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Iaboo, Youaboo, Weallaboo for Anime!
- Thread starter Johnny Unusual
- Start date
Johnny Unusual
(He/Him)
Yeah, I've been enjoying it. So far, my favourite episode is definitely the ice monsters work strike.
R.R. Bigman
Coolest Guy
Enjoy seeing essentially every Shonen Fighting anime trope get tossed into space halfway through the series. Things get real as hell, and I certainly wasn't ready for it.
Kirby Morrow, voice actor for many, many shows, has passed away.
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Johnny Unusual
(He/Him)
I don't think anyone minds but I also suspect that eventually there'll be a manga thread in the literature section (if there isn't one already).
There's a thread, but it has an unwieldy, unfortunate title that's not the best for discoverability.
Finally finished watching the first season of Great Pretender, which is indeed Good. Was doing the dub with my gf and it holds up fine. I predicted more of the outcome of the last case than the previous ones (partly just by knowing the characters better I think) but it was honestly more of a character piece anyway. Looks like the second season isn't quite out on US 'flix yet but I think it's up soon.
Hunter x Hunter is really interesting in that...uh, The Show™ is kinda what happens in the background, while there's like one of 4 different animes playing in the foreground? The Show™ is nominally a hero's journey shonen adventure where a boy looks for his father, makes friends, tries to get stronger and make it as a Professional Hunter™, and gets tangled up with a group of bad guy thieves...but then also there's an entire arc where it's Yu-Gi-Oh, a tournament arc, and they even turn it into a sports anime for a few episodes! Also, for a shonen show, there's not a lot of fighting but there's tons of talking about fighting? It's really weird, when taken as a whole.
I just started an arc about killer ants (??!?!?) that's apparently as 60+ episodes long, whereas the entire show to this point (with multiple arcs) has been 75ish episodes. The killer ants arc is triple the length of the other arcs?! Why? (Also why did it have to be bugs, I hate bugs eww)
And Char Aznable is there! He has a clown gun!
I just started an arc about killer ants (??!?!?) that's apparently as 60+ episodes long, whereas the entire show to this point (with multiple arcs) has been 75ish episodes. The killer ants arc is triple the length of the other arcs?! Why? (Also why did it have to be bugs, I hate bugs eww)
And Char Aznable is there! He has a clown gun!
Johnny Unusual
(He/Him)
The Chimera Ant arc is one of the most ambitious shonen arcs ever but wait for it to be extremely grim and for sections to move very slowly. It isn't even "we caught up with the manga", as it was also the length of the source material. The last 10 after that touch on dark stuff but is mostly hopeful and even though the manga will likely never end (it goes on a lot of long hiatuses), the show lucked into a nice stopping point.
Yeah, his wrist problems means that he can't work for long periods of time (unlike Miura's perennial Idolmaster breaks) and he doesn't really use a lot of assistants besides his wife I think.
R.R. Bigman
Coolest Guy
The Chimera Ant arc is basically DBZ’s Cell Saga combined with Devilman. It is a lot to get through, and it doesn’t stick the landing on everything, but I still think about it regularly over a year after finishing the show.
Yeah y'all were like "it's really grim" and I was like "well they've been kinda casually murdering people throughout so how bad can it get...like obviously all these random dudes they introduced are gonna get eaten alive or something, but it'll probably take a while before the body horror and innocent villagers getting ripped in half and the like"
Then I watched ONE episode (actually half of one I'd already started) and I was like "oh okay, we have WAYYYYYYY less lead time on this than I thought"
Gotta assume Kite/his buddies/Netero all get got at some point too. I'm basically assuming only Gon/Killua live and working backwards from there.
Then I watched ONE episode (actually half of one I'd already started) and I was like "oh okay, we have WAYYYYYYY less lead time on this than I thought"
Gotta assume Kite/his buddies/Netero all get got at some point too. I'm basically assuming only Gon/Killua live and working backwards from there.
I basically actually don't like it any time the series kills someone. I don't know what it is, but there's such a visceral rejection that I get from it? It's probably not intentional, but it feels like the author is trying to make it uncomfortable and distasteful? So, as a result, York New and Chimera Ants are just... so hard to sit through, for me. And I wish Greed Island didn't have some of the ones it does have, because it's otherwise just the perfect representation of everything about HxH I love.
Also Biscuit.
Also Biscuit.
Greed Island is a miss for me because about all I'm in for with Hunter × Hunter is the interpersonal character dynamics and drama, whereas that arc is committed so wholesale to a capsule narrative of totally detached literal rulesets and gaming systems that there's no room for almost anything else to occur. When the series is at its best it provides that sense of investment on both ends of the pro- and antagonist spectrum, and the villainous opposition in that leg of the story is such a total nonpresence for the ostensible import they're granted that it's a hard thing to really care about for the length of time it takes to play out.
That's fair. For me, I was really into the applications of shonen tropes and concepts into non-traditional forms of "combat". The majority of the Hunter test, the training for the battle tower, the Auction Battles as they were trying to get enough money to be in the room for Greed Island, Greed Island itself, the Chairman election, that's the sort of stuff I really came to the series for.
The interaction Killua and Biscut have over what her nen does is a good encapsulation of the dynamic that I really enjoyed out of the series. The very traditional combat-heavy arcs of York New and Chimera Ant threw that kind of stuff away, and on top of that was needlessly grim.
The interaction Killua and Biscut have over what her nen does is a good encapsulation of the dynamic that I really enjoyed out of the series. The very traditional combat-heavy arcs of York New and Chimera Ant threw that kind of stuff away, and on top of that was needlessly grim.
There's a point where a bunch of side characters go to a hive and I want you to post your thoughts afterwards because Patito and I have been laughing about it for the last 2 years. I loved most of that super dumb show. One of my favorite highlights is when a giant tournament arc gets interrupted to talk about a second championship tournament, and the main characters just get bored and leave. It never comes up again.
I'm not at whatever you're talking about, but I am at the first part that was a biggggg miss for me; the
Anyway, we'll see.
Ant Queen's death being portrayed as sad. Like, I get it...the ants will run wild without a chain of command but like...people are doing surgery on her and when she dies it's portrayed a tragedy, whereas...like, five episodes prior she was saying she needed 100 dead people turned into meatballs every day and probably THOUSANDS of adults and children have died horribly at this point. It's just like...what the fuck? It feels really off. That said, they're starting to get into "not all the Ants are bad" territory, which I knew they would because otherwise they wouldn't have gone to the trouble our establishing who the little boy Kurt was and that he turned into Colt, but I'm also like...why are going here lol.
OHHHHHHH also they've established that ants can fuck people and I'm REALLLLLLLLYYYYY dreading they didn't introduce the idea to make good on it later because fuuuuuuucccckkkkkkkkkk that, child murder is already reallllllyyy pushing it but I really don't wanna watch a show about monster ants raping people.
OHHHHHHH also they've established that ants can fuck people and I'm REALLLLLLLLYYYYY dreading they didn't introduce the idea to make good on it later because fuuuuuuucccckkkkkkkkkk that, child murder is already reallllllyyy pushing it but I really don't wanna watch a show about monster ants raping people.
Johnny Unusual
(He/Him)
The reference to Battle Olympia that doesn't pay off in the series was a go to joke for me and JBear. I'm almost kind of bummed that apparently they actually got around to it in the manga. I think, anyway. But, yeah, I love that the arc with the Tower just kind of... ends. Like, the idea you can fuck off in the middle of an arc and just do a different arc.
Also, I feel like its bold that the series biggest story arc (the Chimera Ant one), it ends with the hero and the villain not only never meeting but the villain pretty much unaware of Gon's existence, beating everyone only to die of radiation poisoning because as strong and full of potential as Chimera Ants are, they can't beat humanity's ability to just be fucking awful.
Johnny Unusual
(He/Him)
As an exploration of the thesis, its not informative. And you will be tired of him saying "is that anime?"
But as a showcase for anime adjacent oddities and weird facts about them, it is very informative. And that's much more my jam.
But as a showcase for anime adjacent oddities and weird facts about them, it is very informative. And that's much more my jam.
I hope you respect my choice to.not watch the video and instead appreciate the thumbnail titled Identifying Anime
paired with a picture of him apparently doing so by scent with a copy of Digimon.
Johnny Unusual
(He/Him)
I mean, that's pretty good.
The second half of this should be up on Netflix by now. I'm mildly curious how the show handles the dub of the last act. Since the setting is mostly Japan, speaking to Japanese characters, and in the original they jump between English, Japanese, and Chinese pretty freely depending on context and who is speaking. But ya, the final act is really really really good stuff. Probably my best anime of the year.
conchobhar
What's Shenmue?
All the dialogue is in English, with the script occasionally adjusted to account for that. As an example, there's a bit where one character asks "namae wo?" and Edamura repeats it in English as "What's your name?"; in the dub, the character asks "What's your name?" and Edamura backs her up with a terse "answer her!" The one exception is Cynthia, because her speaking in a foreign language is a specific plot point, so she now speaks in French. Also, Suzaku and Ishigami speak with distinctly accented English (both are voiced by Asian actors).
It's probably about as good as can be done, though it definitely loses something— I think I'll watch the rest of the story arc in Japanese.
Yeah I'm just curious though because
there's a few scenes in the final arc further in where Japanese people are speaking to Chinese people via translators. So the Japanese people are saying stuff in Japanese, then the translators speak to each other via English, and then the second translator translates back into Chinese. And there's big variations in what's being said because of natural diplomatic smoothing of what's being said, but also people are hoodwinking each other via intentionally botched translations. Like, scenes like that can't possibly work optimally if you're just flat dubbing everything.