don't recommend GSC to random people. If she wasn't in it I absolutely would recommend it to more average folks.
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Oct 23, 2014 00:47
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I've come to recommend another of my favorite ongoing series. Truthism(Jitsu Wa Watashi Wa) - Comedy, romance, high school hijinks, supernatural, fantasy Truthism is a somewhat new high school romcom/harem series by Masuda Eiji, and seems to be their first major work to run for more than five volumes. It follows a cast of weirdos in high school, including a vampire, an alien, a demon, a werewolf, and other supernatural creatures-turned-highschoolers. The takes on these characters are fantastic, and the humor is great. Vampires don't disintegrate when exposed to sunlight for example, they just get really, really bad tans. Fanservice is next to nonexistent as well which is a plus(outside of one character whose entire MO is fanservice, and yet it's somehow not offensive). It follows Kuromine Asahi, a Tenchi-esque bland male protagonist(at first) who is unable to lie. He has a crush on the attractive, albeit quiet and stoic, Shiragami Youko. One day, he walks in on her alone in the classroom stretching her huge wings and discovers she's, GASP, A VAMPIRE! If her father finds out her secret has been revealed to anyone, he'll force her to leave school. So Asahi has to keep her secret. Sounds like a pretty generic plot, right? It very quickly devolves into just ridiculous situations with more and more silly and dumb characters. Every single character in this series is amazing, it's really impressive how consistently funny it has managed to be for something that seemed to start out as a standard supernatural romcom. It's in my top five favorite ongoings right now and there's as of this post 49 chapters translated(out of about 80 released). All the characters are adorable and dumb, not just the girls. The humor is really strong for a manga, which I tend not to find very funny most of the time. Also, the faces in it are amaaaaaaaazing.      
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Oct 23, 2014 06:39
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"It can't be helped" is the sign of an amateurish translation yeah
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Nov 1, 2014 17:29
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Also with arbitrary gratuitous nudity and gore wrapped in a candy coating of hypercartoonish art style. Dowman Sayman is great, you should try his other (still ongoing) series, The Voynich Hotel. Be warned though, it's quite a bit more violent/grotesque and has lots more nudity, but it retains his completely absurd storytelling style, albeit a bit more consistent rather than hopping around to completely different themes every chapter. Can love between a wheelchair-bound teenager and a thousand-year-old rotting witch zombie truly bloom? Will the chef who loves poison ever get the luchador hotel owner to notice her?? Will people ever stop accidentally stepping on land mines??? Is the robot detective actually good for anything???? All this and more in The Voynich Hotel! Pretty much my only complaint is the one hotel maid who is a literal example of the thousand-year-old-loli, but I absolutely hate that trope in anything(justifiably so). 
Captain Invictus fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Nov 1, 2014 |
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Nov 1, 2014 17:46
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I really can't believe how good Truthism is. Pretty much every single chapter is gold. It's like Tenchi Muyo but actually funny and without fanservice(aside from one character whose entire gag is that). Chapter 51: Let's Save Earth! The faces in this one are fantaaaaaastic.
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Nov 11, 2014 01:09
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Rejoice, for there is another full volume of I Am A Hero released! An honestly very light-hearted bunch of chapters, compared to the rest of the series. Oda being pregnant certainly throws a wrench into things, though. And her self-sacrificing nature to not burden Hideo and Hiromi will surely lead to more dangerous shenanigans. Seems like the infected are going a Fort Of The Apocalypse route with combining/mutating into other lifeforms, as well as having "alpha" versions that can command other infected. Should result in some real great, horrifying monstrosities, for sure! I love the fairly relaxed pace this series takes. Spending multiple pages with just Oda and Hiromi's breathing in the ocean air was a refreshing cooldown time from the first few chapters of this volume. Man oh man I wish this series would get licensed already. 
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Nov 12, 2014 23:01
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Have you seen Edge of Tomorrow? How does it compare to the manga? I saw it and it was fantastic and really good at putting in humor in an otherwise pretty drat bleak situation as well as having tons of great action and sci-fi shenanigans, but I've not yet read the manga.
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Nov 30, 2014 22:46
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fozzy fosbourne posted:Holy poo poo, I am devouring I Am A Hero. Really incredible flow to the panels. Thanks for the recommendation Invictus! I believe it's by far his most successful series to date, and there's plenty of directions the story could go still, but the progression of the actual story has been going at a comparatively breakneck pace when you look at the last half of the series. So it could end in the next couple volumes, or go on for another dozen.
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Dec 7, 2014 21:24
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It's been over for a long time. There's only a few chapters left untranslated, but the guy doing it stopped due to college or something.
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Dec 7, 2014 21:38
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 Mahou Tsukai no Yome(The Ancient Magus Bride) - shounen, drama, supernatural, fantasy Chise is an incredibly rare human aberration called a Slay Vega, an extremely powerful magic user whose abilities will eventually run out of control and destroy her, but she is very useful to magicians and wizards. Her life has been absolute hell until one day, she is sold at a slave auction to a horned wolf-skulled man in a fancy suit, Ellias. He is an outlier, an eccentric, other magic-wielders avoid him. He has bought Chise with the intention, he claims, to make her his bride, as well as his apprentice, but his motivations seem much different than he claims. This is a relatively new series, only 13 chapters translated so far, and I hear it's been licensed though there's no actual copies released yet, with a release date in the US sometime in mid-2015. The artwork is fantastic and mystical, with lots of otherworldly creatures and magic to be seen. There's a total lack of fanservice, the premise of "child bride" seems more like an excuse for Ellias to take charge of Chise and protect her. For some reason I get a Fullmetal Alchemist-ey vibe from the world of the series as well as some of the more  scenes in it, though it's obviously much more fantasy-based. It's still too early to tell where it'll go in the long-term, but so far it's been a very enjoyable read, and Ellias is a very mysterious and intriguing character. Chise and Ruth are a cute duo, as well. Some of the scenes are very touching. Probably the most iconic one is when Chise meets the Earth Dragon.  There's a preorder listing for the first volume on Amazon, though it seems like they just listed it recently.
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Jan 6, 2015 07:59
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It's "intents and purposes", not "intensive purposes". Also, looking back on 20th Century Boys, I don't think it's very good. It meanders and some of the reveals and pivotal moments are incredible, but as a whole I find it middling at best. I definitely felt it dragged on a lot longer than maybe it should have.
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Feb 1, 2015 06:07
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It's incredibly strong for a long time but I...just stopped caring after a certain point. There's only so long you can keep stakes high before it becomes tiresome.
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Feb 1, 2015 16:20
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Me and the Devil Blues is actually starting back up thanks to the ridiculous success of the author's terrible/great series, Prison School. Dorohedoro is absolutely outstanding and is just about to finish. It's probably one of the most unique series of anything I've ever read, everything from the characters to the powers to the way magic works to the world setting to the ridiculous, ridiculous violence(decapitations and slice-and-dice dismemberment are a chapterly occurrence) is just so different from most other series. It's also genuinely hilarious a lot of the time, too.
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Feb 1, 2015 22:15
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It was actually a few chapters from ending when the manga magazine it ran in went bankrupt, so there was a long period of time where it was just floating in limbo, but it got picked up again and I think there's a half dozen chapters or less to go.
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Feb 2, 2015 06:00
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If it's still in print, amazon is probably your best bet. if not, try ebay.
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Feb 3, 2015 08:25
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 Taiyou no Ie(House of the Sun) - Drama, romance, comedy, tragedy House of the Sun is a dramatic romance/comedy that follows Mao, a high schooler whose mother left her father and she felt unwelcome at home all of a sudden, and Hiro, the eldest brother of three siblings who went through some horrible tragedy in the past. Mao, who used to stay over at Hiro's family's place all the time as a kid, winds up moving into the house he lives in. It's a wonderful series that is simultaneously funny and fluffy shoujo, while also lending real gravity to trauma and people being afraid to face their problems. It just finished being scanlated at 50 chapters and is a really great, heartwarming read all the way through, even if it can stab at your heart as well as warm it. I highly recommend it if you're one for romance series.
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Feb 12, 2015 07:28
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Captain Bravo posted:So is anyone else starting to get tired of protagonists named Hiro? It was clever the first time, and ok the next few, but now it's just started being annoying. We get it. The hero is named "Hiro". Ha ha. Come up with something new already, mangaka. Lurdiak posted:That kinda looks like a romance series about a 20 year old dating a middle schooler. It's a romance, but it also focuses a lot on dealing with tragedy and divorce issues, bringing back together broken families, learning to heal, etc. Captain Invictus fucked around with this message at 10:23 on Feb 12, 2015 |
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Feb 12, 2015 10:19
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I guess. Hiro in that instance is just a dude though, it's not something that affects his stance in the story. Relationships between people a handful of years different aren't exactly uncommon. Hell, my parents are 7 years apart.
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Feb 12, 2015 10:29
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Lurdiak, could you not post in this thread anymore? You rarely say anything of substance and you seem to think that you passing on reading a series is worth posting about. Thanks.
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Feb 12, 2015 16:37
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Lurdiak posted:I'm sorry I hurt your feelings wrt this manga. Nah you're just being a poo poo-stirrer. I'm saying be a better poster if you're going to bother posting in this thread instead of just dropping one sentence(or one word) posts.
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Feb 12, 2015 16:43
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Lurdiak posted:I'm sorry that discussing how I feel about a manga is considered poo poo-stirring.
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Feb 12, 2015 16:52
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Assassination Classroom isn't perfect but it's certainly fun. It suffers I feel from being such a massively popular series but it rarely drags for very long.
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Feb 19, 2015 16:58
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Uznare posted:I take issue with this when the same poster peddles expensive comic books in the anime subforum and doesn't offer any alternatives except buying books one might not like. And a ton of these manga in the thread are totally available legally since the time the OP posted this thread. At worst they could link to the amazon.co.jp pages for the titles without licenses if anyone felt compelled to support their favorite manga even if reading the scanlations because they ship to the US very cheaply and without issues. While you do have a point, you could say it not in such an accusatory way. In fact, some of the series in this thread were licensed because they were recommended here(fort of the apocalypse, soredemo, spirit circle, a silent voice, I'm in mari, and biscuit hammer were picked up by Crunchyroll after mentioning them to someone with ties to the site through this thread). I will admit I never edited the OP's recommendations and samplers to add links to buy appropriate series legally, and for that I apologize, I will do so now. Buying series in a language you cannot read however I think is pointless. I would never buy a book in a language I can't read, even if I wanted to support the author. I will put Amazon.co.jp links where appropriate though if people really feel that strongly about buying the tankobons. Uznare posted:It was a mix of both things I suppose. The OP is very inconsistent because for out of print stuff like Paradise Kiss it links the amazon page for it. But stuff that is readily available like Attack on Titan is listed with a scanlation site. Having both types of links would be ideal. quote:That said my original post did imply that the OP should mostly link manga you can buy. I Am A Hero and Yokohama Shopping Trip not being licensed to this day baffles me. edit: if you have links to where to legally purchase series that have been localized and recommended in this thread that lack a link to an appropriate source, by all means let me know via PM. I know there's Crunchyroll and Amazon, but outside of that, not 100% sure of other means. edit: oh yeah, A Silent Voice and Fort of the Apocalypse were picked up by Crunchyroll by this thread's recommendation as well. So there's that too. Captain Invictus fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Feb 20, 2015 |
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Feb 20, 2015 04:38
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Okay, I've replaced links and/or added Amazon/Crunchyroll/WSJ links, let me know if I missed anything. I'm not very good at finding official amazon.co.jp pages(I.E. not resellers) so any help with that would be much appreciated. For example I was not able to find links to purchase Hinamatsuri volumes because that is also the name of a traditional japanese holiday apparently and so the only results I found were things for that. I also attempted to get Ai-Ren licensed at one point and spoke briefly with the author(though our conversation was via google translate of course), who appreciated the effort but thought that an older series would never get picked up for an English version at this point, though they did say they'd let me know if ever it got licensed.
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Feb 20, 2015 05:30
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Yeah, qualia was getting updates very quickly but then the translator who also had an understanding of quantum mechanics(a rarity among translators! ) suddenly needed to do other things and stopped working on it. I don't know what happened to teppu. I think it's on hiatus in Japan as well which really sucks. Please install a comment blocker for disqus because I have never read a comment worth reading on it. They are worse than youtube comments most of the time. You should try some of the completed series. I recommend Yokohama Shopping Trip. Captain Invictus fucked around with this message at 06:50 on Feb 22, 2015 |
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Feb 22, 2015 06:47
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a kitten posted:Also, everyone read Yokohama Shopping Trip I'm more of a fan of Kissmanga simply because you can load an entire chapter in one go instead of page by page. http://kissmanga.com/Manga/Yokohama-Kaidashi-Kikou/0?id=59330 It's baffling to me that Yokohama Shopping Trip never got licensed. Like, of any series, even I Am A Hero, Yokohama Shopping Trip has some of the best overall user ratings on Baka Updates, with ten times as many 8+ ratings as 7's, and a hundred times more than anything lower than that. It's a staggeringly good, relaxing, melancholy series. AnonSpore posted:Teppu came off of hiatus a while ago, but it was on hiatus for a very long time because the mangaka was severely sick (as in, people were saying it would never be finished, the mangaka was dying, etc) and I guess interest from the scanlators died off during that time. Captain Invictus fucked around with this message at 12:43 on Feb 22, 2015 |
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Feb 22, 2015 12:25
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Then recommend it. Akumetsu is stupid and fun head-explodey ridiculousness, and disappears up its own rear end at the end
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Mar 5, 2015 07:26
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 I also already recommended Teppu in Sampler 3.I hear the author had some serious health issues and had to go on hiatus, that on top of it being a monthly series means while there's not been much in the way of scanlations, we're not all that far behind either.
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Mar 10, 2015 11:36
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Yep, I put KOS in one of the samplers a while back. It also has a cyborg bear-human hybrid though that one is a girl and wears frilly aprons and stuff but also pilots robots because she's a badass. She's the best. 
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Mar 15, 2015 23:43
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Same with rocky and real boxing
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Mar 17, 2015 07:46
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I've never actually seen any of the Rocky's. I was going off most of what I'd heard about the movies(which admittedly isn't much, but cultural osmosis is a helluva thing).  And real boxing kinda sucks to watch in my opinion.
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Mar 17, 2015 11:36
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 20:59 |
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Speaking of MMA series, after half a year off, new Teppu! I was kinda hoping Eyebrows'd get taken out unexpectedly, but I'm happy that at least everyone recognizes she's kind of a freaky weirdo.
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Mar 19, 2015 10:10
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