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Jojo and Mushishi are guaranteed slots that I'll keep up on. Everything else is just wait and see for me, though hopefully Ping Pong and Captain Earth should be fun. Chaika the Coffin Princess I'll probably watch out of the hopes it'll be good like Scrapped Princess was. I'm vaguely intrigued by No Game No Life so I'll probably give that a shot as well. Was Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo actually good? I've had classmates rave to me about it and apparently it's relatively well-liked on the internet.
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Mar 6, 2014 01:49
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Autonomous Monster posted:No. Remove the horrible incest poo poo and what you are left with is yet another magical high school anime with a bland-beyond-belief protagonist who manages to be simultaneously the plucky, underrated underdog and the hyper-competent prodigy, and a supporting cast constructed with a checklist and a careful eye to removing anything of interest or substance. Oh, yes, and if I'm remembering correctly, a whole load of natwank. And then it, by some magic I do not fully understand, takes this poo poo sandwich of a premise and makes it even more obnoxious. There is not a single element of this whole thing which is not a thin streak of diarrhoea. It's also really inexplicably popular so there's that too. You could say because Japan, but it has a fanbase in the West too for some reason, or at least one dedicated enough to give it high rankings on manga lists which is how I first ended up reading it in the first place.
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Apr 6, 2014 21:24
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It's gonna get pretty drat skeevy. I was tempted to write up a trip report of the first volume for anyone who was curious, but got lazy. Haven't seen the episode yet, but I have mixed feelings on the original story overall, since the game elements are interesting in that game logic kind of manner, and the fact that the main character is a self-aware lovely person has potential for growth. The fact that the two of them basically become unable to function when they're separated since they're both terrified of society can be interesting to look into if the story goes that route. But of course, there are quite a few troubling aspects as will be seen in the next few episodes which might put it into terrible territory, such as the siblings' relationship, the main character causing someone to fall in love with love with him against her will (she becomes a tsundere and it's played for laughs, but I'm sure everyone can read the unfortunate implications), and the fanservicey parts. I'm still undecided if the pros can match the cons, but yeah lots of troubling aspects here.
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Apr 9, 2014 21:01
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Coffin Princess did not disappoint so I'm fairly excited to see if it can keep it up. That unicorn design was pretty drat great. No Game No Life was about what I expected. For the moment, they've actually toned down the sibling creepiness a fair degree compared to the LN so that's nice, since even in the novel, there were genuine moments where you could see that they were siblings or at least two kids who are pretty dependent on each other (of course they're step-siblings because  ). It's why I have mixed feelings on that relationship from what I've read since if it weren't for that creepy factor that has to always be pushed in practically every trashy LN, it's a story that could work about these two kids who are afraid of the real world and only have each other. Course things can change since there's a couple future scenes which we'll have to see how the anime will execute, but at the moment, it's sitting on the borderline. I'm probably putting more thought into it than is needed anyways and it's doubtful the story will go that in-depth. The other pros I didn't mention in my last post is that basically all the games basically run on Hunter x Hunter/Kaiji logic with dashes of Yu-Gi-Oh moments, and every opponent basically tries to cheat against them, so it can get pretty creative in what happens in the games, and with 16 races to deal with, you've got your standard fantasy world-building set up. The fanservice moments will happen though and everyone here will comment or complain about it, and it is pretty terrible, but that's the nature of this genre unfortunately.
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Apr 10, 2014 08:14
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I honestly could never get past the first episode of Elfen Lied just because it felt so mean-spirited, so there was always this sense of dread that she would just murder the whole cast in later episodes at the drop of a beat. I have no issues with Berserk, Hellsing, and other similar stuff, so not quite sure other than just distaste at the 1st episode.
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Apr 15, 2014 02:51
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Eej posted:I was told by someone in vague terms that it's not really incest but it would be a spoiler to go further than that but I will defer to your greater incestual knowledge. I decided to read spoilers since I got curious since I probably stopped reading in either the first or second volume, and man, what I've learned is that Irregular is a loving hilarious power-fantasy in how many dumb traits are jammed into the main character in making him perfect yet supposedly flawed. Basically think up any usual aspect that people would give their self-insert characters, and you'd probably be spot on.
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Apr 15, 2014 05:00
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Eej posted:I thought this was obvious enough when every female is giving him the anime equivalent of the sex eyes and he's totally oblivious to it (apparently forever? I suppose that's an upgrade from Kirito).
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Apr 15, 2014 05:23
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Hey I warned you guys things would get pretty drat skeevy in No Game No Life. It just happens that the plot does do some interesting things with games while being held back by its creepy undertones. At least it's transparent that the main character is a terrible maladjusted person instead of being some perfect person that everyone loves, but we'll have to see if the story will do anything with that. I'm sticking on this train to see if it crashes and burns or not.
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Apr 17, 2014 02:35
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Man, after finally watching episode 2 of No Game No Life, I was expecting a lot worse given reactions to it. Admittedly, I'm probably shamefully desensitized to fanservice sadly enough, but for comparison's sake, I will say the manga version of No Game No Life was a lot creepier that the anime version seemed pretty tame. Anyways, the comedy had pretty decent timing, and I still think there's elements of potentially decent story underneath it all so gonna just have low expectations and see if the show will trash its own potential or not. Chess game next episode should be fun and ridiculous. Chaika continues to entertain even if it is a remix of Scrapped Princess. Fugitive on the run stories are always fun. It'll probably end up being fairly solid but generic in the end, but Scrapped Princess was like that too so it'll hopefully maintain decent quality from week to week.
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Apr 17, 2014 08:30
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The Devil Tesla posted:One thing I love is that anime/manga targeted at adults totally glorifies high school, like a Kyoani show or Chihayafuru, yet when a manga is actually targeted at teenagers we get something like Assassination Classroom or Beelzebub, where school is basically hell. That's not totally true given romcoms like Nisekoi, Seo Kouji's stuff, and lots of romance shoujo manga in general exist. Manga authors in general just like to place their settings in high school presumably for the reasons stated in the Tokimeki post. Beelzebub just draws from the same well of punk stories that Kyou Kara Ore Wa and Shonan Junai Gumi does, while Assassination Classroom succeeds a lot of teacher stories like GTO and Kinpachi-sensei. I wouldn't call it hellish, just more exploring a different glorification within the mind of the author of what high school could have been like with possible twists of demons/octoteachers.
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Apr 20, 2014 12:18
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Joshlemagne posted:There's a difference between characters being teenagers and having the story actually set in a high school. I'm not an expert on YA fiction, but I'd be willing to bet you'd find the former was very common, but the latter was fairly rare. If you look at the stuff that's most popular with teenagers in Japan, it's stuff like One Piece and Naruto where the characters are around high school age but don't actually go to high school. It's when you start getting into late-night niche otaku stuff that you start seeing more of high school as an actual setting. I suppose you could say that dramas and stuff were also predominantly aimed at adults. And that's what makes it kind of strange. Got curious and looked up what was most watched on Japanese TV last week. Bear in mind, some of these just started so not the most accurate picture of what's popular. Ignoring variety shows (these actually rank up high, I'm just not sure how to judge them) and TV specials, top watched dramas of last week were: Hanako to Anne - Japanese Anne of Green Gables 22.3 Gunshi Kanbee - Sengoku historical drama 14.9 Alice no Toge - Suspense revenge drama starring doctors 14.2 Yowakutemo Katemasu - High school baseball drama 13.4 MOZU - police investigation 13.3 Smoking gun - detective procedural 10.3 Border - police procedural 9.7 Anime-wise, you got your usual suspects of popular kids' shows, but obviously their viewership is not as high as variety shows and dramas. Sazae-san 16.3 Crayon Shin-chan 11.1 Doraemon 11.0 Chibi Maruko-chan 10.8 One Piece 9.7 Detective Conan 9.6 Dragonball Kai 7.2 Happiness Charge Precure 5.6 Kindaichi Case Files R 5.5 Pokemon XY 5.3 Obviously this doesn't explain the proliferation of high school settings in manga, but turns out the general Japanese population generally likes the same kind of stuff the West does.
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Apr 21, 2014 01:18
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Does it help that I said that the first episode seemed to have toned down those parts. The 2nd episode continued that trend as well of being less creepy than the source material, but a lot of people backed out regardless. Like you could have linked the LN's version of the bathhouse scene(NSFW), and you can already compare it to episode 2, which was not even close to being that creepy. At the moment, the anime seems to be going out of its way to keep the skeeviness to a minimum.
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Apr 24, 2014 00:55
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No Spice and Wolf, no sale.  On a less sarcastic note, I mostly have genre fiction as my backlog anyways (been reading Perdido Street Station off and on). I probably should look into modern fiction that isn't genre fiction one of these days. That or something nonfictional which I haven't done in ages.
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Apr 28, 2014 19:26
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Nate RFB posted:You can (and should) buy Spice & Wolf! Yen Press has been doing a decent job, as far as I can tell. I think a new volume just came out a week or so ago. I think all told you could make about 3 more anime seasons out of the books they've translated so far. Yeah I picked that up around the time the simulwatch ended since I wanted to know what happened next. On the note of light novel chat, I also just read Legendary Moonlight Sculptor recently, which was pretty entertaining if you're into The Gamer and Sword Art Online. Has a bit of a rough translation, but it's pretty cool MMO fiction about a dude just trying to be a gold farmer and profiting to finance his sister's college education. Made me start craving playing an MMO anyways.
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Apr 28, 2014 19:46
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It was a good anime?
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Apr 28, 2014 20:23
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Yeah basically. I know kyousougiga was my favorite show last year, but me and everyone else tended to throw hataraku into their list since it was such a good surprise hit so it ended up being listed the most.
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Apr 28, 2014 20:39
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Clarste posted:That's not what I meant. I don't think the LNs have enough good material. The whole series revolves around one really good joke and everything they add to it just waters it down. I'm not saying the pacing of the second half was bad, I think the content itself was worse. I honestly don't want to see a sequel because the direction it was going makes me think it'll be bad. Depends on how much potential you see in raising a child. Given stuff like Beelzebub and Yotsubato, there's decent comedy potential in the idea. Allarion fucked around with this message at 05:56 on Apr 29, 2014 |
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Apr 29, 2014 05:10
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Clarste posted:Mahouka also won awards. LN readers are not known for their discerning taste. Did it? As far as I can find, it's just very popular and gets high rankings, and the original web novel got a lot of hits. Apparently it was also ranked in a "This Light Novel is Amazing" guidebook but otherwise, it actually hasn't won any official awards.
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Apr 30, 2014 02:24
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SSNeoman posted:Right. Hey how about that Konojo ga Flag show? Is it worth watching? Probably not. It's a really generic harem romcom that doesn't even use its gimmick interestingly other than the first episode. All the characters are cliches and there's barely any character development. There's other stuff that hint at a bigger story, but it's still really generic and kind of boring. This is an opinion I've made based off of reading the manga though, though they're about the same based off what I saw in the first episode.
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Apr 30, 2014 06:15
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There was also Ah My Goddess, which also predates Tenchi Muyo, even though not all the heroines fall in love with the main character. I want to say Ah My Goddess might be the one that set up a lot of trends that the harem genre has now. Tenchi is just remembered in the West due to being one of those early Toonami shows.
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May 27, 2014 06:00
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Waffleman_ posted:I really hope Mahouka doesn't become the next SAO. Mahouka's popularity in the West will always confound me. Its popularity in Japan isn't unexpected though.
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May 30, 2014 21:27
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