Anime

In other news, SAO Alternate: GGO finally has an imperative, if a weak one. Karen, the tall heroine who plays a diminutive, agile character in the game, learns that the mysterious woman who first befriended her and taught her how to play was one of the beta testers for SAO, but missed out on the launch event. As a result she suffers from a form of survivor's guilt and has a death wish, Karen determines to save her, but first she must defeat her in the team combat free-for-all tournament.

Wotaku ni Koi continues to be unpredictably entertaining, Tada-kun is a but more predictable but still passable, yet neither is as good as Just Because from the Spring Season, let alone mentioning Tsuki ga Kirei from last Winter. Comic Girls is charming and funny. The latest installment in the Full Metal Panic series is probably the grittiest that show's writers have offered.

I'm thinking about checking out Steins Gate 0 even though I dropped Steins;Gate after only a couple of episodes. The "Semicolon People" made three animes. Chaos;Head was a bad slasher porn masquerading as a psychological thriller. Robotics;Notes was the best of the lot, an intriguing tale involving a high school club for building mechas set in the near future set on Tanegashima, the S-shaped island almost due south of the southeastern tip of Kyushu, where a Portuguese ship bound for China wrecked in a storm in the early 17th Century, bringing the first firearms to Japan, The cape where the survivors came ashore figures as a location and the show makes use of augmented reality (think Pokemon Go!). Steins;Gate was somewhere in the middle and the problems I had were the "X-Files Overload", by that I mean that they were just tossing out lame conspiracy theories everywhere, and an animation style that made Bakemonogatari seem timid by comparison.

Yeah, I agree with that to some extent.

I watched the rest of the series and I feel like the more you know about Revi's back story the more I start to like her. She's majorly flawed, but she's a messed up wreck because of the circumstances of her life, anyone who went through what she did would be a wreck.

She reminds me a lot of Ferris Eris in The Legend of the Legendary Heroes. Ferris has lived through an unimaginable childhood to turn her into the killer she is in the story. Like you said, bad guy vs worse guys. But because of that abuse and trust issues, she's unable to convey her feelings towards an obvious romantic interest. Also similar is Killua in Hunter x Hunter. But because of his young age, he's able to break through that a little bit.

In other news, I'm about half way through Made in Abyss and I'm impressed. The animation, world building, and music are some of the best around. The story moves just a little slow, but everything else keeps me hooked.

The amount of new Anime coming out over the past several years is staggering. Used to be that you could give nearly everything a try, watch what you liked, and still be left wanting more shows to fill your niche. Now I couldn't watch everything even if it was my full time job. So I'm usually several seasons behind and relying on trusted people's opinions or my own guesses on what I should give a try. Unless something really catches my interest, like Darling in the FranXX. The next things on my list to give a try are Land of the Lustrous and Girl's Last Tour.

A few weeks ago my son wanted to watch Arpeggio of Blue Steel so I watched it with him. I wasn't expecting much but it ended up being better than I though (while still not great). It reminded me a little of DitF where the characters have no experience with emotions, so they're not equipped with the language or skills to deal with these new feelings. I never would have watched this on my own and something that I considered probably crap had some redeeming qualities. There's just so much out there now, it's unreal.

I noticed that Legend of the Galactic Heroes is getting redone. Is the new one worth watching?

I loved Made in Abyss. I wish they would finish that story because there are so many things left incomplete. Arpeggio of Blue Steel was a bit self-indulgent, I thought, but still a good show.

I finished the rest of Made in Abyss and it was excellent. Although you're right, it kinda felt like it ended right where their "training" completed and the real stuff was going to start.

I watched Land of the Lustrous and had a difficult time with that one. I like how the weakest of the bunch struggled to find anything for herself to do and was assigned a job she though was dumb. In her search to get that job started, she decides she's going to find the perfect job for the outcast of the group so that person doesn't have to be alone any longer. But in the process what she really does is find a job for herself and becomes an important part of the group. I also liked the symbolism of religious aspects in the show regarding the split parts of humanity and the intrigue that something more is definitely going on. What I didn't like is that their tiny island is flat, boring, and unimaginative. Not much to go on every episode as the backdrop. Also, I have a hard time connecting with CGI anime. It's visually stunning but I can't get over this feeling that something is missing. RWBY is the same way, I like the fight scenes and Ruby's cutesy dry humor, but I can't seem to connect with the show. The best way I can explain it is like the difference between a tube guitar amp and a transistor amp. They both do the same thing, but there's a warm feeling of home in the tube amp.

I went back an re-watched the Ghost in the Shell movie from 1995 and it's amazing how it stands the test of time. It has a kind of Blade Runner feel and I'm still in awe of the animation during the night time rain scenes, the reflection and glare really looks like lights shining off wet objects. Also the transition into thermoptic camouflage is done well. The whole reason I watched it again is because I couldn't remember Motoko's exact words about being made up of so many cybernetic parts that she wasn't sure if she was human anymore or if she was ever really human in the first place and is just a computer program made to think it's human. Alphonse's interaction with the Butcher in Fullmetal Alchemist is nearly identical to this scene.

MY GOD! SOMEONE WHO UNDERSTANDS TUBE AMPS! YES!!!

Sorry for the off-topic knee-jerk reaction. It's just...yeah. About 20 years ago I was renting a house with a couple of other guys. One of them was a luthier, he now has his own business making pick ups. He started that while we were all living there, in fact. Buying dead pick ups and rewinding them on an old sewing machine initially, just to learn how to get the sound he wanted. Anyway, while he was still doing the luthier gig, working for a company making electric guitars in Woodenville, he borrowed a Mesa Boogie V-Twin amp from one of the guys there. He had an Ampeg cabinet, more tube goodness, while I had been used to solid state amplification. I plugged in the Les, through the Mesa, into the Ampeg...AHHHHH. I don't always Run To The Hills, but when I do so does the entire neighborhood. Stay excellent, my friends.

Yep. I build tube amps and guitar effect pedals for a hobby. I'm a structural engineer by trade, but not realizing what I actually would like as a career, I probably should have gone into electrical engineering.

I've built a few cigar box guitars from scratch and wound pickups on a sewing machine as you've described. But I've found it wasn't worth my time and either buy a wound pickup or use a piezoelectric pickup instead.

Those Mesa/Boogie's are something to behold, although I've never seen a V-twin amp. Are you talking about the dual rectifier?

Plenty of talented hair bands have made a place in history with solid state amps, but when it comes to my own rig, I need tubes to make that connection.

I watched a few episodes of Girls' Last Tour and I think I'm giving up.

I expected that even though the Girls were living in a bleak post-apocalyptic world, they would find a way to make the best of what they've got and do fun things. The OP is fun and cute and I thought it would continue into the show, not so much. The girls themselves are pretty boring and unfunny and spend time trudging through a bleak world. A whole lot of nothing really happens and the girls eat, sleep, move. Nothing interesting. When they finally do meet another person, he's not interesting either.

Even though you can pretty much guess, there's no history of what's happened to the world. Unlike TWD or Rain, there's no 3rd party to cause tension. There's no back story of where the girls came from or how they got on this journey.

Long periods of the show go by showing the girls doing mundane tasks. Drawn out scenes of them driving. 1/3 of an episode on a bath. A big scene of washing clothes. I expect those things happen and don't mind them being shown, but not for it to BE the show. I can go downstairs and watch myself do a load of laundry, thanks.

I'm having a hard time understanding how this show got such high ratings.

Spoiler, it takes all the way until the end to fully reveal how the world got the way it did, but there are hints along the way. I thought it was, if not a great series, at least enjoyable.

Falco wrote:

In other news, I'm about half way through Made in Abyss and I'm impressed. The animation, world building, and music are some of the best around. The story moves just a little slow, but everything else keeps me hooked.

The amount of new Anime coming out over the past several years is staggering. Used to be that you could give nearly everything a try, watch what you liked, and still be left wanting more shows to fill your niche. Now I couldn't watch everything even if it was my full time job. So I'm usually several seasons behind and relying on trusted people's opinions or my own guesses on what I should give a try. Unless something really catches my interest, like Darling in the FranXX. The next things on my list to give a try are Land of the Lustrous and Girl's Last Tour.

Made in Abyss just won't leave me alone. It's burrowed deep into my head. When is the next season (which has been confirmed)???

I agree on the pace of new work. It really is amazing.

I thought LotL was slow at first but it really grew on me. I found myself wanting more. I also liked Girl's Last Tour; I did not mind the slow story, but the ending really made it for me. Not sure you'll agree, though.

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I noticed that Legend of the Galactic Heroes is getting redone. Is the new one worth watching?

I am enjoying it a lot. Never watched the original, but this version seems to be paced much quicker. Truthfully, I just love a good space opera with battles!

Have you guys checked out Golden Kamuy yet? It is a whole lot of wow, and TBC, I think you'll really like it!

Golden Kamuy....yeah...no. Interesting story but ludicrous, two-dimensional villains is a buzz kill for me.

One thing....ever notice that a lot of the portrait drawings of old Samurai, guys from the early days of the Tokugawa Shogunate and prior to that, and many of them had beards? Only people in Japan today who can grow facial hair, besides foreigners, are the Ainu and a small minority of the general population. Now, we know about the Ainu on Hokkaido because their culture there survived intact well into the 20th Century. But what about the Ainu on the rest of the islands? There are theories that as peoples from Taiwan, Polynesia, and Korea combined to create the Japanese culture we know now based on rice cultivation and fishing, the Ainu, who were hunter-gatherers, wound up dominating the warrior classes simply because they were not suited for anything else. Then the 60-odd years of almost constant battles during the Sengoku just about wiped them out. During that time there was such a need for soldiers that they had relaxed the rules, few of the Samurai who remained after Tokugawa Iayasu established his Shogunate were from the old lines, so the ones who kept the dojos open during 250 years of peace were mostly not the descendants of the Samurai who had served the Daimyo prior to the rise of Oda Nobunaga.

frogge wrote:

Made in Abyss just won't leave me alone. It's burrowed deep into my head. When is the next season (which has been confirmed)???

I really need some more Made in Abyss *now*!

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I thought LotL was slow at first but it really grew on me. I found myself wanting more.

Overall I liked it, I just have a hard time connecting w/ the CGI.

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I also liked Girl's Last Tour; I did not mind the slow story, but the ending really made it for me. Not sure you'll agree, though.

Eh, I ended up reading the manga. It's fairly short and I finished the whole thing in maybe 2 hours. It has some poignant parts and I liked the whole premise. It just works better in manga where I can glance past a few panels of travel where in the anime I have to suffer through several 15 minute segments of boring driving or walking.

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I am enjoying it a lot...

Have you guys checked out Golden Kamuy yet? It is a whole lot of wow, and TBC, I think you'll really like it!

I'll have to give both a look see.

Should reply to this...

Falco wrote:

Those Mesa/Boogie's are something to behold, although I've never seen a V-twin amp. Are you talking about the dual rectifier?

Not sure, "V-Twin" was the model and dual rectifier diode tubes sounds like a likely reason for the name. Not sure what effect that would have on the signal from a technical perspective, have to read up on it, but it sounded soooo sweet, especially when I spun the tone on the guitar to "low" and went with the neck humbucker, Clapton's "Woman tone", and when I went for saturation it was like I was holding a live animal that was VERY angry.

Power rectifier (tubes or solid state) are not in the signal path so there's a lot of debate as to weather they make any difference to sound or not.

When the power tubes hit the rails and begin to clip, they could draw more power than the rectifier can deliver so there's a slight "sag" in the sound. The debate is if most circuits even cause this effect and if it's even noticeable by the human ear.

There are FET resistor add on's to a silicone diode rectifier circuit that people claim add this same sag. But again, it's a huge debate.

Most companies don't use tube rectification because running those extra tubes makes the transformer more expensive and most people can't tell the difference.

I say, what matters is that it made a difference to you. So rock on!

I watched a few episodes of Legend of the Glactic Heroes. Its pretty good so far. I wouldnt't say it's paced quicker, just differently. The books likely have a lot of material that wasnt't completely covered in the anime. This version is choosing some different angles.

In the original anime, all the pomp and circumstance of promotions are shown along with the petty gossip behind people's backs. They went into a lot more anguish the Lohengramm family went through over being poor and the decision to sell their sister. Reinhard witnesses a noble party and comes to the same conclusion as Jessica, that nobles play while real people die on the front lines and the only way to stop this is to gain power. It kinda gets more in depth into circumstances and motivation.

The new one so far seems to get more into how the two main characters are strategic geniuses and the battles that show off their skills. The only exception to this is Iserlohn Fortress. The original shows details of how the battle progessed (with a hand to hand battle axe fight). Maybe they're saving this for flashbacks later?

Overall I'd say watch both. While there's a lot of overlap, they're telling the same story from different perspectives.

Falco wrote:

Power rectifier (tubes or solid state) are not in the signal path so there's a lot of debate as to weather they make any difference to sound or not.

When the power tubes hit the rails and begin to clip, they could draw more power than the rectifier can deliver so there's a slight "sag" in the sound. The debate is if most circuits even cause this effect and if it's even noticeable by the human ear.

There are FET resistor add on's to a silicone diode rectifier circuit that people claim add this same sag. But again, it's a huge debate.

Most companies don't use tube rectification because running those extra tubes makes the transformer more expensive and most people can't tell the difference.

I say, what matters is that it made a difference to you. So rock on!

There are a lot of issues which can cause loss of quality when you turn it up to 11...I hope we never stop trying to pin them all down on the basis of "the human ear might not be able to discern the difference".

So, on topic, Uchuu Senkan Yamato 2202: Ai no Senshi-Tachi. That's right, the "Comet Empire" sequel to Star Blazers is out in updated form with an OVA release. It's been a long time since I saw the original...like high school back in the early '80s, but the remade Uchuu Senkan Yamato 2200 was very well done, close to the original, mostly just modernized animation to make it more "watchable" to today's fans. The story itself has held up quite well. Kind of like 501s.

Summer Season is here and a week in it looks like a giant pile of blah for new shows. Unless you in elementary school.

SAO Alternative:GGO wrapped with a surprise ending that was no surprise at all, like if you haven't figured it out by ep. 7 you aren't paying attention so why leave it to the end to finally reveal it. Worse, there was no real imperative to the story line. You know...the first part of SAO was several thousand people trapped in a game world for two years and if the died there the game link would kill them, the second part was Kirito trying to save his dear Asuna from a creep who is keeping her in another game world so he can take over her father's company...cheesy plotline and universally panned, the second series was based on Kirito being hired to go into the GGO game to find out how someone is killing people in real life at the same time they kill their characters in-game. Can not really say whether I give it a recommendation or no. Ay the most I well say that it works the best as a story of Karen, a tall, awkward young woman learning self-confidence as she plays her diminutive character LLENN in GGO.

Tada-kun wrapped after a single cour run, it was really just a standard teen romance with some interesting characters, worth the time spent but it was no Tsuki ga Kirei.

Wotaku ni Koi ga Muzukashii, or "Wotakoi" as the accepted portmanteau, didn't end in the noitaminA block so much as just stop. They rushed to put this one into animation, result, be-ba-de-ba-de That's all, Folks! It's all a success story for the artist. The manga started out in an online forum where aspiring mangakas can post their work, got picked up by a professional site, and is now published dead-tree. It's an amusing series, had me laughing, Nee-Chan, who seldom watches subbed, loved it I just wish there could have been more to the show.

Yeah, so far this season has been a lot of not much. A whole lot of fan service, though.

Cells at Work was kind of fun. More or less an animated biology class, but not bad. Probably won't be stellar, either.

Attack on Titan 3 starts soon-ish. I think it goes without saying that we're looking forward to it.

Plus, My Hero Academia is continuing. It keeps getting better, too, in case anyone gave up on it previously.

At least there is a new season of Overlord to keep me entertained.

I think I might have a winner here. An Historical which is not, for once, thankfully, "lets see how much of a mess we can make of either the Edo Period or the Oda Nobunaga to Tokugawa Iayasu campaign for unification". The title of the anime is Angolmois: Genkou Kassenki and it's set will before Oda Nobunaga...nearly 300 years before.

It's the late 13th Century and Tsushima is the end of the world. At least for a Japanese it is. A day's sail northwest of Kyushu (and closer to modern-day Busan than to Fukuoka) it is a dumping ground for exiles. But a demon lurks to the north and the west. His name is Timujen. He has already sacked Baghdad, Constantinople, and Kiev, laid waste to half of Europe, conquered China and Korea. Next on his agenda is to send one of his trusted warlords to take Japan and the first stepping stone is Tsushima. It's quite famous, Timujen's grandson Kublai Khan sent a great fleet to invade Japan but a typhoon sank most of the ships, the divine wind, the kamikaze but this is a better story I think. Japan saved through the dogged efforts of plucky islanders defending their homes and exiles convinced to fight for their homeland.

Titan is back. Yay!!!! I mentioned this at the old place, Falco, but I got bored waiting for new episodes of the anime and read the manga scanlation a bit ahead. To be blunt, the future is long on drama and exposition but short on action. The new season is events not in the manga, which means we are in for lots of action, but still it opens with a scene of Erin looking out at the ocean just as Armin had predicted there would be, and wondering what lies beyond it.

My go-to site had the Chuunibyuo demo Koi ga Shiitai movie "Take On Me" hosted. Could also have been entitled "Yuuto and Rikka's Excellent Adventure". It's a fun tale that probably puts a cap, so far as the viewers are concerned, on the narrative. Five stars out of five for fans of the show.

Back after a month, because the Summer Season has been kind of slack.No new shows really that exciting, a few returning shows like Lupin III and Overlord continuing to entertain in predictable fashion. What to do in these times is rewatch old shows or take the chance to check out stuff I passed on the first time around...

Steins;Gate 0 is winding down a two-cour run. Steins;Gate was a show I passed on after a couple of episodes, largely because ho hum another show set in Akiba and also it was from the same folks who made Chaos;Head, just a psycho slasher porn with effect visuals and music. However, I did watch Robots;Notes, from the same studio and creative group, and liked it. So I decided to give Steins;Gate another shot, and it's sequel as well...

The premise of Steins;Gate is Okabe Rintaro, an arrogant, moderately self-deluded college first year has a "lab" strong quotes, above an electronics repair shop off a back alley in Akiba with two friends; his stereotypical cute childhood friend Makise Kuriyu, and portly "Supah Hakah" Hashida Itaru, better know as Daru. Rintaro and Daru are working on a time machine in their "Future Gadgets Laboratory" and Kuriyu is rather the mascot. Things begin to go wonky when Rintaro and Kuriyu attend a lecture by a certain professor at a nearby building, and after disrupting the lecture accusing the professor of plagiarizing a self-proclaimed time traveler from a decade previously he witnesses the murder of Makise Kurisu. a young, brilliant theoretician in the field of neurology. He flees the building with Kuriyu and sends a text to Daru, but as soon as he sends it he is hit with an odd vibration. When he returns to the lab he notices that things have changed, and he is the only one who notices it. The lecture he attended never happened because it was cancelled, the text he sent to Daru arrived five days previously, in three parts, and Makise Kirisu is still alive. Also, nobody, not even the authorities, have any explanation for the large satellite-looking object which has apparently crashed into the top floor of the building where the lecture was to have been held.

While it runs on the surface as an action series about time travel, skirting paradoxes, conspiracies, the like, it's really a series about friendships, loyalty, family, sacrifice, anguish. Human stuff.

Steins;Gate 0 is an odd sort of a sequel. Steins;Gate ends on a happy note, have to spoil that for the set up, but there is an alternate to the penultimate episode where a different choice is made, the action leading to the happy ending in the finale does not happen. This alternate is the direct lead-in to Steins;Gate 0. So far, 19 episode out of a probable 24 in, it's just as good as the original, with the same themes permeating. new characters have been added, some old ones are different because it's a different time line. Still, there are places where I am catching myself asking "Why don't they just...?"

Okay, I have sussed out the plot of Steins;Gate and it's sequel, but I think I need to spoiler tag it for language.

Steins:Gate LANGUAGE WARNING:

New SAO and Index shows this season. Both seem good.

Sao: Alicization starts with Kirito beta testing a new game system. The first half of E1 is Kirito in the game. Later, he meets Asuna and Shinon and explains the game he's testing. It has a remarkable time compression, but he does not know what it is as he doesn't retain the game memories due to the secrecy surrounding the project. Later, walking home with Asuna he is attacked by the last remaining member of the rogue PK squad from the first series and gets injected with a poison. In E2 he wakes up in the same village he was in the previous time, but has no memories of it, and the game has been retconned to exclude his previous presence. Also, several years have passed, despite it only having been a few hours in the real world.

Takes two episodes to set that up, but it already sounds better than the Gun Gale Online series, which as I mentioned had no real imperative and a telegraphed "big reveal" at the end.

Toaru Majutsu no Index III is simply a continuation of the events from the previous series. It's also two eps in, currently, and it actually seems to be better written than the early series. It's been a long time, so I am in the middle of a re-watch to get reaquainted with the secondary characters. I'll probably skip re-watching Railgun. The first season was just an expansion of the third story arc of Index and the second was nonsense about Biri-Biri's annoying gal-pals in Academy City's Do-Good JV Squad.

Haven't been mentioning new series in the fall season. Started in on several and already dropped a couple. One winner is Irozuku Sekai no Ashita kara. The rundown:

It's set in Nagasaki, in a district across the bay from the main city, in a world where there is a slight amount of magic. Mostly it is used for illusions, charms, diving fortunes, little tricks. It begins in the year 2078 with a girl named Hitomi. She is from a family of witches, they run a magic shop, but she dislikes magic, has no ability for it, and due to an incident when she was a small child she lost the ability to see colors. At 17 years old she lives in a dreary ash-hued world. Her grandmother Kohaku reveals to Hitomi that she has been working on something for a long time..that Hitomi actually has great power and the way to unlock it is to travel back 60 years, to when Kohaku was 17. She gives Hitomi a vaguely worded note to give to her own parents in 2018 and sends her on her way.

There's a charm here similar to Just Because or maybe Tsuki ga Kirei. Because of circumstances it's several episodes before the 17 year old Kohaku shows up, so Hitomi, who is pushed into playing transfer student in a school she's enrolled in, Class of 60 years from now, thankfully the uniforms are changed over the years, has to initially make friends on her own. And of course, my mantra, "Characters, Characters, Characters", here the friends are the Photography and Art Club at the school, which gets expanded to being the Magic, Photography, and Art Club when Kohaku returns and joins so that there will be enough members for an official school club. I love that the writers made them all solid characters. Not a single cut-out in sight.

Irozuku and the new SAO: Alicization are both good. Irozuku is by PA Works, and I'll watch just about anything from them. That said, this seems to be one of their better ones at this point.

Golden Kamuy has a new season, and it is consistently good (but creepy).

Karakuri Circus has a lot of similarities with Ushio to Tora, but is decent; We'll have to see on that one.

Run With the Wind is a sports (running) anime that is well done. It reminds of Haikyu a lot.

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime is a new "trapped in a video game" show, but it is done better than the last five shows. It's solidly 'meh- not bad'.

I am about to give up on SSSS.Gridman- it's too much Ultraman and I don't care for that genre at all.

I initially gave SSSS Gridman a pass. Just didn't sound that interesting. Now that it's 6 eps in I watched the first three in one sitting. Not really impressed.

I gave up on Golden Kamui because the antagonists are consistently comic-book creepy.

Slime is a fun show, but Isekai is a genre in trouble. Hit any manga scanlation site and look at how many current titles there are. The problem is that for the past 3-4 years manga publishers have been been giving new series to anyone who can draw a straight line who comes to them and says "I have an idea for an isekai..." when what they really should be doing is wrapping them in a futon and tossing them off the bridge into the Arakawa River. The problem is that every single isekai is based around the same premise: Putting someone into another world with something...some concept or object from this world which gives them an unnatural advantage in that world. Slime is a little different in that it establishes early on the MC not being the only one from this world in that one. Death March also alluded to other people from this world probably having been been there in the past. However, the best isekai anime ever (prove me wrong), Grimgar, completely defied this premise. Not only did the central characters enter the alternate world remembering next to nothing about home, they were the weakest of the group who all showed up together.

I just remembered another isekai which completely defied the premise. Now and Then, Here and There. The MC of that anime was a high school kid who inadvertently got drawn into another universe and wound up being a major catalyst for change, his only advantages being that he had an almost cliche optimism plus a stubborn refusal to accept the bleak status quo of that universe as being inevitable.

Another one that mostly violates the premise is Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari, released in North America as Tenchi Muyo! War on Geminar. It's in the Tenchi Muyo continuity and features Tenchi's half brother Kenshi, who gets pulled into a parallel world and winds up piloting a mecha. Mostly he doesn't have any powers other than, well he's a Masaki so he's good at many different ordinary tasks, thus he attracts a lot of attention from females but manages to deflect most of it. And since this IS a Tenchi Moyo continuity tale most of the side characters in the story are female. However, it's not really a harem in any traditional sense, nor is it a comedy. It's more of an action/adventure that sits on the border between shonen and seinen classifications with some very mild ecchi content, none explicit.

I just remembered another isekai which completely defied the premise. Now and Then, Here and There. The MC of that anime was a high school kid who inadvertently got drawn into another universe and wound up being a major catalyst for change, his only advantages being that he had an almost cliche optimism plus a stubborn refusal to accept the bleak status quo of that universe as being inevitable.

Another one that mostly violates the premise is Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari, released in North America as Tenchi Muyo! War on Geminar. It's in the Tenchi Muyo continuity and features Tenchi's half brother Kenshi, who gets pulled into a parallel world and winds up piloting a mecha. Mostly he doesn't have any powers other than, well he's a Masaki so he's good at many different ordinary tasks, thus he attracts a lot of attention from females but manages to deflect most of it. And since this IS a Tenchi Moyo continuity tale most of the side characters in the story are female. However, it's not really a harem in any traditional sense, nor is it a comedy. It's more of an action/adventure that sits on the border between shonen and seinen classifications with some very mild ecchi content, none explicit.

Final notes on two single-cour shows of the Fall Season... Irudoku: The World in Colors and Goblin Slayer.

frogge saye he'll watch just about anything from P.A. Works, it's hard not to agree if they keep putting out shows like Irudoku. It pulls all the right heartstrings with the two main and five secondary characters all being well conceived and fleshed out. Definitely has my vote for anime of the season.

Goblin Slayer is the surprise winner of the season, then. I was expecting a dark tale, something like Kyojin, but what I got instead was a surprisingly human story. The setting is a table-top adventure world, where heroes for hire do quests, kill monsters, earn gold, and sometimes die harshly. In this world goblins are lightly regarded by these adventurers because they are relatively weak, individually. One doesn't get paid much for killing them. It is usually under-prepared low-level adventurers who take the quests of eliminating Goblins, which can be a bad idea, because goblins are tribal, live in caves, and defend them quite fiercely. There is one adventurer who has made his trade in eliminating goblins, in fighting only goblins, and he is known only as Goblin Slayer. This all sounds trite, probably, but in all creative projects execution is everything and here the execution was masterful.

Joseph Campbell's essential thesis is that the key action of an epic is the change the hero undergoes as a result of the journey. This is what defines the human element in an epic. If you have ever watched Kino no Tabi you will notice that it defies the precept, intentionally or otherwise. Tabi and her talking motorcycle Hermes arrive at a town where there is some flaw that is making everyone miserable, they don't actually do anything about it but their mere presence causes the involved parties to suddenly work things out in the space of 3 minutes, Tabi rides off on Hermes to the next episode, ever the detached observer. And they made three full seasons of this happy horse shit. For Goblin Slayer the epic which will set him on the path of becoming "more human" begins when he enters a cave to eradicate a tribe of goblins, not knowing that a small party of novice adventurers has entered only minutes before him and are walking straight to disaster.

The anime, like the manga on which it was derived, has some odd quirks. None of the characters are given proper names simply because the writer was bad at naming characters so he didn't bother. So the lead is only "Goblin Slayer", his description. The other prominent characters are Priestess, High Elf Archer, Dwarf Shaman, Lizard Priest, Guild Girl, Witch, Spearman, Sword Maiden, and annoyingly the busty red-haired childhood friend who waits back at the farm and makes a nice potato-based soup for him every time he comes home is Cow Girl. Another odd quirk is that we never see his face. He wears a helmet with a full-face mask and in the few time he is not wearing it the scenes are "face avoidance". This is done to play up his status as a loner-sort...which brings us to the nature of the change which the show highlights. It's all about Goblin Slayer loosening up his severe isolation, learning to work with others, play with others, relate to others. That is why I called it the "surprise winner" of the season. It's a very well crafted tale about making friends and killing goblins. Who can't relate to that?

Just wanted to pop in and let people know, if you're not watching The Promised Neverland, you should be.

Um...yeah. Bug-eyed alien monsters who find the brains of intelligent human children a delicacy. Makes you wonder what it is about the stupid ones that turns their palates. Everything I have read on the series that wasn't written by the media whores at ANN suggests that it's a bunch of standard suspense hooks to support this rather flimsy premise...but the artwork and animation is top notch.

ETA: Who cares about bug eyed monsters. Insert whatever plot driver you want to make yourself happy. What really matters are the character interactions that are going on at the farm.

I find it to be similar to Death Note. Each side is constantly out-thinking the other. They're not sure who to trust or even truly what their end goal needs to be. Animation is great, characters are pretty good, I find to to be worth watching.

One of the characters is very similar to one in Hunter x Hunter, so it kinda has a little of that feel to me, even though the premise really isn't anything like Hunter x Hunter.

That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime (To lazy to type out it's Japanese title) ended it's 2-cour first season two weeks early and followed it with the news via Twitter that it has been approved for a second season.

Forget everything else in the Aniverse. Shigeki no Kyojin is back.

Okay, don't forget everything else, quite yet. Shinichiro Watanabe's newest offering, Carole and Tuesday, is fantastic, even if you are not into anime. The setting is Mars a couple of hundred years in the future, I was expecting something similar to the world shown in Cowboy Bebop where the cities are in meteor craters but here the planet has a full atmosphere and the cities are connected by rail lines.

The anime is the story of two teenaged girls from wildly differing backgrounds who meet by chance and start to make music together, but that is grossly understating matters. In this vision of the future 99% of popular music is created by A.I. to be the perfect consumer commodity. The musicians themselves might as well be highly trained chimpanzees for all that artistry has to do with their task. Two girls, a guitar, an electric piano, talent, and desire have no place here.

Watanabe-sensei has tackled music as a main topic before. Kids on the Slope was a lightly-received offering about school kids in the late 1960s discovering Jazz. That one, I think, had the flaw of being too serious for it's subject matter. Or perhaps the fact that Watanabe seemed bent on perpetuating the stereotype of jazz aficionados as snobbish. Carole and Tuesday is closer in tone to Samurai Champloo. Nonetheless, I can not help but feel that Watanabe is making a statement against not just the highly choreographed girl idol groups of Japan, AKB 48 and their ilk, but also the prepackaged, focus-group-marketed morass of the current popular music industry where three corporations combine for 97% of new record sales worldwide.

I wasn't really interested in Carole and Tuesday because I'm generally not into music anime, but my app kept suggesting it so I watched the first episode and it looks to be setting up as something great. I'll keep up with this one.

One thing that's cool. Every episode title is a song. For instance the first episode is "True Colors". The eye catch for every episode is the original release 45 of that song.

Oh, I just checked, if the voice of Tuesday sounds familiar, look no further than your banner pic. Kana Ichinose. Unfortunately, she was not voicing Zero Two. She was Ichigo...

Has anyone been watching The Promised Neverland? I'd be interested in reviews and/or thoughts, notes etc if so.

I watched The Promised Neverland and thought it was great. The planning and out-thinking was exciting and the animation was top notch.

TBC had a different opinion.


Also, if you aren't watching Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, you should be.

I just have problems with the basic premise. Alien BEMs vs Cute Plucky Kids is almost always a knee-jerk dodge for me. Probably because I tend to find the aliens more "human" and relatable. Not that I have a things for aliens, per se, so much as the fact a writer must give the main antagonist some sort of recognizable motivation. An alien antagonist who was indeed completely "alien" would be either pointless or the best thing to hope for from a story perspective. Actually, I will take an alien foe who was completely xenophobic any day over one who preferred the taste of the brains of genius-level pre-teens.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba is on which was on my "Might Watch" list, been reading good things about it. Will probably binge it now that the Summer Season is almost over. I dropped the third season of Bungo Stray Dogs after the first arc in favor of a wait and watch approach. Only shows I am actively watching are Shingeki no Kyojin, Carole and Tuesday, and Mayonaka no Occult Koumin which is oddly engrossing even if it's not the most popular show out there.

I really liked Promised Neverland from last season, as well as Run With the Wind and Kaguya-san: Love is War. Personally I think Love is War was the highlight from last season.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba is really good! Hands down some of the best stuff since Made in Abyss. From this season, I also like Gundam: The Origin (sorry but I am a yuge mecha fan). The Fruits Basket reboot is good, but not too different from the first one so far. Attack on Titan suffered at the beginning of season three, but has been much better again lately. One I'm watching is MIX. I like Adachi's work and he tends to do slow builds, but this one has not done much yet so far. Hitoribocchi no Marumaru Seikatsu is surprisingly fun. Lastly, Rise of the Shield Hero is a bit of a guilty pleasure at this point.

Summer season will start in a few weeks. Dungeon ni Deai wo Motomeru no wa Machigatteiru Darou ka will start a second season (did not like Sword Oratorio), as will Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san. Also, very much looking forward to 7 Seeds, based on Yumi Tamura's manga.

Never apologize for a love of mecha!

Sword Oratoria was an interesting idea, I thought. It's the same timeframe and events from a different character's perspective, but all it really wound up doing was revealing more about the background of that world including certain key events.

Having read some of the Shingeki no Kyojin manga in the dead space waiting for Season 2 I can say that I am glad that they omitted a huge chunk of reveal about the world beyond the walls and instead left that for when Erin finally gets Grisha's memoirs and memories. In the manga it's a huge expository dump in the form of the memories of the four infiltrators being recruited from childhood out of the same walled ghetto. Makes for nice reading because there are dramatic moments but there is no action there.

This thread has been in freefall for a while, time to boost it back up. Attack on Titan: The Final Season is currently airing. I have watched the first two episodes and it's good so far.

What else? Another season of Is It Wrong To Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon just aired. The usage nickname for the show is DanMachi, BTW, and I think I will stick with that. It's another season of Bel Cranel getting the Hestia Familia into trouble by trying to save some cute female.

After a long delay the final cour of SAO: Alicization aired in the Summer Season and it was great.

I still need to finish Attack on Titians, I just finished season 1

I am excited for Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train I am still having a hard time finding a copy tho.

It released in October but I don't think it's made it overseas yet

I don't make a habit of reading ahead in the manga which an on-going series is based, but I made an exception with Titan because it was so long in between seasons. Because of this I have a general idea of what in coming in the anime. But only to a point and there is always the possibility that the anime writers could handle events differently than the original material.

Another one that I read ahead on is Dr. Stone, but only because it is so fun and I had no idea if or when they would get around to a second season. Well, that's in the works, and there I do expect it to stay close to the manga.

I know Demon Slayer is really popular (with 12 and 13 year old boys) but I have been a little wary of it because the manga is published by Shonen Jump. They are the 800 lb. gorilla of Japanese Popular Culture...you know the old one "Omg...where does it sleep?" "Anywhere it wants to." My problems with them is that they have too much power as "hitmakers". If you are a mangana and Weekly Shonen Jump picks of your manga, good for you. If they decided to push it for animation it WILL be a hit, count on it, because they will promote the shit out of it and make sure the broadcaster doesn't cancel it. Naruto ran way too long and got stale, the sequel series Boruto is now up to 150 episodes. Then there is One Piece which is less than a year away from episode 1000. But the real irker for me is that they never got around to having the final arc of Bleach animated and forced Tite Kubo to end the manga with a one-chapter epilogue which only barely touched on the lives and actions of a few of the characters afterwards. Ichiro and Inoue are married and living in the Kurisaki Clinic and they have a son. Renji and Rukia are married, have a daughter, and are both Captains, Chad is a famous pro wrestle, and Uryu is an MD. It touches on a few other things in Soul Society, but there is no mention of Kisuke and Yoruichi or of any of Ichigo's immediate family. Did Isshin return to Soul Society, retake his family name, and patch things up with his cousin Kukaku? Did Karin go to Soul Society to hone her Soul Reaper powers? If so the logical place for her would be 4th Division (now with the Kotetsu sisters and the respective Captain and Vice-Captain). Inquiring mind and all that, but we will never know because Shonen Jump put the kibosh on the series and Kubo-sensei has moved on to other projects (which you will likely never get to see because they aren't being published in the pages of WSH)

/rant

But with that off my chest, none of it has any bearing on whether I will actually like Demon Hunter. So I probably should give it a watch.

I have watched a bit of One Piece, I enjoyed it.

I don't know much about anime. Demon Slayer does not seem like a show made for young kids, but I guess the characters are pretty young. The animation is very nice.

The Japanese include things in the shows which are targeted at younger teens that we just wouldn't. Extreme violence, gratuitous "fan service" scenes (there's no reason to frame the shot of him from behind her, between her legs, with the mound of her vulva prominent in her panties, but we will anyway). What can I say? The Japanese are strange.

There are five target demographics:

Kids, just what it says, for pre-teens regardless of gender.

Shonen (lit. "young boy"), boys aged 13 -15, generally.

Seinen (lit. "old boy"), older teen boys and younger men, generally.

Shojo (lit. "young girl") for girls 13-15, generally.

Josei (lit. "old girl") for older teen girls and young women.

Shojo titles are usually the "plucky young heroine who overcomes with the power of friendship", including the magical girl (Mahou Shojo) trope. Josei titles are most commonly romance of some stripe, including "yuri" and "yaoi" (same sex, respectively girls and boys). But that's an easy delineation to make. It's harder with Shonen and Seinen.

Both are mostly action and adventure themed (because that's what guys want...allegedly) (channeling my favorite YouTuber, Simon Whistler) with a couple of other themes thrown in, so what differentiates them is more content than genre. In Shonen titles the good guys are always good and the bad guys are always bad, never any grey, while Sienen titles can have classic anti-heroes or antagonists who are basically good people with good motives but a differing agenda from the MC. Shonen also seems to be character-trope driven quite often. Sometimes these tropes can get extremely annoying. One of the worst is tsundere (lit. "cold-hot"), the girl who is attracted to the male MC but can not express this so she is verbally and/or physically abusive. Shonen writers use these tropes so that the viewer knows what to expect. It's your basic "lazy writing" in action. Seinen will generally have more complex themes, characters who are more fleshed-out, occasionally non-linear story progression. But there are some titles which blur the lines, make you ask just who this is targeted at.

One is Bleach, which was based on a manga originally published, as I said in my previous post, in Weekly Shonen Jump. You would think then that it would automatically be a Shonen title. But it actually contains very few of the Shonen tropes and hallmarks and more content which you expect from Seinen. The central action involves a conflict between Shinigami (lit. "death god", the Japanese cultural appropriation of the Grim Reaper) who reside in a place called Soul Society, and Hollows, dead people who had some event preventing them from passing over and so become monsters. One of the Captains of the 13 squads of Shinigami, Kenpachi Zaraki, is a maniac who will fight anyone, friend or foe, and another, Mayuri Kurotsuchi, the head of the scientific development division, is a monster of a mad scientist with zero scruples. On the other hand, two of the boss-level Hollows, Neliel tu Oderschenk and Coyote Stark, are downright decent folk.

Then there is the Grand Dame of Manga, Rumiko Takahashi, who had no fewer than six...oops, now seven mangas given the full animation treatment. Her first two, Urutsei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2, are definitely Shonen, both are what you would call "comedy of errors" utilizing themes from Japanese culture. In the first a teenaged boy named Ataru who is chosen to be the savior of the Earth by defeating the champion of the aliens who are threatening destruction. His opponent is Lum, the daughter of the alien king, and she wears tiger-striped boots and bikini with a strapless top, has long green hair and small horns. Ataru has a week to defeat her and all he has to do is grab her horns. Easier said than done as she is very nimble and athletic. Ataru also has the standard "childhood friend" who has declared that she will marry him if he wins. He eventually does by putting a hook on a line, snagging Lum's top and pulling it off, and grabbing her horns while she is embarrassedly covering herself. Elated, he exclaims "Now we can get married, speaking of himself and his girl, but Lum misconstrues it to mean that he is claiming her as his bride. Easy mistake to make, right? Thus began 347 chapters of manga, collated into 34 tankoban volumes and was the basis for a series which ran on Fuji Television for six years starting in 1981.

The second series introduced the first gender-bending character in anime, Ranma Saotome. While training with his father Genma, practitioner of a form of martial art which steals whatever techniques it can find, a cursed spring in China Ranma falls into a pond in which a red-haired teenage girl drowned many years ago. The result of the curse is that he takes the form of the girl when doused with cold water while hot water turns him back. Genma also falls into a pond and is transformed into a giant panda, same conditions. The two then return to Japan, to the Greater Tokyo suburbs, where Genma's fellow practitioner of that art, Soun Tendo has a dojo and three daughters. It was long ago agreed that Ranma would wed one of the girls, and the youngest, Akane, who is the same age as Ranma gets the honors. Akane is understandably less than thrilled to be betrothed to a guy with better tits than hers (half of the time) while Ranma doesn't really like the idea of hooking up with a girl whose only two talents are fighting and figure skating. Literally. That's all she's good at. Everything else she tries she fails miserably. Cooking? She burns water. Swimming? Straight to the bottom of the pool. And you definitely don't want her for a dance partner unless your life insurance is paid up.

There are other characters who intrude upon the potential nuptials. One of these is Shampoo a girl from a tribe of Chinese Amazons, who originally comes to Japan to kill Ranma because he and Genma, on the way back from the spring, had intruded on the Amazon's village and helped themselves to all the food which had been set out for a village feast. But Ranma defeats her and now she swears her love for him. She returns to China, goes to the spring, and jumps in a pond where a cute grey Persian Cat had drowned, so now she has a changed form. The problem here is that Ranma has a deathly phobia of cats thanks to a failed attempt at training that Genma had put through as a child...put him in a large box with a bunch of angry cats and bang on the box. One of the funniest scenes is in an episode where the Saotome and Tendo families go to a hot springs resort with a large cold-water swimming pool. Ranma is wearing trunks and intends to just relax and catch rays well away from the pool, but Shampoo, wearing one of those '80s bathing suits with lots of string bits connecting the top and bottom halves, intrudes, takes his arm and they tumble into the shallow end together. They come up with Shampoo sitting on top of Ranma's head. She is freaking out because she's now a wet cat, and he is freaking out because he's now female, topless, with a freaked-out wet cat on his head. Wonderful bit of physical comedy there, but again, it's all in a Shonen vein (when you take into account that the Japanese don't have the public nudity taboo that we do).

But it was Takahashi's third hit, InuYasha, which established her as a legend and broke the rules on target audience. Kagome is you normal, ordinary 15 year old girl. She lives with her family in a Shinto Shrine which her family had tended going back to the Sengoku Period, the 16th Century when Oda Nobunaga was beginning the campaign to reunify Japan. She has the normal life and likes of a Japanese teen, her passion is being on the school's archery team. But she also has a secret that nobody knows about, that she doesn't know about. She was born with a powerful orb, a ball about 1 1/2" diameter, in her body next to her heart. One day while searching for something in a shed on the grounds of the shrine with an old, dried-up well inside a giant centipede emerges from the well, tosses her down it, and she is transported back to the Sengoku. She manages to climb out of the well and sees what looks like a teen boy unconscious and pinned to a tree with an arrow. It's really a half human half dog demon (yokai) named Inuyasha who was pinned to the tree by the village priestess after he tried to steal the orb. She removes the arrow, he awakens after 20 years of slumber and senses the presence of the orb inside her. He convinces her to extract it, wanting to claim it again, after realizing that despite her appearance she is not the priestess. She does but is attacked by the giant centipede monster, which Inuyasha kills. Then a large crow swoops in and swipes the orb in it's claws. As it flies away she looses an arrow (because she just happens to bring her archery stuff into the past) but instead of hitting the crow the arrow strikes the orb, breaking it into thousands of fragments which scatter all over Japan.

The task of Kagome and Inuyasha is to recover all of the fragments. Their allies in this are the demon slayer Sango and her cat-yokai pet Kirara and the lecherous Buddhist monk Miroku with his own curse, a hole in his hand which swallows everything and will eventually swallow him. This all sounds Shonen, but it has strong Seinen, Shojo, and Josei elements as well. The teen heroine is pure Shojo, there are developing romances between Kagoma and Inuyasha and between Sango and Miroku (if he can just keep his non-cursed hand off her backside) that make for Josei, and the meta plot is complicated by things such as Inuyasha's half-brother Sesshomaru and a sword they both desire but is within the body of their father, a wolf-yokai who hates dogs but becomes a reluctant ally, basically a whole lot of well conceived and executed characters which generally only exist in Sienen.

The show aired on Fuji for several seasons, took a seven year hiatus while Takahasi completed the manga, and picked back up with InuYasha: The Final Act, which wrapped the story in three seasons, plus there were four full-length OVA movies. Vonne was and is overfond of calling Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood "the perfect anime". She's dead wrong, but she's what is known as weeboo among anime fans. In fact she's a textbook case. A person who watches only a few titles, declares one the greatest thing since the electric rice steamer, and never watches any others. If anything could lay claim to that title, in my opinion it's InuYasha.

To quote my next favorite YouTuber, The Critical Drinker, "That's all I've got. Go away now."

Wow, very interesting, thank you for sharing this!