Anime and Manga - ゴゴゴゴ

[Sarex]

34 minutes ago, Lexx said:

They introduced a new (female) character in the latest episode, who just took a bath at the main characters house for reasons. Obviously the guy storms into the bath, because he doesn't know who's in the house (could be a fraud or burglar!!!), and oh no, that girl is standing completely naked in front of him now. Then because of shock, she falls down and gives our male lead a full front view of all the goods.

By the way, that woman has the body of a young girl but as established in a later scene, she is actually older than the other characters around, because of course. This is cringe level over 9000.

That is, sadly, fan service... Very hard to find an anime that gets around that.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

2 hours ago, Sarex said:

That is, sadly, fan service... Very hard to find an anime that gets around that.

I'm really struggling to think of one. Perhaps Devilman Crybaby, if only because the show is already so sexualized that anime tiddies don't really have the same effect they do in most anime fan service moments.

[Lexx]

Well if they would at least show something There's always something in front of it or obviously hidden. I'm just sitting here like, man, I'm clearly too old for this.

[Sarex]

10 minutes ago, Lexx said:

Well if they would at least show something There's always something in front of it or obviously hidden. I'm just sitting here like, man, I'm clearly too old for this.

You either get over that stuff or read manga. Not saying there is no fan service in manga, there is and they even started uncensoring it partially, but you can find manga that is simply not about that. If you really want to see what a harem anime/manga is than you can read To Love Ru which is all about it and the author cheekily insert uncensored stuff in reflections that is really well hidden, like easter eggs...yeah easter egg... Now here is where I say that I haven't read/watched it and that I know all this from second hand, but reading what I wrote I don't believe myself...

[Lexx]

I know what harem animes are - Have seen more than enough of that garbage.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

1 hour ago, Lexx said:

Well if they would at least show something There's always something in front of it or obviously hidden. I'm just sitting here like, man, I'm clearly too old for this.

It is awkward when they do that. Of all the anime I've seen, only Evangelion has really pulled that off to be funny.

34 minutes ago, Sarex said:

You either get over that stuff or read manga. Not saying there is no fan service in manga, there is and they even started uncensoring it partially, but you can find manga that is simply not about that. If you really want to see what a harem anime/manga is than you can read To Love Ru which is all about it and the author cheekily insert uncensored stuff in reflections that is really well hidden, like easter eggs...yeah easter egg... Now here is where I say that I haven't read/watched it and that I know all this from second hand, but reading what I wrote I don't believe myself...

I wish there was an anti-harem anime where the supporting cast are all horny bisexuals but none of them are interested in the main character. Now that would be something else.

[Sarex]

17 minutes ago, KP the Torque Dork said:

I wish there was an anti-harem anime where the supporting cast are all horny bisexuals but none of them are interested in the main character. Now that would be something else.

There are variations of that in manga, where they subvert the harem trope. Like the MC being gay and the girls won't leave him alone and things of that nature.

Thinking on the subject of fan service the only example where it added to the plot and worked was Prison School, it was hilarious while it was good... sadly it took a nosedive near the end. I guess Grand Blue is another example, but there it's mostly male nudity, so I don't know how much of a fan service that is.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

29 minutes ago, Sarex said:

There are variations of that in manga, where they subvert the harem trope. Like the MC being gay and the girls won't leave him alone and things of that nature.

Thinking on the subject of fan service the only example where it added to the plot and worked was Prison School, it was hilarious while it was good... sadly it took a nosedive near the end. I guess Grand Blue is another example, but there it's mostly male nudity, so I don't know how much of a fan service that is.

That sounds cool, but I'm thinking more along the lines of denial than disinterest.

Re: Grand Blue...I think it depends on which fans are being serviced. So to speak.

[majestic]

2 minutes ago, KP the Torque Dork said:

That sounds cool, but I'm thinking more along the lines of denial than disinterest.

Re: Grand Blue...I think it depends on which fans are being serviced. So to speak.

Please score a goal inside of me!

[Bartimaeus]

Gall Force 2: Destruction.

Something I apparently didn't pick up on in the first movie, because I am not very smart, is that our crew was not simply all women because "why not", but apparently, all these ladies come from an alien species that *is* all women - there are no men. This makes the main story make so much more sense now that I know this, as I couldn't figure out why the movie was...well, it doesn't really matter to the rest of you, but there's a baby boy that the movie was basically treating like the most precious thing this side of the galaxy, and now all that makes a lot more sense.

This series is still wigging me out that it's so much more serious than I ever expected. Look at this poster, they're...well, actually, now that I look at this one in particular again, they do look a bit more severe than my initial impression would have suggested:

Poor Catty on the left there looks like she's practically about to have a mental breakdown...which, uh, I guess is pretty understandable given the circumstances of the first movie. Okay, so maybe I just didn't look close enough before actually watching it - also, holy crap I wish these films were in HD. The art is fine at DVD quality, but...ugh, stuff like this being lost peeves me so. But anyways, I really did think it was just going to be silly space adventures - girl space commandos sounds fun, right? Nope - anyone not doing their part is gonna get killed. Well...at least it's better than some alternatives I can think of (hello, Plastic Little). Anyhow, while this was a continuation of the first, it wasn't quite as much to my tastes - a little too focused on space battles instead of the characters, which was a better strength in the first one. Actually, that was a little weird, because ostensibly, this film was about protecting a few important characters from the first film...but we never even saw them until literally right at the very end, so there felt like a bit of an odd disconnect between what was said to be being accomplished and what you're actually seeing. Still, I'll watch the third one and see how it ends (...and whether I should watch the couple of side-entries to the series).

Edited February 15, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

40 minutes ago, majestic said:

Please score a goal inside of me!

 

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Drop Kick on My Devil s1. So pretty much it's consistent low stakes humor that is repetitive but can be fun. Until the unaired 12th episode drops, which is half of a beach episode so of course I feel weird watching it.

@InsaneCommander has it right with this meme.

[InsaneCommander]

On 2/11/2022 at 2:36 AM, Gorth said:

What is not properly explained is, who created the stone masks? The "men in the pillar"? If so, why didn't they create them so they could use them themselves? The human vampires created by the masks had no immunity to sunshine, why would the "men in the pillar" gain immunity then? Were Wham and AC/DC the two babies? If so, who was the other adult? Where did Santana enter the picture? He got labeled and some kind of lowly "slave" almost to the "men in the pillar".

Who put the men in the pillar? What is/was the pillar?

Don't forget the biggest unanswered question: why did the other pillar men call Santana "Santana"? That name was given to him by Stroheim.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

21 minutes ago, InsaneCommander said:

Don't forget the biggest unanswered question: why did the other pillar men call Santana "Santana"? That name was given to him by Stroheim.

I like to believe that Kars picked up on it based on what Stroheim said and that they didn't bother to name Santana because he only spent 9000 years at the gym.

[Gorth]

6 hours ago, KP the Torque Dork said:

Drop Kick on My Devil s1. So pretty much it's consistent low stakes humor that is repetitive but can be fun. Until the unaired 12th episode drops, which is half of a beach episode so of course I feel weird watching it.

I'm at episode 9. I do like it very much. Quite funny. But as you said, also repetitive in a Vile E. Coyote vs. Road Runner kind of way. I.e. predictable. Still, the many ways Jashin-chan can end up displeasing Yurine (and being ground to sushi, filleted, impaled etc.)

 

Somehow I just image a Drop Kick on my Devil beach episode being Jashin-chan ending up as bait on a fishing hook and thrown into the water...

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

9 minutes ago, Gorth said:

I'm at episode 9. I do like it very much. Quite funny. But as you said, also repetitive in a Vile E. Coyote vs. Road Runner kind of way. I.e. predictable. Still, the many ways Jashin-chan can end up displeasing Yurine (and being ground to sushi, filleted, impaled etc.)

 

Somehow I just image a Drop Kick on my Devil beach episode being Jashin-chan ending up as bait on a fishing hook and thrown into the water...

That's not entirely incorrect.

[Gorth]

2 minutes ago, KP the Torque Dork said:

That's not entirely incorrect.

???

 

She is a bit of a snake though...

 

[majestic]

The best thing about Dropkick on my Devil is Jashin and Medusa's* completely dysfunctional relationship and the ATM joke.

ATM joke explanation:

Spoiler

For those that didn't watch this, Jashin is always broke and Medusa is constantly bankrolling her every desire, and in turn Jashin calls Medusa her ATM. As it turns out, ATM is a Japanese/English pun-acronym, actuallly meaning 愛してるメデューサ (ai****eru Medusa, i.e. I love you, Medusa).

*And Medusa wearing a paper bag when leaving home.

[Gorth]

4 minutes ago, majestic said:

The best thing about Dropkick on my Devil is Jashin and Medusa's* completely dysfunctional relationship and the ATM joke.

ATM joke explanation:

  Hide contents

For those that didn't watch this, Jashin is always broke and Medusa is constantly bankrolling her every desire, and in turn Jashin calls Medusa her ATM. As it turns out, ATM is a Japanese/English pun-acronym, actuallly meaning 愛してるメデューサ (ai****eru Medusa, i.e. I love you, Medusa).

*And Medusa wearing a paper bag when leaving home.

Ah, didn't know that second meaning of her calling her 'ATM' when greeting her

 

It does show what happens when mortals accidentally sees her without the paper bag on her head

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

35 minutes ago, Gorth said:

???

Your prediction of the beach episode.

16 minutes ago, majestic said:

The best thing about Dropkick on my Devil is Jashin and Medusa's* completely dysfunctional relationship and the ATM joke.

ATM joke explanation:

  Reveal hidden contents

For those that didn't watch this, Jashin is always broke and Medusa is constantly bankrolling her every desire, and in turn Jashin calls Medusa her ATM. As it turns out, ATM is a Japanese/English pun-acronym, actuallly meaning 愛してるメデューサ (ai****eru Medusa, i.e. I love you, Medusa).

*And Medusa wearing a paper bag when leaving home.

I didn't know that. Huh.

Minos seems underused. I think we saw a ton of skits about Medusa and Jashin-chan or hungry Pekola, but Minos only got a handful of dedicated bits. I think the ice girls ended up with more time than 100% beef.

[majestic]

17 hours ago, KP the Torque Dork said:

Your prediction of the beach episode.

I didn't know that. Huh.

Minos seems underused. I think we saw a ton of skits about Medusa and Jashin-chan or hungry Pekola, but Minos only got a handful of dedicated bits. I think the ice girls ended up with more time than 100% beef.

Minos is definitely underused, and hungry Pekola is overused. It's not a perfect anime by any means, but it is fun(ny) enough.

PreCure just pulled off the good old redemption equals death trope.

Spoiler

For nine episodes in total, Kiriya was part of the core cast when he joined the school Honoka and Nagisa go to. Pretty expectedly he found it fun, and he ended up saving Pretty Cure twice. In the last episode, they blasted his sister out of existence, and now he actually fights them. Honoka stubbornly refuses to attack him in earnest, gets pretty banged up for it and Nagisa asks him if there's any joy in seeing her like this.

He says no, give them his Prism Stone and leaves, while the last of the five bad guys ominously tells him what fate awaits those who defy their master's wishes.

Cosidering the setup was thorough enough and I actually find myself liking everyone invovled, that fell on its nose. Pretty hard. I don't know exactly why, but that episode did not work on its own, and certainly not when compared to some of the inspirations it came from (like Naru and Nephrite).

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

17 minutes ago, majestic said:

Minos is definitely underused, and hungry Pekola is overused. It's not a perfect anime by any means, but it is fun(ny) enough.

I think every Pekola bit was the same, she's hungry and doesn't want to eat with devils but does it anyway. Really Pekola worked best when she was paired with the other fallen angel whose name is close to popcorn.

Minos delivering milk is hilarious and it would have been fun to see her paired with Medusa for some hijinks.

[majestic]

Yesterday I was idly browsing Netflix for funny recommendations for the post in the streaming thread, but there was one that actually looked somewhat promising. A quick googling also told me this won virtually every animation award in Japan and landed the director, Sunao Katabuchi (who was originally selected to direct Studio Ghibli's Kiki's Delivery Service), film prizes usually not even given out to directors of animated films.

この世界の片隅に, Kono Sekai no Katasumi ni (2016)

Clocking in at an impressive two hour and nine minutes runtime, there's apparently also an extended cut running almost 2 hours and fity minutes that I actually planned on watching afterwards if it turned out to be a good film - well maybe not necessarily directly afterwards. Now I'm not entirely sure I want to. No, not because it's bad. It was crowdfunded, with over three thousand backers chipping in 39 million yen (impressive for a crowd funding campaign, but not a whole lot for a film).

Anyway, regardless of the money involved, this is from 2016 and looks like this:

Say hello to Suzu, protagonist of the film.

So, anyway, Suzu is a nice, young girl who loves to paint and has an overactive imagination. She's a bit of a klutz, has her head in the clouds and sometimes gets lost walking around. When she turns 18, her family marries her off to a young suitor, and after moving from Hiroshima to Kure, Suzu does her best just living her life in an ever increasingly problematic time for her, her family and well, everyone else. She has a rocky start with her in-laws, is patently useless at household chores at first, and her sister-in-law doesn't like her too much. All that will change in time though. Life isn't so bad, all in all...

Spoiler

Not very surprisingly, things turn really bleak towards the end there. Suzu loses her drawing-hand to a time delayed bomb in the aftermath of an air raid on Kure, a hand that was at the time holding her six year old niece Harumi. Her mother is missing in action after the attack on Hiroshima, her father died of radiation poisoning and her sister is shown to have radiation burns. It ends with Suzu and her husband Shuzaku adopting a war orphan stumbling through the ruins of Hiroshima.

Still, amongst all of that, the worst scene has to be Suzu's reaction to the emperor's speech when Japan surrendered. Having a nervous breakdown, she ends up yelling at the air that this isn't a time to surrender, that she still has an arm and two legs left to give. Because, in the end, was all of this for nothing?

Of course it was, such is the nature of it all.

The film's structure and use of artistic elements in certain scenes gave it a reputation of being somewhat hard to follow, which I don't really agree with, but I can see where the criticism is coming from. If you watched Grave of the Fireflies and wondered if it would be a good idea to spend the entire runtime of the film on depicting the everyday life of a normal family before dropping the (literal) bombs on them, wonder no more, and give this a spin. Well, or watch. It's a movie, not a record, after all.

[Bartimaeus]

Yeah, I saw that one a couple years back, it was alright. Big problem for me was that I really disliked the main character from beginning to ending, and...it's a movie that's entirely through her perspective, so not liking her is a pretty big problem. Slow* main characters are apparently a tough one for me. If I had liked her, it probably would've been a great movie instead of just an alright one.

*I don't mean stupid, I actually mean...just slow. As an example, Minako may be pretty dumb, but she has sharp reflexes, her mouth runs faster than she can think, she makes decisions quickly, and sometimes even starts acting before those already too quickly-made decisions have been decided in the first place...and so she is not slow in the sense that I mean - in fact, if she was slow, she'd probably be effectively smarter because she'd have more time to think what she's going to say or do through. Being slow in all of those areas tends to be very...frustrating to me, and she was as extreme as I've ever seen in a main character in a cinematic film. It didn't help that she also had great difficulty finding stuff to be useful at.

Edited February 19, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

Yeah, I saw that one a couple years back, it was alright. Big problem for me was that I really disliked the main character from beginning to ending, and...it's a movie that's entirely through her perspective, so not liking her is a pretty big problem. Slow* main characters are apparently a tough one for me. If I had liked her, it probably would've been a great movie instead of just an alright one.

I'm going to borrow one of your favorites:

And by that I mean I do not disagree on a literal level, but an allegorical one. I don't think Suzu is slow in the literal sense, that is shown at points in the films where she's quite capable of thinking and reacting like any regular adult. Oh, right, spoilers from here on out in case someone else wants to watch.

Spoiler

The scenes where she directs everyone to the bunkers, manages to save the house from the incendiary charge (even down a hand) and the way she interacted with her sister near the end when she invites Suzu back to Hiroshima are what I mean (among other things). Suzu's slowness and the way she changes over the course of the film is an allegory for the loss of a generation and a societal outlook (as well as tradition) to war. That's why her grandmother tells her of the umbrella questions and Suzu doesn't understand, or simply changes in front of everyone, and why she has such an antagonistic relationship with Keiko, which by far and large comes from Keiko - a very non-traditional woman for the time. Keiko's rejection of Suzu is a rejection of everything traditionally Japanese.

For all intents and purposes, newly married Suzu is the innocence that's being lost in war, and her transformation to someone who adopts an orphan, lice and all. She stops drawing and painting, even though her art clearly is fantastic and even won accolades, although when thought to come from someone else. The more she finds to a regular, "adult" self, the more she's not useless (or slow) in terms of her new family, the less she does everything she liked as a child. Drawing, daydreaming. Not always, there are the moments where she gets lost in the city and meets Rin, or absent-mindedly chases after a heron to save it during an attack.

The final moment of this being the loss of her hand and Harumi to looking at the sea, like she used to. I might be mistaken about this, but I think her speech patterns change throughout the film too, reflecting that (at least in the original).

 

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

*I don't mean stupid, I actually mean...just slow. As an example, Minako may be pretty dumb, but she has sharp reflexes, her mouth runs faster than she can think, she makes decisions quickly, and sometimes even starts acting before those already too quickly-made decisions have been decided in the first place...and so she is not slow in the sense that I mean - in fact, if she was slow, she'd probably be effectively smarter because she'd have more time to think what she's going to say or do through. Being slow in all of those areas tends to be very...frustrating to me, and she was as extreme as I've ever seen in a main character in a cinematic film. It didn't help that she also had great difficulty finding stuff to be useful at.

If taken purely at face value, Suzu's antics, her way of speaking and quite frankly everything about her demeanor can be frustrating for at least the first half of the film, or potentially all of it. You'd facepalm at her idea of regularily visiting Rin at the brothel, wonder how silly you could be for wandering directly into a bulletstorm trying to save a bird, or any other of these scenes. I know, because so did I. I was wondering about that too for a while, and frequently paused the film in between, sometimes being nothing but frustrated.

It's probably not the best setup, especially since it takes most of its runtime to become clear, and then it really depends on how much you're willing to accept this sort of thing in films - or any other works of art, i.e. how much leeway you're willing or able to give a work and its interpretations. Where does allegory begin and suspension of disbelief end?

It sure walked a very fine line regarding verisimilitude, but I think it (barely, but still) stayed on the acceptable side of such works. It doesn't quite dip into inellectual wankery territory, unlike some other series and it's final movie that we've watched here.

Or like this post. Help me, I'm becoming one of "those" critics. Yikes.