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Just watched the Made in Abyss movie, this is pretty much my reaction.

https://tonights-episode.tumblr.com/pos ... -disguised

I just felt like mentioning It's Time to Go to His Stomach, OK? exists. Even if they're only good for a short while, horror does seem to have a much higher average quality than the mass market stuff. There's probably a ton of decent seinen series out there that don't get any exposure.



Trash, garbage. My expectations are set to the surface of the floor, and somehow they find ways to still disappoint me.



Heh heh. The easiest thing in the world is to come up with cool ideas. The hardest thing in the world is creating characters with actual depth that appeal to a broad number of people.

The guy who writes Worth The Candle has written a book's worth of background material to his book as part of his production process. Most manga authors just pull things out of their ass as they go. They expect 95% of their work to be cancelled, so emotional attachment is an idiot's game. And if they do get syndicated (like say, Murata Punch Man) they have literally no time to write or plan things out. If a competent writer like One can't handle the time pressure, what chance does someone who spent all their skill points on drawing things well have?

And that's why all manga is The Cavalry Battle.

It's just so rough. Like, when Legosi left school, it totally jumps the shark [and I stopped reading for a while because it was really, REALLY kinda stupid], but gets a grip for a while after and if you accept that it's a bit dumb, it's still consistently entertaining and has fun shocking the reader every few chapters. It's like clockwork how it keeps trying to pull something crazy out of a hat, but it's still entertaining.

Then, after Melon shows up, it becomes completely pants-on head stupid and it never recovers. It's not immediately terrible, but it's clear that Paru didn't really know what to write after that point. His introduction and trying to keep the rest of the plot at a similarly over-the-top level really wrecked everything. Shifting to more of an action series really didn't help either.

I guess "quickly" was the wrong word, it's more like "out of nowhere". It was good, right up until it wasn't. There were a bunch of other plot points to follow, but this comes out of the blue and takes everything down with it.

I don't usually recommend anime to other people since they obviously have different tastes than mine, but Weathering With You is a superb movie that's made by the same creator of Your Name. It's animation and visuals are beautiful, it captures the metropolitan culture really well. Makoto Shinkai has made great anime movies that are breathtaking to watch.

Let's post some seasonal shit.

Maoujou de Oyasumi - Absolutely hilarious show about a princess who's been kidnapped and held captive in a castle full of demons .. except all she wants to do is sleep, and she constantly finds ways to break out and wreak havok looking for various things (and monsters) to help her sleep better. The sleeper hit of the season (Sorry, I had to). The show's premise is stretched to absurd levels, but never gets tired (Sorry, I had to. Again).

forever going to remember this colony drop tomino did on shinkai. i kind of liked shinkai's old "she and her cat," but he started to really exhaust the hell out of me with his constant, facile sentimentalism. every single one of his movies seems to be about the bravery and nobility of extremely ordinary relationships. i often get tired of or annoyed with miyazaki, the other big director popular with western audiences, for being a little stupid and none too small a hypocrite regarding what he preaches (though i still seem to enjoy his movies), but shinkai strikes me as an almost impossibly boring and shallow person. he's turned that humbly resilient smile of the character whose love has little-to-no foundation but will somehow persist through anything into something as obnoxiously ubiquitous a stamp as the dreamworks' smirk.



he's also got this... deeply fucking irritating belief that his work is somehow cutting or useful social commentary when it's the world's most plain and careful takes imaginable. he's somehow become both wildly beloved to the point of being japan's new golden boy of anime and still thinks of himself as this independent little iconoclast out here telling it like it is - it's pathetic. directors like yuasa and ikuhara are still out there making me feel like love exists in the world and that a flitter of the heart is a noble call to adventure, but shinkai feels regressive, beckoning to these strangely conservative relationships with no interiority surviving through increasingly ridiculous circumstances. it feels his characters never internally develop and their brave face is somehow even less earned than that of the most tepid shonen protagonist preaching the values of inertia.

To be honest, I don't really know and care about their personalities in real life, as long as they have not done any criminally
bad stuff. If their anime works are good, then I'm proud of them. Their real life personas have nothing to do with their work.

??????? almost everything i said is focused squarely on what is in his work or how his character is expressed through his work. i know almost nothing about the man's personal life, but i think it's deeply stupid to assume someone's preferences aren't in some capacity reflected in what they create or that creative works are apolitical or exist in some sort of magical creation vacuum bereft of having been someone's form of expression.

Fair point. I can understand that his sentimentalism can get on people's nerves.

I finished Way of the House Husband. Funniest shit I've ever read.

....... .... .......... .....

First episode of New Higurashi had its english dub released today. Today....

You might not understand how crazy this is if you're not in the loop. How improbable. Let me tell you about Higurashi Old.

The original series... was a commercial failure here. The heartwarming story of psychotic cute characters stuck in a time loop just didn't catch on for whatever mysterious reason. The company that did the english dub died horribly, I think they fell off a bridge into a pit of spikes or something. Funimation robbed their grave and got the rights to the series, as a Funimation is prone to doing. But wouldn't touch Higurashi with a ten foot pole - they printed some discs and that was all. The license was bounced around and the fluffier second season never got a dub into any other language. It was supposed to be a dead franchise.

So, improbable. The least probable thing I've seen happen in my lifetime. I'd put it up there with those paranormal military experiments actually getting one of their "warrior monks" to successfully phase through a wall. Cats and dogs raining from the sky, we truly are living through the apocalypse.

I suppose this is a testament to how much bigger the market is these days. You could argue "if they'd dub Endride, they'd dub anything! And Higurashi has a lot of history behind it, supporting this reboot makes sense!" and sure maybe - but the suits are filled with vampires. Which are instinctual animals. If one husk didn't have blood inside it the first time they bite into it, they rarely give it a second test.

just finished Zeta Gundam. Now that was a good show! Just started up ZZ Gundam and wow what a difference! Silly humor and titillations, so weird that this was directed by the same guy that did the first two Gundam shows. I'm going to stick with it because I hear it gets better but damn, head spinning from the dissonance

Yeah it does get better, just to confirm that. Of course it does not approach Zeta, but that's the pinnacle, imo.

Things I've been watching: Cobra (currently in the baseball arc), Marmalade Boy and watched Wicked City the other night.

Wicked City was one of my earliest exposure to anime - there was this weird channel hidden on the TV that played some "Japanimation" late at night sometimes. The Fist of the North Star movie and some Lupin flicks were on it, too.

One day my friends and I rented a few things. They really liked Ninja Scroll. Wicked City... not so much. I thought it was a bit of a bummer.

It's very 80s. Has tons of titty, and of course spider pussy. Kawajiri definitely has a style. I liked it more than Ninja Scroll, but I'm not big on Ninja Scroll.

I remember a Japanese friend of mine who owned a watering hole I used to frequent that had similar tastes as mine seeing Ninja Scroll somewhere on a website in English and was like "WTF is this?" Apparently it wasn't all that big in Japan.

My impression was that Ninja Scroll wasn't particularly well remembered in Japan either but I could be wrong.

It's interesting to look at the anime that made it big in the West back in the 80s and 90s, i.e. titties and gore. Also funny how publishers like Manga would gratuitously add swear words to their dubs driving home the point that this is 'serious adult stuff'. I guess Kawajiri is epitome of this style.

I can't be the only one that has a bit of nostalgia for the Japanimation era. Just found a nice 480p file of Wicked City so I can watch it on my PVM (never seen it before). Shlock like this just seems more appropriate for the CRT.

Oh heh, I just re-re-re-watched Ninja Scroll and watched Wicked City for the first time ever just a few months ago. Great, classic stuff.

Also, Cyber City Oedo 808 which I haven't seen for at least 20 years. It was one of the few series/movies that was available on VHS here back in the 90's. Though I was surprised to see (or hear) that the absolutely banging soundtrack I remembered wasn't there in the Japanese version that I watched now, turns out it's completely original stuff put only on the UK release. Luckily it's available on Youtube.

Ghegs, I just bought the Votoms collection based partially on your rec. Looking forward to checking it out

Oh, cool. Yeah, Votoms is good stuff almost all the way through.

I trust you've already checked out Legend of the Galactic Heroes as well, then.

Do you mean specifically the dubbing?

My favorite period for anime is definitely 80s-90s. Which wasn't my first exposure to anime either. I started in the early 00s and it was a mix of stuff.

Wicked City was pretty awful. It had this weird psycho-sexual vibe that just made it seem like another episode of the author's barely concealed fetish.

Heh, 50% of the Fist of the North Star broadcast cut was just a pixelated red mess. Even that was too much - tons of frames of animation were cut out and it was crazy choppy. It kind of blew my mind when Telemundo was airing Dragon Ball Zeta uncensored; this is a dark world where children need to be protected from the horror that is rice balls.



Yeah, it was pretty great.

i don't think.... kawajiri is "concealing" anything lol

Wicked City is cool

Defend Kawajiri! he's mah boi

Oh man, it's on the list. Haven't dived in just yet. It takes me awhile to make it through a show since I'm very anti-binge

just watched sarazanmai again. i really think this is going down as a completely, unambiguously beloved all-time favorite. everything that ikuhara does tends to recapitulate the same kind of sentiments - anti-authority, anti-modern/capitalist society, anti-groupthink, pro-love, pro-understanding & interiority, pro individuality - more succinctly, earnestly, and clearly, and i feel like this is his greatest work. i also think that despite one being able to make some occasionally obvious character parallels, which you can make as much to his other works, that he's finally escaped feeling like he needs to define his narratives in some way as a response to how utena was perceived and how that shadow (and the shadow of its unruly, unpleasant, and demanding fans) is constantly trying to loom itself over him.

i feel like with his other works that if you're missing a lot of the allegory and metaphor and tend to scratch your head at big-brained takes from auteurs (are you an open-mouth idiot still traumatized by evangelion and calling it deliberately inscrutable nonsense in 2020?), you might find yourself wondering what it was about. utena, for example, is much more commonly misunderstood than it is understood, which is partly his fault for not having refined the message as much and partly just that it was a group creative effort with some very different ideas on how it should go - and that's not to mention the stress & length of production breathing down everyone's necks. when he got to let loose on the movie, there's some brazenly obvious catharsis being released in contempt of the restraints that had been on him. not so with sarazanmai! it feels without contempt, which i would characterize as distinctly unlike yurikuma, where you could still feel a bit of the seething and whose narrative revolved around reconstructing elements of utena in a way that almost seemed to lift the middle finger to fans who still didn't "get it."

while he can't help himself but continue to be adorably weird, revel in teenage eros, and insert layers upon layers of abstract positioning (let's be honest, if you're watching an ikuhara work, you're here for those things and know he's not getting rid of them), this is the most obvious i think he can possibly be, including the primary antagonist introducing himself in the final battle as "an abstract concept" that "cannot be defeated." many who watch utena tend to think that akio was the greatest manifestation of evil rather than the conditions that create an individual like him (he's a tool and victim, though hardly blameless and certainly past the point of most forms of forgiveness), even after watching the movie reveal him as a red herring by killing him almost immediately and turning utena into a fucking car (could the car be a METAPHOR for ESCAPE? no way, ikuhara just fuckin crazy, NO ONE can understand him!!!) for anthy to use as an escape from the many forms of oppression, restraint, and subjugation that the school represents.

like everything ikuhara, it ends with a big message about forgiveness, true love, loyalty, etc. villainous characters are portrayed sympathetically or even heroically overcome their mistakes by choosing love, death is defeated by finding love in pursuing our true selves and connecting with those we find most dear in spite of everything, society is rejected in favor of a positive relationship with a god who is able to exist within a marriage of hope & despair, love & libido, everything and nothing, etc. what is reduced by society to be considered mundane is positioned as transcendental and the individual is empowered by a combination of internal validation and unwavering commitment to their friends, so on and so forth. all that life-affirming goodness you want to see in the world, only capitulated the best you've seen by ol' papa ikuni. it's great. love it. i think a lot of people bump hard on his somewhat challenging endings, which are all "happy," but this one removes the scare quotes.

Warning: A bunch of talking out of my ass. No really, don't read it before I delete it.



As for Wicked City count me in the camp with Bryan and FB. It's great in that it is exactly what it wanted to be. Is it something I will watch super frequently? Probably not but I also wouldn't get rid of the blu ray.



It's so good but it's also really long and a slow burn. The pacing is honestly heinous even for anime.

yeah. a lot of new stuff is fettering and commodifying expression because we're in late capitalist society. it is harder and harder to have true expression within the confines of cultural media and most auteurs that are still pushing the label often lie when giving their pitches or are "notoriously hard to work with" because they won't compromise so easily and dilute their vision. it's why i'm able to garner respect for someone like yoko taro (i realize i'm dipping into games, but they're arguably more rotten an industry than anime, so it's a solid parallel) when he's a fucking moron - he's like, saying something. he's got a vision. his vision may be self-inserting himself as a boy who is desperate to get his balls crushed by a Sexy Robot Maid, but for fuck's sake it's at least an idea he's doing something with.

if you like angel's egg, you're probably already doing/have done this, but make sure you check other oshii shit. that guy is on top of his game almost always. i love his antagonistic friendship with miyazaki and how miyazaki is like this angrily buzzing little fly, to him lol. you might also want to check out works chiaki konaka has written - both have a relationship to christianity that has informed their works in deeply interesting ways. they've also both got hella chiseled philosophies, they're smart dudes! i'm a bit more a konaka fan than an oshii fan, he sometimes strikes me as a woman that never transitioned, and that yoshitoshi abe chose to depict a character named after him & based on him in neia_7 as a woman (as well as how his pals occasionally tease him but seem to have strong relationships with him in interviews) kinda gives me the impression his friends think similarly of him lol. he also writes a very strange amount of lesbians and is no fuckin doubt projecting himself into their shoes from time to time. sorry, yuasa, i dig you too! 0_0 but devilman lady > devilman crybaby.

I think the pacing's a part of the appeal, at least for me it is. I've watched through the whole original series (+ Gaiden + movies) twice and I'm sure to do it again. The pacing is slow but it's meaningful, it never feels like there's a filler episode and I can easily watch 2-3 eps in a row. Each episode either moves the overall plot along or gives insight into a character or to the history of the world of LOGH. One of my favorite episodes is one where the characters do nothing but talk, about the original diaspora from Earth, the rise and fall of the early space-faring empires, the rise of Rudolph and the Galactic Empire, the exodus that ends up forming the Free Planets Alliance.

I came for the pew-pew space combat but I stayed for the characters and world-building.

I've actually been watching Maison Ikkoku since July and I can only stomach a few episodes each week because, other than a few small exceptions, nothing of worth ever happens and the characters barely ever change. They don't have arcs, they have a flat line. Of course LOGH and Maison Ikkoku are wildly different shows, I just mention it because Ikkoku has the type of pacing that's almost painful to me.