The Anime TV Thread

As observed the state of gay love affairs in anime is far from ideal, but there IS a lot of realistic down to earth programming.

So anyway here are some of those others: First, a few years ago there was a series called Wandering Son about middle schoolers exploring their gender identity that was incredibly sweet.

There have been many, many romance anime, like My Love Story!! from a few years back, an adorable series about a big lunk of a guy finding an improbable relationship with a girl. Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun remains one of the most purely enjoyable of these sorts of series to me, but it is about a girl falling in love with a boy who secretly writes girl’s comics, so it may or may not be too into nerd territory there.

I really enjoyed Scum’s Wish last year, although that’s entirely about teenagers having incredibly toxic relationships so the emotions you’ll get out of that are very different. See also Flowers of Evil for a similar ride.

Finally and almost obligatorily, Monster. Monster was almost made into a HBO series, and it’s the rare anime that in live action form would make perfect sense in a HBO lineup. A series about a Japanese doctor on the run in Central Europe, and give it about four episodes to see if it grows on you.

Thinking about the End of Evangelion for no reason.


Anyway, in addition to two anime shows this season, Netflix also has an anime Godzilla movie premiering on the 17th, which looks very much like it'll appeal to anyone who enjoyed Knights of Sidonia and/or BLAME! (and is produced by talent from, and also Gen Urobochi wrote it because why not):


There will be a trilogy of these films, the first anime films about Godzilla, though not the first anime about Godzilla. That would be, ah:



Anyway kind of a slow season for me, though, outside Devilman Crybaby's well deserved domination of social media and this thread, A Place Further Than The Universe is very, very sweet and Kokkoku: Moment by Moment is interesting, having a family struggling to get by, featuring a thirty-one year old employed son who sits around playing videogames and looking unshaven who I definitely did not feel attacked by. Nice OP, too.

Devilman Crybaby the whole thing: I honestly did not expect this to be one of the most beautiful and heart-wrenching pieces of art, but here we are.

Considering this was a pretty faithful adaptation of a near 50 year old manga, pretty much a lot of things actually aped the original story.

Even Netflix Canada gets it streamed weekly, just not the US for whatever reason. Netflix doth bust my balls.

Yeah, I saw it earlier today in my Netflix recommendations but left it for later and instead watched another episode of Star Trek: Enterprise.

Anyway, I sometimes wonder what real-world social conditions these "female weapons being depressed" anime are metaphors for. They're not meant to reflect the struggles of real military veterans, as Japan isn't the US and their veterans are either all dead or three-quarters there. Their target audience is clearly men, so they're not feminist takes on the everyday struggle of femininity. I think the biggest sign to what these anime are about is the fact that the female weapon characters are all teenage girls or coded as such, along with the inevitable male point-of-view protagonist. There's of course the undeniable element of sexual fantasy combined with nostalgia these shows traffic in - wouldn't it be great to be a teenager again, but this time around all the girls like you? - but odd specificity of the female weapons bit and the air of depression hanging over everything makes me think that there's something more than mere gratification going on here.

I'm thinking specifically of another work in this genre, What Do You Do at the End of the World?, and of the plaintive longing and wistful desire for a better world that suffuses the show. The longing isn't for a golden time in the past, but rather for something that doesn't exist, which is to say that the show is about a wish for a fairer world where people aren't tools but also about the recognition that even this small wish - they're not asking for a utopia - is on the face of it an impossible thing to have.

Which I think takes us to what this sub-genre of anime is about. It's for men who feel they've been used up and spit out by an unfeeling world and about their inchoate desire for a time when the world didn't seem so cruel (but it always was, they just couldn't see it as well at the time). And while the point of view characters are usually men (or rather, teenage boys), the characters who are actually doing things and feeling emotions are girls. Here it gets kind of speculative on my part, as this part involves psychological analysis at thirdhand, but my take on it is that depression, anxiety, and mental and emotional issues have a stigma to them in Japan and it's easier to think about these things when it's happening to characters unlike oneself, similar to how heterosexual teenage girls are drawn to stories of homosexual love (gay fanfics and yaoi comics and manga) as ways of thinking about sexuality without imagining it happening to oneself.

It just goes to show how much the audience of anime has shrunk into just the core group of hyper-fans when the incredibly specific psychological hang-ups of a few people have entire categories devoted to them in the DVD aisle.

As far as the non-Devilman options this season are concerned I've been pleasantly surprised by A Place Further Than The Universe, the first two episodes of which have been really quite delightful. I've been very impressed by its ability to so well establish the quirks and personalities of its very endearing central cast in so short a time and there’s a real energy and flair to the direction and visuals. For all the sometimes understandable ire that the pure quantity of ‘High School Girls Doing X Thing’ shows can draw, when the end results are so often worthwhile on their own merits and go beyond the outwardly generic outline of the subgenre, it’s really awfully hard to complain.

Grancrest War will be made or break based on the strength of its longer arcs, as the first two episodes had some nice visual flourishes but were definitely heavy on clunky exposition and felt like they were rushing through a bunch of stuff to get the characters situated where they need be for purposes of getting its its primary storyline underway, which itself looks like some classic "gathering a party of heroes and going on a great quest" stuff. It’s not great right now, but let’s be real I'm a sucker for traditional fantasy anime of this type and I'm going to keep watching regardless.

Citrus is stupid, melodramatic trash but it’s also well-executed stupid, melodramatic trash and that certainly counts for something. Your mileage on enjoying this will vary enormously based on your ability to tolerate the absurdly heightened situations, coincidences and emotions on which the plot movement of this thing depend, and of the show’s substantial truckload of what can fairly be described as ‘problematic’ issues, but I can’t say I’m not having fun.

Pop Team Epic is aight, I believe amusing is the most accurate descriptor for it. I do wonder if it will commit to the whole ‘play the whole episode twice with different voice work’ thing for its entire run, I’m betting yes.

Darling in the FranXX had a very confident opener that I enjoyed quite a bit. The various elements of the story; the mecha meets adolescent angst and burgeoning sexual neuroses angle, a society on the brink of destruction standing against mysterious outside forces and our protagonist being drawn to an outsider girl with both immense power and significant emotional hangups, are all components that have all been done in all sorts of configurations many times before, but if nothing else Trigger seems to know how to cobble all these myriad pieces into a engaging whole. It’s hard to say whether it will just be a fun, polished but largely familiar ride or yet do something more distinctive, but it was a finely tuned premier nevertheless.

There’s a few other new seasonal shows I’d like to watch but they are all on Amazon and thus beyond my lack of monied grasp or are Violet Evergarden.

Ehhh, personally im hoping MHA takes anime of the year. The 2nd season(at least the first half) was fucking great. I am surprised AoT season 2 didn't get nominated for anything.

The rakugo anime was charming; it was one of the more memorable shows of the seasons it was in, but truthfully in the best anime category given those choices I'd vote for Little Witch Academia and in the best drama I'd vote for Scum's Wish.

Attack on Titan's second season was just kinda... there. It didn't have any of the 'oh shit!' moments of the first season (like when Your One got eaten) and it never had like a particularly interesting climax. It had a great, great initial hook for its premise but after season two I don't know what the long term potential is.

I'm not wild about the film nominations (three franchise films! I saw the Monogatari one, it's fine, but it would be complete nonsense seen independently and not as the third film in a sequence) but Your Name has to be a lock to win there, and Your Name was great, so I can live with that.

I wonder if Lu Over The Wall was eligible; I mean I saw it in an Irish theatres last year and it also had a similarly limited UK run but I don't know if it's in the States? Your Name was a 2017 film over there which is why it's in the running I assume, as it was 2016 here and in Japan. If it is eligible it definitely feels like an oversight, but alas, such is the way of things.

Comedy may be the hardest one for me, I admire what Osomatsusan does a lot, but Gamers was such a good romantic comedy. Close is villains; Tanya Dagurechaff was a lot of fun in Saga of Tanya the Evil, but Rabbit in Juni Taisen: Zodiac War was better as a villain, which Tanya really isn't.

And boy the nominators definitely liked March Comes In Like A Lion a lot more than I did, I struggled to have a strong opinion on that show.

The Space Dandy episode with all the different alternate dimension Space Dandy's is the best episode of any anime.

I've given Violet Evergarden the traditional 3 episodes to prove itself. Throughout the entire first episode I marvelled at the lush visuals but wondered if the story they were illustrating was equally worthwhile. Then I got to the end and thought that maybe there was something there. I've watched two more episodes and have specifically been going out of my way to watch it, so I think we can say that the show is worth it. It's genuinely emotionally affecting. Admittedly, when you're examining it plot-wise then not a lot happens. However, that's not really the point. I had been afraid the whole "unfeeling weapon learns to be human" thing would just be nothing but cliches and trite moral-of-the-week pronouncements but no, it actually has an emotional core. I will continue watching but now I'll stop telling myself it's just to give the show a fair shake - I'm actually just watching because I want to watch the next episode.

Douay-Rheims-Challoner Is Grancrest War the one that adapts a DnD(-ish) campaign? Because there are science fiction/fantasy magazines that specifically tell writers they automatically reject stories based on an RPG campaign because of how shit they usually are.

I don't know if it's a direct adaptation.

I do know that it was originally a tabletop game, and that 'replay' books have been published (which are literally campaigns fictionalised) and Ryo Mizuno did previously turn an actual campaign into a popular book series (Record of Lodoss War), but whether this is that, no idea.

But if it isn't, it certainly could be.

I've seen a lot of people online critique the Pop Team Epic anime for being "lol so random", but I'd say there's a world of difference between general absurdist humor, and I dunno, some wacky screaming youtuber.