Let's talk anime.

I'm really enjoying Deca-dence (watching it subbed on Hulu) so far. The promo image and a brief blurb made me give it a shot:

IMAGE(https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZjkyNTE4Y2MtODBjYi00M2QzLWIyODEtZWVjMDBhNGYxYjRiXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMzMyNjUwMzY@._V1_.jpg)

After nearly being driven to extinction, survivors band together to build a mobile fortress and mount their resistance against the Gadoll.

Due to the series structure, though, I'd strongly recommend that anyone curious about it not read anything about the plot before watching the first two episodes, or at least past the opening credits of the second episode.

I'm also enjoying that one.

I'll have to give it a try. That art looks pretty nifty.

I read some fantastic reviews for Deca-dence over at Anime News Network. I want to watch it, but it's on Funimation. I really don't want to subscribe to another service. And Hulu isn't available in Canada, so that option is out.

Deca-dence is definitely a standout this season, and we can't talk about it much because the twists and turns of the story are a great feature of the show. I am also watching Diary of Our Days at the Breakwater Club and it's, er, cute girls doing cute things. If you're into that, it's an entertaining show about fishing at a breakwater location. It's a Slice of Life show, so there's no great overarching plot or anything. The fish and the fishing gear appears to be pretty well depicted, though. I imagine someone more into fishing would get a kick out of that.

Here's my quick-and-dirty ranking of the shows I'm watching this season:

  1. DECA-DENCE - Probably the best series we've see this year and I'd say the best original series in the last couple years.
  2. Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- Season 2 - I really enjoy this series, for a number of reasons too long for this quick list.
  3. The Misfit of Demon King Academy - Just a really fun story that subverts many of the usual tropes.
  4. A Certain Scientific Railgun T - Just another franchise I'm glad to have more of. Always have enjoyed Railgun more than the main storyline.
  5. Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! - A fun little comedy that I look forward to every week.
  6. Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time - I like it, so sue me.
  7. Rent-a-Girlfriend - A bit of a warped love-comedy, its series of unfortunate coincidences keep me entertained.
  8. Fire Force Season 2 - Still an enjoyable series, although I feel like its getting a little bogged down by its larger story.
  9. Lapis Re:LiGHTs - Cute girls doing cute things and occasionally singing in a magic academy. Yeah, it's up my lane.
  10. Sword Art Online: Alicization - War of Underworld Part 2 - While this franchise is far past it's peak, I still love the characters, even if the story is ona downhill slide.
  11. UMAYON - Silly shorts with our Umamusume from a couple years ago.
  12. Muhyo & Roji’s Bureau of Supernatural Investigation Season 2 - Its nice to get a continuation.
  13. SUPER HXEROS - An ecchi superhero comedy that has some moments, but generally gets lost in excessive fanservice.
  14. Monster Girl Doctor - Honestly, I find this one a bit boring. Most weeks I'm wondering why I'm still watching.
Mantid wrote:

Here's my quick-and-dirty ranking of the shows I'm watching this season:

  1. DECA-DENCE - Probably the best series we've see this year and I'd say the best original series in the last couple years.
  2. Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- Season 2 - I really enjoy this series, for a number of reasons too long for this quick list.
  3. The Misfit of Demon King Academy - Just a really fun story that subverts many of the usual tropes.
  4. A Certain Scientific Railgun T - Just another franchise I'm glad to have more of. Always have enjoyed Railgun more than the main storyline.
  5. Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out! - A fun little comedy that I look forward to every week.
  6. Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time - I like it, so sue me.
  7. Rent-a-Girlfriend - A bit of a warped love-comedy, its series of unfortunate coincidences keep me entertained.
  8. Fire Force Season 2 - Still an enjoyable series, although I feel like its getting a little bogged down by its larger story.
  9. Lapis Re:LiGHTs - Cute girls doing cute things and occasionally singing in a magic academy. Yeah, it's up my lane.
  10. Sword Art Online: Alicization - War of Underworld Part 2 - While this franchise is far past it's peak, I still love the characters, even if the story is ona downhill slide.
  11. UMAYON - Silly shorts with our Umamusume from a couple years ago.
  12. Muhyo & Roji’s Bureau of Supernatural Investigation Season 2 - Its nice to get a continuation.
  13. SUPER HXEROS - An ecchi superhero comedy that has some moments, but generally gets lost in excessive fanservice.
  14. Monster Girl Doctor - Honestly, I find this one a bit boring. Most weeks I'm wondering why I'm still watching.

Only ones of these I'm watching are Deca-Dence (the plot twists are pretty nuts, I like it), Re Zero (not sure why I really like this series, it baffles me but I do), and Sword Art Online (best season since season 1 but that's more a reflection of how bad the other seasons were than how good this one is. Season 1 still far and away the best)

Railgun is always a treat. It feels a lot like Academy-level X-Men except with anime girls. And Magneto is a tomboyish high school girl, while Xavier is a popular clique-ish teenager with her own legion of hangers-on. The fight choreography and destruction fanservice here is truly amazing. I always appreciate the detail on explosions and various debris. It really sells the scale and power.

Spoiler:

I found their treatment of Shokuho Misaki interesting in Railgun (more interesting than in Index) because she's her own person in Railgun and her own actor. When Misaka meets her and asks her why she didn't want to approach Misaka for help, Shokuho replies that as one of the few people who can fend off her mental powers, she cannot possibly trust Misaka. She only works and lives with people into whose minds she can delve, because then she can understand their motivations and goals in life. Indeed, if you grew up and had this sense, it would come naturally to you to "look" at a person's motivations with your ability and you'd just naturally interact with everyone like this.

It's interesting to contrast this with Xavier who has notions of privacy similar to a normal person - as if he WERE a normal person and only just acquired his power and can turn them on or off. Misaki is fundamentally different from a normal human - her entire personality is built on the assumption that she can sense motivations and goals innately and that this is just how she interacts with people.

She also uses her power to change people's emotions and memories to suit herself, and while doing this with an alien power seems intrusive, her own outward personality does hint that she also does this with external appearances, words, and mannerisms, just like a normal person. So she is like this naturally (as indeed we all are), it's just that she doesn't wholly differentiate between making a good first impression by dressing well, and doing it just by using her powers. If you're naturally charismatic and empathetic, would you draw the line at dressing well, and simply ignore what you intuit about others? Of course not. Humans don't work like that.

Viewed from her perspective, Misaka is a cagey individual who refuses to "tell" her about her true personality and her true feelings. So naturally she can't trust her.

I watched Nagi-Asu: A Lull in the Sea on Netflix and enjoyed it, it's about a world where some humans live underwater and four underwater kids have to start going to a school on land after their underwater school closes.
Starts off as a fairly standard middle-school drama but it throws in some pretty major twists and turns as the story progresses.

I watched The Princess and the Pilot on Amazon Prime yesterday. I think it is an enjoyable movie.

Mantid wrote:

[*]Lapis Re:LiGHTs - Cute girls doing cute things and occasionally singing in a magic academy. Yeah, it's up my lane.

Little Love Witch Live...
I'll probably watch it.

I am so sorry. I have tried, on several occasions, to get into Magical Index and Railgun. It just isn't for me and I don't know why. All the ingredients tell me the cake should be delicious but it just doesn't go down well.

Grenn wrote:

I am so sorry. I have tried, on several occasions, to get into Magical Index and Railgun. It just isn't for me and I don't know why. All the ingredients tell me the cake should be delicious but it just doesn't go down well.

Railgun and Index are weird. Like, I can empathize. The last two times I tried Railgun T, it just didn't click and I know it's that kind of show, so when it's not clicking, I just don't watch it. This last time, it clicked and I binged the entire season up to the latest episode.

I find that what throws me off Railgun is that it's both a slice of life show and not a slice-of-life show and the way they weave it can be pretty off-putting. Feels a bit like Le Miserables (the novel) like that. So I have to be in a headspace where I don't mind watching people just living their lives in relatively mundane ways, but at the same time I'm watching for small incidents that could have larger consequences later on, as is usually what happens.

To those that always perceived Kill la Kill as just a fan-service show.

Found that while I was trying to research connections between Satsuki and Oda Nobunaga. Stuff goes even deeper than I could detect given how little knowledge I have of Eastern religion and stuff.

This is why I love Trigger. Their shows are always at a minimum entertaining, but usually got a lot of underlying themes running through them. They're not always that great (Darling in the Franxx, in hindsight, being quite the letdown), but there's always more going on than meets the eye.

Just finished the second episode of Deca-Dence. Two observations:

1) Avoid all further discussion before you see at least this much.
2) This is an interesting show.

I picked up Rent-a-Girlfriend again. For the uninitiated, it's a romanticized depiction of the rent-people business in Japan which I imagine doesn't make a lot of sense to us outsiders. I'm not Japanese, so I can't really claim first hand expertise or knowledge about anything; but the way I understand it is that it's not prostitution. It's prostitution-adjacent in the sense that it's close to Sugar Daddies in Japan, and that arrangement may or may not include physical relationships.

In the romanticized anime, the deuteragonist girl is working as a rented girlfriend, and you can rent her by the hour for dates, and she's signed up with a company providing some regularity and protection. She basically pretends to be your girlfriend for these dates, and you're paying for her company. This is, of course, understood to be a manufactured experience, so how she is when she's working isn't her true personality (and you're both supposed to know that).

The guy protagonist does find her very attractive and lusts after her in the usual fashion, but he's also kind of a low-life, unassertive jerk, which is why he needs a rental girlfriend in the first place (that part feels realistic). No, the girl does NOT ultimately doesn't fall for him and rom com does NOT ensue. She's philosophically committed to her work in a way, and part of that is being part therapist so she wants to leave him in a place where he can be healthy enough to pursue real relationships. She has other clients and is generally very professional.

It IS misery porn, so don't watch it if you're not into that. Kazuya gets what's coming to him a lot, and it gets a bit much. Lots of jerks in this show.

I actually tried Lapis: ReLighs. Haha. It's very much a moe show, but I found it interesting that the CG animation for the dance scenes had de-syncced dancers, which is a relatively new innovation. Dancers generally try to sync up their dances because that's what takes their dancing to the next level. But in CG animation, that just makes it look fake. The de-syncing improves the impression of the CG dancing.

That was interesting, because thoughtfully reintroducing specific imperfections in animation is also how Arcsys creates anime-like animation with a CG workflow.

Not anime, but live-action traditional Taiwanese puppet theater... except it's written and created by Gen Urobochi of Madoka Magica and Psycho-Pass fame. It certainly does have that Magica vibe. Up until the last episode, nothing is as it seems, but it all makes sense, and on rewatch you notice all the little clues that makes it all hand together. He's not "cheating." All the twists and turns have some kind of foreshadowing.

I did not know the second season was out and it's just fantastic as the first season!

OMG. Two of the anime I'm watching got interesting developments! Deca Dence is one, but yes, that's Deca Dence for you. Rent-a-Girlfriend is now apparently no longer cringe comedy but drama-comedy.

Spoiler:

Evidently, Kazuya finds that he genuinely likes Mizuhara now, but he doesn't want to pursue it because he knows she's not interested, and their current relationship means that crossing that line is a massive, massive no-no. He's imposed a lot on her too much already. But then he gets this other girl Ruka who likes him partially because she sees how he treats Mizuhara, and figures that if he's that good to a rental, he's going to be an amazing boyfriend. And she's cute.

Yes, she's kinda shallow for wanting him for her own agendas, but aren't we all that way?

Kazuya doesn't want to go out with her, because he likes Mizuhara, but since he can't say that, he says he doesn't want to go out with Ruka because Ruka was his friend's rental girlfriend and he doesn't want to crap on the guy's feelings. That's true, but it's not the only reason he doesn't want to go out with Ruka.

Except now he is because Ruka blackmailed him into a trial relationship, made a public scene, and mainly because Mizuhara told him to do it. She wants him to go out with Ruka because she doesn't want any more drama and because she thinks it'll help him grow as a person (and then she can finally cut him loose).

TLDR: still a show full of jerks.

Great Pretender on Netflix is really good.

Watched the first couple episodes of Deca-Dence. To be honest I'm not sure how it can hold the audience's interest after it reveals its parlor trick so early and the visual style post-reveal just won't allow me to take whats's going on seriously. Shallow of me perhaps but I can't get past it.

Middcore wrote:

Watched the first couple episodes of Deca-Dence. To be honest I'm not sure how it can hold the audience's interest after it reveals its parlor trick so early and the visual style post-reveal just won't allow me to take whats's going on seriously. Shallow of me perhaps but I can't get past it.

We're talking about visual style, right, not character design? The show actually make some use of the visual styles later on to help highlight the differences in locations and situations.

Spoiler:

In space:
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/AOlFLHo.jpg)

On the ground:
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/L26YdhM.jpg)

But, hey, if you can't get past the visual styel, I completely understand. There certainly have been some series I haven't been able to get into for the same reason.

Mantid wrote:
Middcore wrote:

Watched the first couple episodes of Deca-Dence. To be honest I'm not sure how it can hold the audience's interest after it reveals its parlor trick so early and the visual style post-reveal just won't allow me to take whats's going on seriously. Shallow of me perhaps but I can't get past it.

We're talking about visual style, right, not character design? The show actually make some use of the visual styles later on to help highlight the differences in locations and situations.

Spoiler:

In space:
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/AOlFLHo.jpg)

On the ground:
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/L26YdhM.jpg)

But, hey, if you can't get past the visual styel, I completely understand. There certainly have been some series I haven't been able to get into for the same reason.

I'm talking about both. It looks like it was made as a cringe-comedy-for-stoners [adult swim] original, social media sh*tposting in animated form.

Those hungry for more Tite Kubo and his world of BLEACH will have a little nugget come October.

Middcore wrote:

I'm talking about both. It looks like it was made as a cringe-comedy-for-stoners [adult swim] original, social media sh*tposting in animated form.

I did think that would be a barrier for some fans. The visual style is profoundly non-human and very stylized, so I think that speaks to the nature of their society. Their physical bodies aren't limited by biology, but at the same time, they don't think of themselves as alien and frightening. At least that's how I interpreted the style.

Mantid wrote:

Those hungry for more Tite Kubo and his world of BLEACH will have a little nugget come October.

So are they making the manga and the anime side-by-side or something? Because the first full chapter of the manga just came out, I thought.

ccesarano wrote:
Mantid wrote:

Those hungry for more Tite Kubo and his world of BLEACH will have a little nugget come October.

So are they making the manga and the anime side-by-side or something? Because the first full chapter of the manga just came out, I thought.

I'm not sure. The first Burn the Witch one-shot was from 2018 and a new four chapter follow up is what is currently being published. I would guess the anime special is from the one-shot?

Oh, that's just a special and not a series? That makes more sense. Everything in that trailer looked like it came outta the one-shot, but I assumed that was just how new series trailers work.

Yeah, just got around to reading the chapter released a couple days ago. Looks like the current manga and the anime are the same. So yeah, side-by-side.

DBZ bibidi babidi buu, I just got it.