Submitted 3 weeks ago by wjs018@ani.social to anime@ani.social
Welcome to another general discussion thread! Feel free to use this thread to talk about things you have watched recently, questions you have, or recommendations you want to give!
As always, remember to be mindful of spoilers. If you want to know more about how to handle spoilers in this community, check the guide here (also linked in the sidebar).
Picked up Lazarus, Witch Watch, The Apothecary Diaries Cour 2 this season. Also, rewatching Neon Genesis Evangellion.
I completed Beastars season 2 over the past week, and it still got me hooked as much as season 1.
However, there were a few points in the show that annoyed me enough to ruin my immersion.
Here are some snippets of my stream of thoughts as I was watching it:
Legosi bit a huge chunk out of his attacker. It should be very obvious who the attacker is because of his injury, or because he skipped school to hide his injury. Why don’t Legosi want to stay in school to find out?? Or at least tell a teacher!! Wtf. I hate it when serious characters lose their brains.
The anteater is an insectivore, making him a carnivore, but they are treating him like a herbivore??? Also, looks like some non-insect-eating carnivores would eat bugs occasionally, and they are real casual about it. Last I heard, non-vertebrates are animals too. What’s this discrimination???
WhyTF did Legosi and pretty boy not tell a teacher or any other responsible adult after they found out who the culprit was??!!
I know the show did address my complaints after the immediate episodes, but I found the way they did so unsatisfying.
The one that takes the cake was
the divine moth that appeared in Legosi’s dream to justify him taking insects lives. My mind was blown at the hypocrisy. Like no. Just no.
Despite my complaints, I still enjoyed it so, so much.
Plus, the opening song - Monster by Yoasobi - is a banger.
I am so looking forward to the final part / season to drop before starting on the next one.
Unfortunately, because of the annoyances, I will be docking a point from its final score, making it a 9 / 10 - for now; I may change my mind later.
I dropped I’ve Been Killing Slimes For 300 Years And Maxed Out My Level Season 2 after the first episode.
Looks like I have gotten bored of the chill, do-nothing slice-of-life genre.
With posts like this and the occasional recommendation thread popping up every now and then, I thought I’d group my favourite anime into broad categories / genres for easy recommendations.
I want each group to be mutually exclusive, so if an anime qualifies for more than one category, I would be the one that felt like it better represented (e.g. a romcom that is more com than rom would end up belonging to comedy)
I ended up noticing a few things about my taste:
In case you are curious, here are my lists:
“Gundam”
Gundam Hathaway
Zeta Gundam
Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans S2
Gundam 00 series and movie
Gundam Unicorn
Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory
SSSS.Gridman and Gridman Universe
Code Geass Lelouch of the Rebellion and Lelouch of the Re;surrection
Gundam Thunderbolt: December Sky
Gundam: Char’s Counterattack
Comedy
K-On Live House and Plan OVAs
Zombieland Saga
Mob Psycho Miraculous Unknown Psychic Recap Episode
Urusei Yatsura (2022)
Wasteful Days of High School Days
Konosuba God’s Blessing on This Wonderful Art and Choker OVAs
NieR:Automata
Romance
Insomniacs After School
The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes
Teasing Master Takagi-san series and movie
I Want to Eat Your Pancreas
Drama
Vinland Saga Season 2: Drowning in the Shadow
Cells at Work Code Black
The Boy and the Heron
A Silent Voice
Land of the Lustrous
Nausicaa
Idol MV
Girls Band Cry
Porco Rosso
Millennium Actress
Suspense
Ghost Stories
Perfect Blue
Hyouka OVA
Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan
Summertime Render
Moriarty the Patriot OVA
Ace Attorney
Thriller
Haikyu
The First Slam Dunk
Jujutsu Kaisen
Demon Slayer
Wholesomeness
Yuru Camp (in order: S1, S2, S3, Movie)
Re:Zero Memory Snow OVA
Tari Tari
Picked up two shows this week:
We’ll probably be giving Kowloon Generic Romance another go, as well as Gundam GQuuuuuux, and of course we’re still watching Apothecary Diaries.
I watched two movies the past few weeks:
This is a collection of animated short films from different directors. The two notable ones here for me were Masaaki Yuasa and Shinichirou Watanabe. Happy Machine (Masaaki) was my favorite! The little baby character (and the overall vibe of it) reminded me of Pendleton Ward’s Adventure Time.
There were other really quirky ones in the collection too. Deathtic 4 was different from the rest. It was 3DCG and I don’t know the language (it sounds European). Interestingly, there’s a scene there where the zombies said they were fighting “injustices” and it shows them trying to pick a fight with two girls wearing a US flag and USSR flag suits (it was funny). Genius Party (same title as the collection) was chaotic and fun while Limit Cycle was really (intentionally) boring (it’s about a salaryman).
The more “normal” ones were Shanghai Dragon, Doorbell, and Baby Blue (Shinichirou). Shanghai Dragon was partly in Chinese because it’s set in China. I think anyone familiar with Japan-China relations will raise eyebrows here because it portays a poor China and a technologically advanced Japan, but at the end it was the Chinese boy who saved everyone through his imagination as opposed to the technology of Japan. Doorbell reminded me of Satoshi Kon, and Baby Blue was maybe my favorite for the “normal” shorts.
I had this in my watchlist for a looong time (because it’s a certified classic) and I’m happy that I did not watch it earlier. I don’t think I would have appreciated this at a young age. I think this is the second Oshii Mamoru movie I watched. The first was Angel’s Egg which was pretty much the ending of GITS. There’s already a wealth of information and reviews on GITS especially by Western writers so I don’t really have to say much here.
But I noticed how spirituality or religion always ties with technology in anime. People who’ve seen Serial Experiments Lain probably know what I mean. It’s very similar to GITS. Evangelion is another example. Also, it might sound a bit odd but it reminds me a bit of the “programming” in Angel Beats too which I complete last month.
(Also Major Kusanagi is very beautiful. Holy shit.)
This week I might watch Genius Party 2 and maybe look for an older series to finish (maybe more Masaaki Yuasa stuff).
I’ve been pretty busy lately, so the Spring season snuck up on me. So far, I’m continuing Apothecary Diaries and I watched the 1st ep of the 2nd season of SHOSHIMIN today. The former is still brilliant, and the latter started off great. Other than that, I’ll need to look at Anichart or something.
Not had time to continue much of RWBY and I’m not sure I will anymore. Last time I was in the mood for something silly, but I’m not sure I am anymore.
I have awakened from my slumber to watch more terrible anime! (and good ones too hopefully)
This season seems to be going pretty well so far, with lots of promising new shows. I’m particularly eager to see more from Lazarus, YAIBA, and Gorilla God’s Go-to Girl, with a special shout-out to Classic★Stars, an anime I am very much enjoying even though it is trash and I don’t think anyone else cares about it.
Speaking of trash, though, here’s my garbage pile from the past week:
There’s potential for a good story here, but wow was this structured badly. They dedicated the first half to harem hijinks, without even really introducing us to the waifus or their relationships with the main character (who was absent). It felt like filler, which is a terrible first impression to make. When we finally do see our main character, he’s being a badass and extorting the rich out of their slaves so that he can free them and give them affordable healthcare, which is based as hell (especially considering the state of current anime’s relationship to slave waifus). I feel like this premise could make a really good and engaging story, but it seems like the show wants to focus a lot on how all the hot animal girls want to jump his bones, and I truly do not care about that. I also learned that the entire first episode is anime-original, and the choice to write new boring content instead of adapting the actual story doesn’t bode well for their writing decisions going forward. Not to mention it seems like when we flash back, we’ll get the bog-standard banished from the hero’s party story we’ve seen a million times.
The art is cheap and bad and the core story feels more what you’d throw together to make a softcore porn than an actual attempt at real fiction. Boring and bland, but if you’re into the fetish stuff it’s going for, then I guess it’ll serve its function.
A few minutes in I had to go check to make sure this wasn’t a sequel. It felt like the story expected me to know context I didn’t, and not in an in-medias-res way. It isn’t, so I continued, assuming it was just a strange storytelling choice and we’d get back around to the backstory and lore later. After the episode was over, I found out why from the source material readers. Apparently, the anime took the bold and confusing choice to skip the first volume of the novels. They cut right to the start of volume 2, without rewriting things to fill us in on the missing context. They also went ahead and revealed most of the major twists from volume 1, essentially locking themselves out of flashing back to that later (at least in a satisfying way). So in a way I was sort of right, this is a sequel, just not to any anime that exists. This strange choice (as well as some other changes the source readers pointed out) really doesn’t bode well for the quality of the adaptation going forward. I have no idea how good or bad the source material is, but this adaptation is honestly worse than nothing.
It’s nice to see you back again at the start of a new season! Just as a meta aside, I want to thank you for stress-testing the bot by requesting multiple threads between the bot checking on messages (every 5 minutes usually). It’s a usage pattern that I hadn’t really thought about ahead of time or tested, but I am glad to see that everything worked the way it is supposed to.
I always mean to stick around farther into the season, but for one reason or another it never seems to work out, lol.
And I’m glad my impatience came in handy! I realized I had a few to send to rikka and considered waiting for a reply each time to make sure I didn’t break her, but ultimately decided it was probably fine, and thankfully it was! You’ve done a great job with her, so thanks for all you do.
This was a great week for old anime.
I started off with the rest of Noragami Aragoto, which was very good. Noragami in general has been a pleasant surprise - it doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention, but it’s really quite good, in a sort of low-key, just-all-around-good sense. This season had two main arcs, and both of them were interesting and well-executed (which was especially satisfying for the first one, which dealt with a central drama that had been lurking in the background since the start, and about which we’d already gotten enough hints that there weren’t many surprises left).
Then I bounced around for a bit before ending up on Oda Nobuna no Yabou. I was in the mood for cute girls doing something, and like the protagonist, have spent far too much time playing Nobunaga’s Ambition, so Cute Girls Doing the Warring States it was. And while I expected it to be cute and stylish and sort of goofy, I didn’t expect it to be… well, sort of epic really. Granted that Sengoku is literally an epic tale, I still figured the cute girls thing would keep it light. And while there was a certain amount of expected charming silliness and fanservice, mostly it was surprisingly dramatic and engaging. And the addition of a character who already knew the entire history and was determined to stop this Oda from making the same mistakes the other did led to some intriguing changes in the story. All in all, it was just very pleasant and enjoyable.
Then after bouncing around a bit more, I ended up diving into a series I’d been idly threatening to watch for a few years - Shinsekai Yori aka From the New World. I got a copy of the first volume of the LN years ago and have bounced off of it half a dozen times or so, so I figured I’d give the anime a chance. And even the anime takes a bit to get going, but once it hit its stride, it just sucked me in. It’s very good, and with impressive art design and music, in addition to the expected good story. I’ve watched 21 episodes in just two days, and will certainly watch the last four episodes later today.
Weekly ranking roundup:
Credit to /u/Abysswatcherbel for making the chart for reddit karma and /u/Nooble5 for the Anime Trending chart.
A bit of a different set of rankings this week as we are between seasons for the most part. AC polled for most anticipated for the new season. The rankings are kind of surprising as I don’t think the top shows (Fire Force, Wind Breaker) have been terribly popular in this community in past seasons (basically just @zabadoh@ani.social in Wind Breaker threads).
The reddit chart meanwhile was topped by finales. with the first new show down at #5. I am glad to see Rock is a Lady’s Modesty doing pretty well as I am a fan of the manga and enjoyed the first episode. Looking forward to more.
The good news is that we’re seeing a lot more different individuals posting in the episode threads, which is fantastic because I had a hard time starting, much less keeping up with last season’s shows.
Hopefully we’ll see even more consistent and numerous participants in discussion this season…
Yes! This has been great to see. I have also noticed some new names over on the !manga@ani.social community as well. In small communities like this even a couple people actively posting and commenting makes a big difference.
New season is getting going. Here is where I stand right now:
dumblederp@aussie.zone 2 weeks ago
I enjoyed Bocchi the Rock that was recommended here. Mostly teen girl band orientated but gave me an interesting insight into social anxiety.
I also watched Fist of the North Star, which is it’s own whole thing.
wjs018@ani.social 2 weeks ago
Image
dumblederp@aussie.zone 1 week ago
That pic also covers how some of the FotNS villains were just massive units for no real reason, maybe post apocalyptic radiation effects.