Any anime fans?

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"Best Friends" would have sounded better if they really wanted to hide the fact that they were lesbian lovers. Saying that they were "cousins", it's like they were implying incest especially when the two women still flirted with each other in the English translation of the show.

I hadn't watched much anime in a while, because I have a terrible attention span, but out of nowhere I spent a few days watching Stein's;Gate and the first season of Aldnoah.Zero. I'm learning Japanese so I guess part of me wanted to reinforce that by hearing more spoken Japanese? Anyway, I'm going to dump my thoughts here because I need to.




I'm going to be vague here and mostly not explain plot details, but I would advise avoiding the below if you are concerned about
spoilers




Stein's Gate (I'm not going to stylize it properly again, sorry) was strange. I felt disappointed? I'm not sure how but this series based off of a fairly lengthy visual novel felt like it would have been better suited as a two hour movie. There were a few episodes in the middle that were amazing and I really liked Okabe. Hearing tuturu~ made me smile every time too. As for the bad, anybody who has watched this show knows that the pacing isn't great, so I'll skip out on that.

The biggest problem I had is that it's a deeply stupid show that thinks it's smart. It alludes to science in an offhand manner on occasion to disguise the fact that so much of the time travel doesn't make sense. You can't reference the butterfly effect as a reason to affect something completely distant to the thing that was altered, if you then make it the ONLY thing that changes. You especially can't do that if, for example, changing someone's gender doesn't actually affect that person in ANY way (beyond the obvious physical differences). There's actually a lot that I can suspend my disbelief for and even a lot that I love about how the show handles time travel but the inconsistencies and nonsense (THE ENTIRE CERN PLOT STRAIGHT UP DOESN'T MAKE SENSE) made it difficult to even pay attention at times. The mandatory VN romance hurt the show. The betrayal was badass and showed that not every young woman inexplicably throwing attention at Okabe is necessarily doing so without an ulterior motive; except, as it turns out, she is exactly what she appeared in the first place: a neurotic damaged girl for Okabe to grope at. Epic.

I could go on especially about the last few episodes but I don't want to seem like I hate the show. Maybe it's a love/hate thing. I did cry a couple of times and I can't remember the last time I did that. I wonder if I should play the VN?

Aldnoah, on the other hand, I have very little to say about. It was a fun watch but also felt a little bit like being dead. The first four or five episodes were especially good but it lost steam, very little happened in the second half except for the villain of the piece explaining his motives. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think he was angry about hating Terrans, about being made to hate Terrans by the Martian state or material conditions on Mars or w/e, and as a result he wanted to kill all the Terrans to end the hate for the Terrans and also his own hate for hating the Terrans? I might be a little fuzzy here. I don't want to think that's it. I feel like I'm losing my damn mind. Afterwards I watched the first ep of the second season and I can't believe the audacity of what they did! I don't think I'll watch any more.

I played the Steins;Gate VN and will say that though I think it's better than the anime, it suffers from the same issues you identified. Some plot arcs are silly and require a lot suspension of disbelief. The setting of one guy surrounded by lots of other attractive women who have no reason to hang around him and his one unattractive male friend for him to be compared favorably against is a cliche VN trope that has no reason to be in the story. Despite the flaws though, I still enjoyed it a lot and consider it one of my favorite VNs/shows.

This makes me want to pull out some of my favourite Engrish parts in anime.







I can have some sympathy with Aldnoah Zero, I do think that it had some good things, like interesting that its hero seemed to have autism, but it just fell apart. It got bad towards the end of the first season, and then the second felt like punishment with how it was all handled, kind of reminding some of my thoughts with Code Geass.

If you sort of found yourself drawn to that sort of anime, but felt sort of disappointed in the end, maybe I could recommend Re:CREATORS, the general idea is of various fictional characters from different franchises, coming into real life. I think that it manages to have that sort of darkness, without feeling like it is sinking in it, in my opinion not failing in the end, and self contains its crazy bits by mostly addressing them as parts of different genre.

I never sat down and watched Mermaid Melody and it's an obvious Sailor Moon rip-off.



But I gotta admit that a couple of the villain's songs give me an eargasm.

Lanhua


The Black Beauty Sisters

annime

[quote="Bradleigh"][/quote]

The bits in Stein's;Gate where they'd have a native English-speaking character voiced by a Japanese person going MI SHUPIK INGURISH or w/e was cool and I hope they never stop doing that in anime.


Aldnoah's first couple episodes were great for exactly that reason and because they framed it in such a way that the viewer is an active participant. When you see the big mech with the force field that destroys everything it touches stopping at a tunnel entrance you question why it would do that. When they explained it I was wondering how it would receive a camera signal, then separately I wondered how it could walk in the first place. So when the protagonist figures it out and beats it, it felt like I'd solved it, in a sense. The problem is that his initially believable savvy turns into technobabble and then, in the second season, into a literal super power. You don't get to follow along with that. But it doesn't even matter that much because they mostly forget about that whole idea after the first five or so episodes and it devolves into really bad melodrama.

I watched the second season of Aldnoah so I have some more words.



Spoilers. I don't know if I should really bother even indicating that for this bad show that anyone already interested has probably watched, but oh well



In the second season, Earth is fighting in space and apparently putting up a good fight, and this is never explained! These clunky Earth mechs are suddenly fighting space battles. At the end of the first season it was heavily implied that all of Earth's cities were destroyed and the survivors were holed up in the military base at the united Earth HQ (which was stormed at the end) and probably in other shelters elsewhere. The finale felt like a Pyrrhic victory where basically everybody gets owned and Earth is obviously done but they TECHNICALLY won in their objective of deactivating the castle. How this leads into the second season isn't explained, but everyone who was either near-dead or perforated like swiss cheese or literally shot through the head survives and, in fact, the protagonist gets an eye implant that ties in with his brain and provides it extra processing abilities despite the fact that no such technology is ever shown elsewhere. As a result, pretty much every fight but the very first one (which is insanely stupid, btw) is beaten by the guy saying that he's tracking the enemy with his eye, and then shooting the enemy according to that. You know, maybe he beat enemies in other ways, but I stopped paying attention after the first six episodes of this season and that's all that I saw. I am so sorry.

Going back a bit, I thought that the way the villains were piloting ancient Martian tech but really stupidly was both cool and thematically appropriate, because it highlights how the feudalistic system places people in power arbitrarily and shields those people from any real challenge, so they go down in these psycho mechs and enact a power fantasy. The main villains both have a motivation of wanting to end the feudal system, so they were clearly thinking about these themes. I'm not sure what happened but at some point in the first season the characters stated motivations completely detach from any sort of rationality. There's no reason for either main villain to want war with Earth except for some nebulous references to material conditions on Mars being quite poor because the food isn't as good? I felt like the show desperately wanted to depict actual society on Mars and in fact if they're trying to portray the war as a futile power struggle between warring states then it's your duty to show us both sides! They had 24 episodes! Nothing happened in at least half of those episodes!

Don't get me started on the forced rivalry. It doesn't warrant mention.

After a full season's worth of non-events the show farted out with a battle against the rival that brought together none of the themes or motivations or ideologies that the characters ostensibly embody - that either didn't make sense or stopped existing in the writers' minds some time ago anyway - and Earth won. The princess, who I almost forgot about because she's such a pivotal character, presumably gets to continue the feudal system on Mars (albeit with Aldnoah activation rights granted to everyone, which is exactly the same thing as a working democracy I guess) as the benevolent pacifistic royal archetype that exists in all Japanese media because of their perverse idealisation of monarchy (I'm British though so I can't really make fun of them for this one). Some stuff happened in the end credits but I think they were just sending off the various characters - girl, guy, doctor, angry girl, alcoholic ptsd soldier whose character arc I think they just forgot about, etc - so I turned it off.

I didn't intend to type this much but I feel like the enjoyment of typing this stream of consciousness drivel is the best way to recoup my lost time watching this show. Anyway, I give the show a 7/10 in MyAnimeList Rating Units -- the lowest score ever recorded.

e: just remembered that episode 18 had a good battle. Season two had one good battle. Knock that up to 7.1 MALRU

Maybe I'll watch Re:CREATORS but I'm getting sick of Japan's use of colons and semicolons. Maybe after I watch Devilman Crybaby and whatever else worth watching that I can sift out of the Netflix anime landfill. There's an anime on there that's just called "Forest of Piano" and I start hyperventilating every time it scrolls past lmao

I wonder if I would like this show? Don't know what it's about but I like this song.

k-ON had a negative reputation at first, from people thinking it was just using moe as a crutch, like people thought it was ruining anime. But later opinions of anime have been very positive. As people realized that the director had not merely adapted source material, but improved on it, and did itself well, a generally fun show. You probably could guess what it is about more from the OP, as being about a high school light music club.



The show also has its fair share of good music, spread over its two seasons, and movie.

Yeah I figured it was about a high school girl band. The music sounds really cool maybe I'll check it out one day.

I just hope it doesn't have any weird pedophile characters hanging around the high school girls like the male teacher in Azumanga Daioh. That kind of crap is one of the reasons why I don't like most Japanese animation.

Another villain song I liked from Mermaid Melody.

I just recently started watching anime. I still prefer non-anime but it's good. I have a close friend also on the autism spectrum who is obsessed with anime and I have met a few other people who watch anime as well so since I keep meeting people who watch it I decided to give it a go after having been totally against it before.

I still don't like most anime but some isn't so bad.

To be fair, there is no form of popular media on Earth that isn't mostly detritus for people who just want familiar tropes repeated at them ad infinitum as a comforting escape from the late-capitalist hellscape dystopia that exists out the window

Ahem.

I watched the first couple eps of Devilman Crybaby and it's bad ass. The gratuitous sex and violence reminds me of 90s anime in a good way. The scenes with Akira in school post-transformation cracked me up.

Sturgeon's Law

How can something this cute be evil?