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MorningMoon posted:Hey where the gently caress do i find episode summaries i need to know (real rear end spoilers for episode 3) if Chief is alive I don't think we're meant to know that yet. It's framed ambiguously, so that next week we could find out he's just got minor injuries, that he's too hurt to fight, or that he's dead. Keeps things tense. If I had to bet, he's probably still alive. The way the show does cliffhangers in the past suggests that, if he was dead, it would confirm it. Same as last season they stopped at nine on a tencount that Joe got up from. We also have too small a cast right now to easily afford to lose one of the leads. Don't think he'll be in boxing shape, though.
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Apr 19, 2021 03:21
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Nanigans posted:I hope this series is doing well ratings wise. I loved the first season and didn’t think it needed a second season, or that it was even popular enough to get one, though of course I’m happy it did. I’m just not sure who this series is made for besides men in their 30s-50s like me-not really the demographic people really cater to with anime. I feel like this will become a cult classic remembered years from now but never really appreciated in its own time. Even more than season 1. At this point, I hope they deliver another satisfying conclusion that precludes not needing a third season, but also leaves the door open for more. I suspect it's marketed towards Americans. It's got a lot of stylistic touches shared with the anime that got big stateside in the early 2000s, and the first season had pretty good ratings on Crunchyroll and really weak DVD sales in Japan. It's a growing market, after all.
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May 4, 2021 20:14
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Fabricated posted:BD sales have become kind of a weak indicator of popularity, since I want to say overall sales have been trending down. There has been a decline overall, and it's not always a direct way to find a show's success (for example, Vinland Saga got poor Blu Ray sales, but really good TV ratings, and the manga seemed to get a sales boost), but it's widely available data and you can compare like to like within a year to get a little more context. Megalobox sold about 364 discs on average per volume. Meanwhile, the new Full Metal Panic that year sold 3,738, the abysmal Gundam Build Divers managed 1,142 (and that had twice as many episodes to bring down the average), Hisone to Masotan got 788, Planet With hit 1,363, and for some of the big original hits of the year, you have A Place Further Than The Universe at nearly 14K a volume, and Gridman at 10K. (To balance things out, Granbelm sold 252 discs on average, and Juushinki Pandora barely scraped to 155. Megalobox didn't fail dramatically or anything. It was just one of the many shows that didn't make a big splash when it came to home video.) Again, I'm not trying to say that Blu Ray is a be all and end all. It's just one way a show can succeed, and if that doesn't bring in much money but the show still gets a sequel, it's probably doing well with another revenue source. And since Megalobox didn't have much merch or an original manga to sell (well, it had Ashita No Joe as a loose inspiration, but I figure that one didn't need the help), I think streaming is a likely source here.
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May 4, 2021 21:32
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Man. That episode felt weird to me. Not so much for itself, but.... I guess it's the context. I should back up. I finally read Ashita No Joe between seasons, and the defining thing about Joe Yabuki was his fire. He was a boxer because, ultimately, he couldn't be anything else. He burned everything he had chasing the dream, not because he wanted to be champion, but because he owed the dead everything. Even if he lived in the end, even if he by some miracle recovered enough for a more-or-less normal life, the Joe Yabuki in the final panel was burned to pure white ash, never to fight again. The scene at the dinner table here? That's as far from that white hot burning need as you get. Joe might want the match, may think it's the best way forward for him, Mac, and the ghosts he's carrying, but he doesn't need it, isn't defined by it. He's more like Nishi in that scene than he is like Joe or Rikiishi. For lack of a better way to put it, he's normal. A regular man who happens to be a boxer, not the capital letter Boxers of Ashita no Joe, figures who were both more and less than human. And the thing is, the finale to the first season actually played well off that. Joe broke loose from the chains, neither killed his rival nor himself, was able to join with common humanity again. He didn't have to be a grand and tragic figure, just a guy from the slums helping people make it a place you could live decently. But here, he crashed again... and that's where the real problem is for me. Joe finished his arc this season. He got back what he lost, rebuilt his connections, settled up with his ghosts. Which is fine! Good, even. It's just not something you do with two episodes to go. Fights can be exciting because they're well animated, or because they have interesting ideas, but most of all they're exciting because something is on the line. This episode spent a major scene working against that, reducing Joe's personal stake. And that feels weird. It feels somewhat like Joe's being set up to die, but even that's less satisfying without unsettled business.
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Jun 14, 2021 05:09
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GorfZaplen posted:I agree completely. Joe is a very nothing character now, and frankly him getting back in the ring at this point feels contradictory to the path the show has taken him so far. I'll admit I'm several episodes behind at this point because the last few episodes have been very blah to me and I don't have the enthusiasm to watch them. Yeah, it feels like they had something they wanted to do with the Joe and Mac (Caveman Ninjas) fight, but they haven't given Joe the drive to really justify One Last Fight. Also, this episode's handling of the villain... sucked. The big reveal was that Mac was healing fine on his own, and only got the chip because the villain blackmailed his wife with surgery for his son in exchange for her signing off on a potentially lethal experimental surgery. And that's terrible! First, it's wildly illegal. Not "well, some money can make this go away" illegal, but "if anyone so much as whispers what happened, the whole project gets shut down" illegal. It's the kind of violation of medical ethics that's both very easy to prove, and very hard to get away with, with a massive paper trail. It's the kind of poo poo that you don't want when trying to seal a contract, because it's the kind of poo poo that doesn't go away. Second, and more narratively important, it takes away the interesting aspects of the moral conflict here in favor of just making the guy you already hate worse. Initially, this was something that played off Joe in a clever way. You had a genuine miracle, a Good Thing that the shady megacorp did that shows the value of this technology, and it was corrupted by greed combined with Mac's semi-innocent desire for glory. He was burning up what mattered most to him in the ring, in a more literal way than Joe, and that was going to be what the protagonist went up against, defeating his own self-destructive desires and saving someone else in the process. Plus, it also frames the villain's lack of concern in a way that makes him click as a person, not just a figure to boo. Everything Mac had was a gift from the company, so anything that happened to him as a consequence, while unfortunate, was coming out of something he wouldn't have without them. But no. Instead, we just have Sakuma being villainous.
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Jun 14, 2021 23:58
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