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I'm a fan of both Fullmetal Alchemist series, and the manga. Brotherhood follows the manga more closely, so the two shows are separate continuities. The live action movie is also it's own thing.

I am waaaay behind on my anime watching. I just started to watch Psycho Pass and Seraph of the End, both a few years old. The former has some good ideas, but I'm having trouble getting into the characters. The second's not bad so far, but I hope it doesn't spend too much time in the high school setting. 

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21 hours ago, Meera of Tarth said:

Oh, I just finished Higurashi. 

I loved the ending. There were some moments when one thinks anything could happen, so I was still very thrilled.

I have some issues with 

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the villain. To be precise

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if the villain was mad, when did all start, etc.

although

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I loved that there was more to come in terms of the other villains, and also that the main villain had a background and was kind of a complex human being.

 

 

I'm really glad that you liked it! In regards to your issues...

Spoiler

I really don't think that we are supposed to take Takano succumbing to the syndrome as an excuse for her actions. She only developed symptoms over the course of the last arc after all. The best indicator should be when she and Tomitake broke into the shrine storehouse in Eyes Opening: When Takano went gushing about Oyashiro being an evil god, both Shion and Tomitake were hearing Hanyuu jumping around in frustration. Shion because she went nuts in this arc, Tomitake because Takano switched his medication as stated in the Massacre arc.

Keiichi and Takano however were oblivious to Hanyuu's presence, making it clear that at this point, neither of them were in danger of getting mad. Therefore this is something that happened to Takano only after the kids were starting to tear down her plans. She was totally clear in the head when she murdered Rika's parents or forced Irie to vivisect that construction worker...

She is twisted, misguided and ruthless. That's on her, not on the syndrome, that much is clear. What the ending however did enforce is the idea that this shouldn't be a reason to root for her death, especially if she'd only die to take the fall for someone who is just as evil as she is. Yes, we were supposed to pity her at the end, but I don't think were supposed to forgive her for her crimes. Mortals cannot do that after all... only Hanyuu can, like she herself said n the same episode. Well... before Takano pulled a gun on her...

21 hours ago, Meera of Tarth said:

I really liked the that the show had so many mysteries, since it's a genre I love (not only in anime) and also the messages about

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hope against fate and restless perseverance

Season 2,

And don't forget the power of friendship! It might sound cheesy, but Higurashi is one of the few stories where such a theme doesn't seem superficially tacked on, but is actually a core strength of the narrative.

(Also why spoiler story themes? That's really not something all that spoilery, isn't it?)

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26 minutes ago, Toth said:

I'm really glad that you liked it! In regards to your issues...

:commie: Thanks for your recommendations!

26 minutes ago, Toth said:
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I really don't think that we are supposed to take Takano succumbing to the syndrome as an excuse for her actions. She only developed symptoms over the course of the last arc after all. The best indicator should be when she and Tomitake broke into the shrine storehouse in Eyes Opening: When Takano went gushing about Oyashiro being an evil god, both Shion and Tomitake were hearing Hanyuu jumping around in frustration. Shion because she went nuts in this arc, Tomitake because Takano switched his medication as stated in the Massacre arc.

 

 

 

 

For some reason I didn't remember this.

 

Quote
Spoiler

 

Keiichi and Takano however were oblivious to Hanyuu's presence, making it clear that at this point, neither of them were in danger of getting mad. Therefore this is something that happened to Takano only after the kids were starting to tear down her plans. She was totally clear in the head when she murdered Rika's parents or forced Irie to vivisect that construction worker...

She is twisted, misguided and ruthless. That's on her, not on the syndrome, that much is clear. What the ending however did enforce is the idea that this shouldn't be a reason to root for her death, especially if she'd only die to take the fall for someone who is just as evil as she is. Yes, we were supposed to pity her at the end, but I don't think were supposed to forgive her for her crimes. Mortals cannot do that after all... only Hanyuu can, like she herself said n the same episode. Well... before Takano pulled a gun on her.

 

 

To the bolded, yes this is my take as well.

Quote

And don't forget the power of friendship! It might sound cheesy, but Higurashi is one of the few stories where such a theme doesn't seem superficially tacked on, but is actually a core strength of the narrative.

(Also why spoiler story themes? That's really not something all that spoilery, isn't it?)

Well, that's implicit! Of course it is. And constant and consistent during all the series (if we forget the horror arcs maybe.....) oh but even then.

I spoiler-tag everything just in case! :P And the more spoilerish things are in spoiler tags that are inside other spoiler tags, xd.

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  • 2 weeks later...

And I had completely forgotten how amazing Conan movies can be.......how much fun I had watching that....I loved it so much. No...more than that. It's just WOW.

And I started Death Note, two epis and it really caught my attention, the premise is promising. 

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 4 weeks later...

I watched "a silent voice" yesterday and what a great movie. It's rare I'm left thinking about a film overnight but this one sunk its class in. They somehow make the concept of "bully on a redemptive arc falling in love with his victim" work when chances are it should have gone horribly wrong. I guess it helps the kid was quite young as the bully and probably didn't realise at the time just how horrible he was. This film really drew me in though and I was massively invested in the two leads to the point where I was really rooting for them and

the scene where he finds her trying to kill herself had me shouting at the screen for the worst not to happen and when he fell I was in tears thinking "this is one of the most tragic/traumatic films I've seen". Thankfully it didn't end there.

. I appreciated the relatively open end but I'm fairly confident in my interpretation of what happened next.

The animation and music were excellent too and the visual trick of having the people he couldn't make eye contact with or connect with have blue crosses over their faces worked really well. I think the crowd often had his voice at the start when they were talking suggesting it was his internal voice interpreting their speach which is also a cool device.

Anyway an excellent film and one that doesn't rely on any SFF elements. I think I'll start using it to convince non anime fans to give the medium a try.

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oh this thread alive again!

on my side I do not have lots of news. I have spent around two weeks without watching Conan bc I priorised finoshing an HBO series but I will return soon to my watching.

i also watched more of Death Note and it is still excellent. The way the characters express their thoughts with their inner voices and the mind battles.....superb. Some really really interesting twists.

however I am now officially at the fourth arch of the story (last ten epis aprox) and something changed. It took me one day to digest this breaking of dynamics (well actually it's not the first one in the story that I have had to digest with one day without watching...) but appreciated the time jump as well. The story continues with the same goal settled initially so for me it's fine. Looks like the Shinigami who have been appearing sporadically will....do something. Oh...the King...

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1 hour ago, red snow said:

I watched "a silent voice" yesterday and what a great movie. It's rare I'm left thinking about a film overnight but this one sunk its class in. They somehow make the concept of "bully on a redemptive arc falling in love with his victim" work when chances are it should have gone horribly wrong.

I truly adore this movie. A powerful reflection on guilt, depression and making amends.

Spoiler

I really appreciated that the potential relationship between Shoyo and Shoka was not delved into too much and left to our imagination of what might have happened after the film. Guilt and a feeling of unworthiness is supposed to be the main drive for our main characters, not love.

During the balcony scene I was stretching my hand outwards crying "Take my strength!" a la Dragonball :P

I've recently enjoyed Made in Abyss as well as seasons 3 of Attack on Titan and My Hero Academia. I'm currently watching Megalobox which is pretty 'by the numbers' but engaging and beautifully animated.

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On 8/26/2018 at 12:28 PM, Toth said:

Well, Steins;Gate 0 continued a bit more over the course of the last few weeks. And... I'm not exactly sure I like the direction it is taking.

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They try to return back to their roots now. Literally. When I think about the fact that Okabe is currently jumping back in time again and again to save Mayuri, I'm thinking that they are really just copying the story of the original Steins;Gate series as it is. Essentially only the shorter time-frame and Kirisu being dead already are the only things that changed.

Well, that and the copious amount of unrequited crushes on Okabe. I had a conversation with Rippounet here before where I defended the original Steins;Gate that it was not a typical harem story because OkabexKirisu was the core of it. Even in the VN as far as I had managed to read it there are little signs that the the other characters are possible love interests, especially with Mayuri being his closest platonic friend.

Eh... so much for that. I could live with the copious amounts of OkabexMaho shipping, which could have been used as a way to get over Kirisu's death. But now that Mayuri has confessed that she loves him and this is the part that gets all the attention... I feel really bad about their friendship now taking a romantic turn. This is really not the image of their relationship that I had after Steins;Gate and it pisses me off...

 

I just noticed that I haven't wrote any more musings after the series finished some time ago. Shame on me.

So... basically my final verdict on Steins;Gate 0:

Spoiler

I guess I have to apologize to Rippounet when it comes to Steins;Gates harem elements. I'm still fairly certain that I couldn't have possibly missed them in the first series if there were just as prominent, but since Steins;Gate 0 apparently wanted to merge all routes together, it became quite annoying that there was so much ship-teasing of Okabe with a large chunk of the female cast (even if thankfully not all of them).

Still... I really can't say that it kept being interesting till the end. The first sudden timeline change that threw Okabe into a world where Mayuri died and Kirisu lived, that was certainly very interesting. But I felt like from then on the show lost a lot of momentum even though it already had prepared all the motivations it needed in order to go all out. Instead whenever Okabe threatened to pick up pace, they threw Okabe out of the loop again. This whole move into the bad future felt utterly unnecessary (and Okabe going back frog-leaping makes no sense given that it's established that so many jumps drive you insane). Then of course is the ridiculousness of the ending. How come Suzuha and Mayuri have to get stranded at this trippy end of time place to prevent a paradox when this was never an issue for Suzuha in the main timeline where the events prevented her from ever go back in time? And then of course Okabe's convoluted plan to fake his own death and go search for them for this doubly trippy happy end Evangelion style... and then of course the revelation that the Okabe we have watched during Steins;Gate 0 actually WASN'T the guy developing the plan to save Kurisu, but yet another alternate self that was shoved into the story just for this story, with the one we actually thought being the one in question only appearing in the last episode.

I'm not someone who usually complains about drastic twists, but these while not necessarily too convoluted, still felt very pointless. The whole things just felt like filler, answering questions that I really didn't need to have answered, instead of focusing on the proper efforts to get the timeline back on track or give a satisfactory ending to this plethora of new characters introduces. Heck, I think only Amadeus had a somewhat heart-felt goodbye.

Case in point: Why the hell was it thrown in that one of Mayuri's cosplay friends also had the Reading Steiner ability like Okabe? It never went anywhere, so why the hell throw it in? That's basically what all my gripes boil down to. This story devolved into a hot mess of tangents that were dropped immediately after bringing them up, with only a small number making any difference and even then they weren't the most interesting ones anyway.

I don't know if that is the problem of the VN or rather the awkward way in which they tried to merge routes. And I know that if this is the case, my complaints appear rather hypocritical since I keep advocating that Fate/Stay Night adaptations should have gone to such an approach of merging routes. But of course all I demand is merging in order to increase the pay-off of the story... and I'm not sure this is what happened here.

Despite all this ranting, it probably still is a fairly decent show. But nowhere near the masterpiece that I thought its predecessor to be.

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I forgot to mention something about Death Note. It would be quite interwsting to keep in mind the different rules about the Death Note that keep appearing in the middle of thr episodes as a way of cutting it into two parts. They always remind us of an easy rule but then of another not as trivial. Not even all the main Shinigamis know them...

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1 hour ago, Mentat said:

I truly adore this movie. A powerful reflection on guilt, depression and making amends.

  Reveal hidden contents

I really appreciated that the potential relationship between Shoyo and Shoka was not delved into too much and left to our imagination of what might have happened after the film. Guilt and a feeling of unworthiness is supposed to be the main drive for our main characters, not love.

During the balcony scene I was stretching my hand outwards crying "Take my strength!" a la Dragonball :P

I've recently enjoyed Made in Abyss as well as seasons 3 of Attack on Titan and My Hero Academia. I'm currently watching Megalobox which is pretty 'by the numbers' but engaging and beautifully animated.

I agree, it's such an interesting topic and handled incredibly well besides the somewhat blasé attitude towards suicide but that's the only cultural divide in the story - the rest is very universal.

I agree that these young adults were finally creating a platform for themselves where they could make well-informed relationships. The two had a lot of potential though. The deaf girl was almost too nice but they got away with the trope of school crush and it was interesting how the boy's guilt and self-hatred was far more prevalent than her hatred of him (I know I'd be insanely pissed irrespective of a crush) although there were a lot of things she mistook as kindness (the chalk board incident) and I think there was a part of her that recognised his loneliness and inability to communicate/connect unless it was through being a prankster/bully. I'm also left wondering if it was intentional that the rest of the group (excluding the deaf girl's sister) didn't come across as real friends and that any real friendship between them had to occur after the film? I think a subplot of the film was that they were all having somewhat shallow interactions before the end of the film.

And as for that balcony scene - I'd have never been able to watch the film again. They manipulated me masterfully, not wanting her to die and then thinking they were insanely cruel to twist it into him dying.

As it is this film will be one I will look forward to watching again - I'm tempted to get the Blu-ray if it has extras. This and "red turtle" has reminded me I need to watch more animated films as when they get it right there's something about them that transcends live-action. It's inspired me to move "Your name" and "the boy and beast" up my to watch list.

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2 hours ago, Meera of Tarth said:

oh this thread alive again!

on my side I do not have lots of news. I have spent around two weeks without watching Conan bc I priorised finoshing an HBO series but I will return soon to my watching.

i also watched more of Death Note and it is still excellent. The way the characters express their thoughts with their inner voices and the mind battles.....superb. Some really really interesting twists.

however I am now officially at the fourth arch of the story (last ten epis aprox) and something changed. It took me one day to digest this breaking of dynamics (well actually it's not the first one in the story that I have had to digest with one day without watching...) but appreciated the time jump as well. The story continues with the same goal settled initially so for me it's fine. Looks like the Chinigami who have been appearing sporadically will....do something. Oh...the King...

I think I know which part you mean (but I won't say for fear of a massive spoiler) but the show loses a bit of a shine after such an upheaval in the show's dynamics. It also suffers a bit from "breaking Bad " syndrome in the sense that Light to me becomes utterly irredeemable - he was evil throughout but his wits and intelligence made him admirable still. But I couldn't let what he does prior to the final arc slide and wanted to see him fail which is always harder to get behind.

Series wise I'm preparing to do an attack on titan season 3 binge. I enjoyed season 1 more that way than the intermittent weekly viewing of season 2.

I also finally have a replacement laptop so will insist on watching the final dozen episodes of Naruto as my "before work" viewing next week.

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32 minutes ago, red snow said:

I think I know which part you mean (but I won't say for fear of a massive spoiler) but the show loses a bit of a shine after such an upheaval in the show's dynamics. It also suffers a bit from "breaking Bad " syndrome in the sense that Light to me becomes utterly irredeemable - he was evil throughout but his wits and intelligence made him admirable still. But I couldn't let what he does prior to the final arc slide and wanted to see him fail which is always harder to get behind.

Series wise I'm preparing to do an attack on titan season 3 binge. I enjoyed season 1 more that way than the intermittent weekly viewing of season 2.

I also finally have a replacement laptop so will insist on watching the final dozen episodes of Naruto as my "before work" viewing next week.

yes, exactly. I''s all about the dynamics. However I also like expansion of universes if they have been hinted before, (and time jumps...also kinda hinted) and thus, I can't really complain.

mmmm....what are you exactly referring to when saying what Light did before the last arch? (we can usd spoiler tags here).

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2 hours ago, Meera of Tarth said:

yes, exactly. I''s all about the dynamics. However I also like expansion of universes if they have been hinted before, (and time jumps...also kinda hinted) and thus, I can't really complain.

mmmm....what are you exactly referring to when saying what Light did before the last arch? (we can usd spoiler tags here).

Hve you watched episode 26? if so

I found L to be a fundamental part of the show and once Light had killed him I felt the tension from their rivalry was never recaptured.

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Does castlevania count as anime? Noticed the second "season" has dropped. I'm dubious of season as there was only 4 episodes last time. Thankfully there are 8 this time around so hopefully more to go off.

The first episode was decent with some funny moments particularly the put down of the Viking vampire.

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5 hours ago, red snow said:

Hve you watched episode 26? if so

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I found L to be a fundamental part of the show and once Light had killed him I felt the tension from their rivalry was never recaptured.

 

Oh, I absolutely agree with what you say, but there is something wrong in your statement

Spoiler

masive spoiler

Spoiler

Light didn't kill L, it was Rem.

 

And I particularly loved the third arch of the series, it left me speechless. 

 

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40 minutes ago, Meera of Tarth said:

Oh, I absolutely agree with what you say, but there is something wrong in your statement

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masive spoiler

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Light didn't kill L, it was Rem.

 

And I particularly loved the third arch of the series, it left me speechless. 

 

Ha, very true but it was all part of light's plan :)

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49 minutes ago, red snow said:

Ha, very true but it was all part of light's plan :)

Yeah, and about both things. Oh my, I hope the ending is worth it, the heart of the series was awesome, you could not stop watching, XD

Now, well, I guess I'll end it soon.

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12 hours ago, Toth said:

I just noticed that I haven't wrote any more musings after the series finished some time ago. Shame on me.

So... basically my final verdict on Steins;Gate 0:

  Reveal hidden contents

I guess I have to apologize to Rippounet when it comes to Steins;Gates harem elements. I'm still fairly certain that I couldn't have possibly missed them in the first series if there were just as prominent, but since Steins;Gate 0 apparently wanted to merge all routes together, it became quite annoying that there was so much ship-teasing of Okabe with a large chunk of the female cast (even if thankfully not all of them).

Still... I really can't say that it kept being interesting till the end. The first sudden timeline change that threw Okabe into a world where Mayuri died and Kirisu lived, that was certainly very interesting. But I felt like from then on the show lost a lot of momentum even though it already had prepared all the motivations it needed in order to go all out. Instead whenever Okabe threatened to pick up pace, they threw Okabe out of the loop again. This whole move into the bad future felt utterly unnecessary (and Okabe going back frog-leaping makes no sense given that it's established that so many jumps drive you insane). Then of course is the ridiculousness of the ending. How come Suzuha and Mayuri have to get stranded at this trippy end of time place to prevent a paradox when this was never an issue for Suzuha in the main timeline where the events prevented her from ever go back in time? And then of course Okabe's convoluted plan to fake his own death and go search for them for this doubly trippy happy end Evangelion style... and then of course the revelation that the Okabe we have watched during Steins;Gate 0 actually WASN'T the guy developing the plan to save Kurisu, but yet another alternate self that was shoved into the story just for this story, with the one we actually thought being the one in question only appearing in the last episode.

I'm not someone who usually complains about drastic twists, but these while not necessarily too convoluted, still felt very pointless. The whole things just felt like filler, answering questions that I really didn't need to have answered, instead of focusing on the proper efforts to get the timeline back on track or give a satisfactory ending to this plethora of new characters introduces. Heck, I think only Amadeus had a somewhat heart-felt goodbye.

Case in point: Why the hell was it thrown in that one of Mayuri's cosplay friends also had the Reading Steiner ability like Okabe? It never went anywhere, so why the hell throw it in? That's basically what all my gripes boil down to. This story devolved into a hot mess of tangents that were dropped immediately after bringing them up, with only a small number making any difference and even then they weren't the most interesting ones anyway.

I don't know if that is the problem of the VN or rather the awkward way in which they tried to merge routes. And I know that if this is the case, my complaints appear rather hypocritical since I keep advocating that Fate/Stay Night adaptations should have gone to such an approach of merging routes. But of course all I demand is merging in order to increase the pay-off of the story... and I'm not sure this is what happened here.

Despite all this ranting, it probably still is a fairly decent show. But nowhere near the masterpiece that I thought its predecessor to be.

I somehow had forgotten about it! Good reminder, still on my list!

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