Anime - Magical Girl Anime Thread, hajimarimasu!

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Samurai Champloo 9 and 10.

Everytime I watch an episode It exceeds expectations. Holy **** these were great.

[Sarex]

Been reading a new manga that's on it's 17th chapter (it's weekly), but it seems that it had poor rankings and it's getting the axe (which is sad cause I liked it). Seem they let the author know, or he is pretty sure, because in the past 3 chapters he put the story in to warp drive (the final conflict is happening now). Now that is not really that strange as new manga get axed regularly and the authors sometimes decide to speed through the story, but this guy started to explain that the manga is getting axed through the story of manga itself. That is a first. I will laugh my ass off if the manga ends up not getting cancelled and he tries to write himself out of the hole he dug.

[InsaneCommander]

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures 18-23

 

Spoiler

Ok, ACDC was not dead yet. Why didn’t he take a body and run? If he took Suzy’s, the good guys wouldn’t notice until it was too late.

 

JoJo to Suzy Q: "You may be an old lady first, but I’ll return." They will end up together, right?

 

Why would Kars call Santana Santana?

 

Sad moment with Caesar. But I suppose there will be another time jump to the next arc, so they might as well kill some major characters and show that no one is safe.

 

JoJo, just before seeing his family’s pictures in Lisa’s bag: “Now, maybe I should bring you a change of panties?” Come on, start thinking man.

 

Can’t believe Whamu fell for that trick. JoJo was obviously messing with the wheels. And he complains about cheating later, when Kars fought Lisa.

 

Oh no. I guess Lisa is gone.

 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

3 hours ago, Sarex said:

I will laugh my ass off if the manga ends up not getting cancelled and he tries to write himself out of the hole he dug.

Maybe he'll take influence from the worst aspect of superhero comics and just relaunch the series everytime it gets canceled?

2 hours ago, InsaneCommander said:

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures 18-23

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Ok, ACDC was not dead yet. Why didn’t he take a body and run? If he took Suzy’s, the good guys wouldn’t notice until it was too late.

 

JoJo to Suzy Q: "You may be an old lady first, but I’ll return." They will end up together, right?

 

Why would Kars call Santana Santana?

 

Sad moment with Caesar. But I suppose there will be another time jump to the next arc, so they might as well kill some major characters and show that no one is safe.

 

JoJo, just before seeing his family’s pictures in Lisa’s bag: “Now, maybe I should bring you a change of panties?” Come on, start thinking man.

 

Can’t believe Whamu fell for that trick. JoJo was obviously messing with the wheels. And he complains about cheating later, when Kars fought Lisa.

 

Oh no. I guess Lisa is gone.

 

SHIZAAAAA!

I don't want to spoil anything, but oh boy it's about to get crazy. Enjoy it while it's last because soon.....

Beware, spoilers from the first five minutes of Stardust Crusaders....

DIO returns and STANDO POWAH replaces Hamon Beat.

[InsaneCommander]

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures 24-26:

 

 

Spoiler

Smokey looking at the Squirrel: “It’s kind of cute, actually.” You had to say that?

Where did JoJo pull an entire airplane from?

With all the main character’s deaths, JoJo and Lisa surviving surprised me. The funeral scene was hilarious.

 

Stardust Crusaders 1:

 

Spoiler

Why did he wait 20 years to go meet his grandson?????

JoJos are getting less polite with women over time. Jotaru calls his own mother an annoying bitch.

He is gonna be a funny partner to his grandfather.

 

And.. Dio is back!

Couldn't find a gif for Holly freaking out in the Police Station, exactly like her mother above. What a family!

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

15 minutes ago, InsaneCommander said:

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures 24-26:

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Smokey looking at the Squirrel: “It’s kind of cute, actually.” You had to say that?

Where did JoJo pull an entire airplane from?

With all the main character’s deaths, JoJo and Lisa surviving surprised me. The funeral scene was hilarious.

 

Stardust Crusaders 1:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Why did he wait 20 years to go meet his grandson?????

JoJos are getting less polite with women over time. Jotaru calls his own mother an annoying bitch.

He is gonna be a funny partner to his grandfather.

 

And.. Dio is back!

Couldn't find a gif for Holly freaking out in the Police Station, exactly like her mother above. What a family!

Don't forget

DIO has evolved to all caps now

[InsaneCommander]

On 10/30/2021 at 4:38 PM, KP the meanie zucchini said:

JoJo 12 and 13: Santana and Stroheim.

Stroheim's laugh is even more of a meme than Hououin Kyouma.

 

So many memes! Lisa has some good ones too.

The "pathetic" collection is increasing:
 

Spoiler

Have you seen this one?

 

[LadyCrimson]

I'm not typically into sports-themed shows of any kind, but I started watching Kuroko's Basketball (2015, I think) on Netflix.

It's reminding me a tad of a live-actor series Prince of Tennis, except it's basketball, and anime. Y'know, where the superstar players are almost magical in their playing abilities, there's an underdog team, winwin, loss, win, growth, a little humor, etc. I like the style I guess. Anyway, dunno if I can take the endless rounds of "suspenseful" who'll win back and forth for three whole seasons, but I like the first season, with it's introduction and setup of main players, quite a bit.

A nice way to pass some weekend time, anyway.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

9 minutes ago, InsaneCommander said:

Have you seen this one?

I have now. JoJo really is the meme that keeps on giving. 

[Gorth]

About 1/3 (episode 10 iirc) into Claymore. Still liking it. Interesting back and forth a bit on the timeline to give some background info. Of course the shady organisation has to be shady, like real shady. With friends like these... who needs enemies anyway?

 

[LadyCrimson]

Yup ... midway through the 2nd season of that basketball anime, the power creep starts to really ramp up. Maybe by the 3rd season the star-player 2nd lead will be able to jump to the moon to make a basket/dunk/block.

Each game shown may last 2-4 episodes. I think those are done pretty well in terms of action/cheesy fun.

There's a few supporting player chrs. that are interesting/you maybe want to know more about them (but probably never will) but like most ... shounens? whatever that word is? ... it begins to all be a bit too much. And basketball players or not, I'm guessing most chrs. are supposed to be 15-18 but ofc most look like 28 year old NBA's or something, haha.

Anyway ... it was fun for a while but movin' on now.

Edited November 1, 2021 by LadyCrimson

[Sarex]

The Wind Rises. Well that was an unexpectedly sad story and seems like an intro for Grave of the Fireflies. Was really surprised Anno voiced the main character.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

17 minutes ago, Sarex said:

The Wind Rises. Well that was an unexpectedly sad story and seems like an intro for Grave of the Fireflies. Was really surprised Anno voiced the main character.

Sounds like something I need to check out.

[Sarex]

17 minutes ago, KP the meanie zucchini said:

Sounds like something I need to check out.

If you haven't seen it, definitely.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

JoJo Battle Tendency 14-19. OH MY GOD! I've seen entire seasons of anime that don't move half as much ground as these episodes.

It looks like Part 5 is now on Netflix, and Part 6 starts there sometime next month. Probably weekly like Komi Can't Communicate. Heaven is coming.

[Gorth]

9 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

There's a few supporting player chrs. that are interesting/you maybe want to know more about them (but probably never will) but like most ... shounens? whatever that word is? ...

Noobs like me sometimes need the power of the internet to decode what people are saying...

https://geekandsundry.com/your-anime-vocabulary-starter-guide/

 

[majestic]

17 hours ago, LadyCrimson said:

There's a few supporting player chrs. that are interesting/you maybe want to know more about them (but probably never will) but like most ... shounens? whatever that word is? ... it begins to all be a bit too much.

Most shōnen stuff starts out too much and gets worse.

7 hours ago, Gorth said:

Noobs like me sometimes need the power of the internet to decode what people are saying...

https://geekandsundry.com/your-anime-vocabulary-starter-guide/

It's really only a starter guide, and you need to be careful with some things.

Also for the love of god avoid anything that has lolis in it. While Lolita fashion really means Victorian era doll-dresses (see Violet Evergarden's doll like appearance, for instance), lolis that appear in lolicon anime are... what happens when animators realize that there are no age restrictions in erotic animated content and they feel like making an animated version of Nabokov's Lolita, if you catch my drift. It's super easy to look for one thing and then suddenly have very different things, uhm, in your search history.

Anyway, since you mentioned that you're usually preferring original with subtitles, there are a few things that are more important to get a hang of than general terminology, and that's the subtleties of Japanese politness and forms of address and honorifics. It's a minefield that will leave you go what? often enough, but it's also something that sadly most subtitles fail to transport. Especially English subtitles because English by far and large just stopped having the required words for it a while ago.

You can perhaps gauge by just how bad that really is when you look at something that happened back in 2008 when the then prime minister of Japan answered a question by a journalist like this:

Anata to chigaun desu (I am not like you, by far and large, in the context). This caused a major sh*tstorm in Japan. Why?

Anata is a word you'll hear relatively often, and it means "you" - just a you used between peers or by someone in higher (social) standing to someone of lower standing. A politician is essentially the servant of the people, so they have no business thinking of their constituents as equals. You just don't address someone of higher standing with anata.

Kind of hilarious when not even Japanese top officials get their words and addresses and honorifics done right. It's ridiculous.

[Gorth]

I did notice a noticeable (pun unintended) emphasis on names at the end of sentences.... like every second sentence goes something like blah blah blah... (short pause) GORTH!

I'm sure there is some kind of language thing that I don't know about as the underlying reason for this way of constructing sentences.

 

[majestic]

I managed to a get a few things finished over the weekend. First, I closed my rewatch of Violet Evergarden, the movie - with good sound. Honestly that improved the film to a point where I wished I would not have watched it with the original cinema experience. I'm not going to complain about the ending again, or the premise. Both things are what they are, and while I wish that the movie would not exist (at least not in this form), the film itself is nothing short of breathtakingly beautiful in many ways. It's also much, much more melancholic than even the series was.

When looking at the film as a standalone project, perhaps that's why it got a schmalzy happy ending like that. Without that, ultimately, the film would have the dour and depressing mood that you will get from watching the end of Grave of the Fireflies and have it from start to finish. While the series has Violet dealing with her grief and repressed guilt in a manner mostly seen through third parties and their own struggles, the series is, while having some very dark moments, still hopeful, and ends on a fanastic high note. Kind of a recommendation for @Gorth, time and budget permitting (Netflix has a free one month trial, anyway).

The film on the other hand, has nothing that is hopeful, at least not (spoilers from here on out):

Spoiler

Violet looking forward to seeing Gilbert again, but being really, really nervous about it, and then he refuses to see her. In the end, they do meet (that's the cheesy rom-com part), however, the rest of the film is very melancholic. The B-plot that happens with Julis is the most depressing thing too, a child dying of a wasting disease. His function in the story is for Violet to be able to reflect on having a chance at life.

The other was I was able to finish Steins;Gate.

Spoiler

First, I took a step back and looked at my predictions, and noticed that while I did not peg Moeka as SERN-Agent, that funnily, as it turned out, was true. She was just an intermediate recruited by "FB", Okabe's landlord, who was my pick in case Daru isn't a mole (which I assumed due to his ease of hacking SERN, but hey, apparently he's really just that good).

Kurisu's father really was the physicist giving the lecture, and that turned out to be relevant for the storyline, even if only at the very end.

Steins;Gate has something common with Love Live!, and that probably has something to do with the writer, Jukki Hanada. He is quite capable of writing wonderful and convincing character interactions (like that final episode in K-On!'s first season) - some of them in the latter half of Steins;Gate are really exceptional and simply work, but he's also capable of coming up with the worst sort of fanservice and terrible behaviour. Lampshading it by having other characters call Okarin and Kurisu tsundere doesn't really cut it.

Most of the time Okarin is an idiot in a way that makes it completely unrealistic than anyone wants to be his friend, even his dysfunctional group of friends should just leave and never come back, yet they do, all the time. I'm not even going to talk about the storyline or the plot holes, because I don't know much much that comes from the source material. However, there are a lot of them - not very surprisingly, what with this being a time travel story.

Often enough, something happens in the story because it has to, not because it makes sense.

Spoiler

Like when Okarin decides to undo the damage his D-Mails and needs Feyris to remember what she wrote - then she suddenly does, and while he still is the only one who remembers crossing timelines, he suddenly isn't alone any more in remembering what happened between them, and every character needed to remember something suddenly does, because plot, and the way they are able to cheat to character fates at the very end is a joke.

Still, the tail end of the show was interesting enough for it to not be a total loss after that horrible middle part all but killed my interest for a while. I'll take a long break before beginning Steins;Gate 0. If I never have to hear Feyris go NYAAAAAAAAAAAAN again it'll be too soon. Nyan, nyan.

 

[ShadySands]

Pegasusu...

It gets me every time

[Bartimaeus]

Just now, ShadySands said:

Pegasusu...

It gets me every time

You and poor Chibi-Usa.

Horse girls...

@majestic I can't imagine how much I would dislike that film based on all the things you've said about it (not just now but also months ago) given that I already had serious problems with the series.

[Bartimaeus]

 Sakura, episode 61, :

Spoiler

I don't know why, but I've loved Mirror since the very first episode she appeared. There's something about the idea of having a mischievous and independent yet also kind and obedient doppelganger used in the way she has been that appeals so much to me. I also love that Kero and Sakura were willing to listen to her...alas, cut short because of her stupid brother! Technically, I'm paused right now before whoever's knocking on the door has revealed themselves, but it's a hundred percent him. Aaand...oh wow, look who it is! This season has had like...a long-running joke/theme of no-one being able to tell or be able to listen to anybody else when someone else is trying to tell them something important.

The most kaiju of all kaiju faces! And she misses the foot stomp! Yowch!

Every single time Toya tries to have a conversation with Yukito - literally every single time, man...

Every single time Xiaolang tries to have a conversation with Sakura - literally every single time, man... Although I wasn't expecting Takashi to be the one that popped out of literally nowhere, . The hell's he even doing here so early, it's Sakura's and Xiaolang's clean-up day!

...I thought this frame was cursed, but the next with the black and white sketch version of Xiaolang was even worse, lmao.

"It's almost Christmas, after all. Other than the present for you, Sakura... Riding atop the present, Sakura will dance through the Christmas skies!" Uh... Hopefully, Tomoyo hasn't figured out a way to transform herself into a pegasus.

"Why can't I say it?" Because you're a shonen in a shoujo, my dear boy, and it's better to be overwhelmed and conflicted by the well-deserved feelings that you've been developing over the entire course of the show than act like the complete piece of crap that your fellow boys in actual shonen shows do! Also, lol @ at him inadvertently sending Sakura directly to Eriol.

Toya needs to beat whatsherface to death right about now. "You're doing this on purpose." No kidding!

89 MB, jeeze.

Everything is fine - totally normal, . "I know!" Aw yeah, here comes Mirror again! Lmao, Mirror is stricken with the same inability to speak that everyone else has been - great. But she'll blush at the thought of going shopping with Sakura's big brother... Funny that a "card" can have a crush like this.

It's a good thing talking is a free action, because Sakura has a habit of bringing out cards to save herself and do the whole danged cutscene right before she's about to get slashed, stabbed, bludgeoned, crushed, or otherwise maimed.

...Did Toya seriously get Mirror a present? I loved this from the start, but this has shockingly turned into probably the most wholesome interaction in the entire show. Oh wow, the show tricked me, I thought it was implying that Sakura wanted to gift Eriol something...but no, she just wanted him to record the song to thank her cards! Man, what a wonderful episode.

 

[uuuhhii]

reading liar satsuki can see death

many manga have one interesting idea but completely wasted all the potential in 5 chapter

this one stay creative for 35 chapter now

hope to see more

[majestic]

 

3 minutes ago, Gorth said:

I did notice a noticeable (pun unintended) emphasis on names at the end of sentences.... like every second sentence goes something like blah blah blah... (short pause) GORTH!

I'm sure there is some kind of language thing that I don't know about as the underlying reason for this way of constructing sentences.

Japanese has ten thousand different pronouns and a very simple rule regarding them: Use them as little as possible, ideally not at all. Hence the excessive usage of names, especially to address people. Every time there'd be a "you" or "they" or something similar in English (or any other Germanic language), you'll probably get a name if at all possible in Japanese.

When you look at something simple like eating, that would be taberu. Simply saying taberu is a complete sentence in Japanese. That can mean, depending on context, I am/he is/you are/we are eating. It's also a familiar way of speaking, tabemasu is the polite form.

57 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

@majestic I can't imagine how much I would dislike that film based on all the things you've said about it (not just now but also months ago) given that I already had serious problems with the series.

If you thought the series was overboard on appeal to emotion drama, then the film is the cherry that tops everything off. I don't think there's a point in trying, but Erica is really only a small part in it. Plus it won't work nearly as well as it does when you're familiar with Violet and what happened to her, but the film was clearly written with the intention to provide enough context for a new watcher to understand what is going on.

I'd still say Grave of the Fireflies has more joyful moments in it, and that's... probably saying a lot.

[majestic]

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Man, what a wonderful episode.

Indeed, I think the "worst" (not that it ever is really bad) of the second arc is over by now, but that could also be just me being happy that the average episode quality improved a lot. There's going to be a few things going on now.

Sakura spoilers (as if anyone else would watch, but hey):

Spoiler

Has anyone talked about what happens to Yukito at the moment? I watched these episodes way too quickly to be 100% sure and I don't want to spoil anything.