Topic: Anime & Manga (NO SPOILERS PLEASE)

I just have to say, the new Uzaki episode wanted to kill us. Her dad was RIGHT in the place she and Sakurai works at. Where's Uzaki? At home with a hangover probably. I need her dad to realize Hana is the girl Sakurai always talks about. This show is making me die.

Man, for as hype as it is seeing some of the Chainsaw Man set pieces animated, for me, some of the best moments are seeing the quiet moments brought to life, instead. So many panels in the manga you might end up skimming right over, but when you can actually see the expressions flash on characters faces, when the show can hold on these moments for just a few seconds. You can tell a lot through animation, without even any dialogue or anything else, in a way you can’t do in a static medium like a manga. I feel like I already have a better appreciation and connection to these characters, than I did reading the manga from start to finish.

Yesterday I finished Tao Tao and I think it is a great series for kids. The characters are cute and pleasant and the atnosphere is warm and gentle. Many stories are about embracing yourself for who you are and the best place is home.

Holy f*** they're retiring Ash.

@Fizza No waaaay!

Also btw, MHA is in Fortnite now, I’m buying all of them, if I can lol. I’m so hyped!

I've been watching the Evangelion films (not including the old ones, I watched them last year) over the past couple of months, cause I only get so much time in which I could watch them. So far, I've watched the first 2, and I have the 3rd on DVD. I've been enjoying them a fair bit, and then realised that I've never seen the 4th one on DVD. I was wondering if anyone here knows if it is actually available on such formats, or if you have to watch them on some streaming service or another? Cause that would suck.

My brother finally watched Spy x Family.

Controversial opinion maybe: I've not been as into the 2nd part of Spy X Family. At the same time that they've been relying on shorter stories with less time to be much of anything (even in a comedy show this can make a notable difference), its been doing things that generally kinda bug me. I don't know where or why the "look at this woman being bad at cooking" anime cliche came from, but anything that even starts to get close to the line of gender stereotyping tends to annoy the **** out of me, and a lot of the episodes have that same type of lame and obvious comedy where the joke is just the most plainly obvious one. Oh, this girl is so bad at cooking it causes physical trauma, oh this nerd guy is bad with the ladies, oh this one child has a stupid crush on Twilight (the other crush on Twilight is ok). Pretty underwhelming compared to the rest of the series so far.

Just watched the tennis episode, which is leagues better than most of the past few have been at least.

@Scooby-Doo, Thrice Upon a Time is getting a BD/DVD combo pack release in Japan in March 2023. GKids (the same distributor who released the OG series on BD) will be publishing it in the US, though they haven't set a date AFAIK. Don't know about other countries.

Currently it streams exclusively on Amazon Prime.

A bit of a weaker episode by the extremely high standards set by this season of MHA, but still an enjoyable episode all the same. Can’t believe just how good this season has been, it is really on another level from basically anything I’ve been watching. Oh and best boy Lemillion is back!

Anne Of Green Gables is great so far. A little bit heavy maybe for a childrens series but it makes me care for the characters and I am happy for them, when good stuff happens.

I believe next week is the final episode of Chainsaw Man’s opening season. I am sure they’ll get a chance to adapt more of the manga, but I haven’t heard when that’ll be. There is also the fear it’ll be like One Punch Man Season 2, which features one of the most dramatic declines in quality from one season to another in an anime I’ve ever seen (and it is an especial shame, as Metal Bat is one of my favourite characters and I would have loved to see his only proper fight scenes animated to the standard of the first season, rather than the crappy PowerPoint slideshow of season 2).

Honestly though, pessimism aside, I really enjoyed the first season of Chainsaw Man. I know they made some changes to the source which infuriates some people, but it was well animated, directed and produced and really enhanced my appreciation for a manga I already liked.

MHA Season 6 Part 1 is now finished, I believe there’ll be a second, 12 episode, part starting on the 7th of January. It sounds hyperbolic I know, but while there may be other anime with stronger individual episodes, this is honestly one of the best seasons of anime I’ve watched when looked at as a whole unit.

Animated to a really high standard basically throughout, and full of dramatic moments and epic battles, and it doesn’t ever really slow down. One of the most frustrating things when watching shounen anime, is how often the anime will artificially inflate the post battle sequences creating these long cool down sections which just drag out the pacing. The reason why this is done is obvious, but it doesn’t make the shows more enjoyable to watch.

It is why I appreciate the more modern approach we’ve seen for a lot of adaptations that instead produce 12 to 24 episode seasons and take up a year between them so they can a limit the amount of filler and also produce it to a really high standard. Like you go back and watch some of the old big three anime from when I was a teen, not only did a lot of it move at an absolute snails pace, it was full of truly awful animation clearly as a result of people trying to get these episodes out on a weekly basis with basically no breaks. I am pretty sure there was a stretch during one Bleach’s later arcs when they were getting so close to the source material, rather than doing a filler arc, they were literally dragging single chapters out to full episodes, filling as much space as they could with recaps and flashbacks to things that just happened. Without adverts and recaps and stuff, some of the episodes were only like 10 to 15 minutes long when it came to actual new content.

I’ve also started watching Blue Lock, I had a few friends recommend this to me but I don’t like that kind of football, however, I was watching the World Cup with my Dad so I decided to give it a go. It has a silly premise even by anime standards, it is kinda like a football themed squid game only no one dies but everyone acts like it is life and death.

It is mostly quite grounded in it’s presentation of the sport, I mean it is still exaggerated to a degree, but by anime standards it is fairly restrained. Although this is kind of a double edged sword, given every character design is so aggressively anime, it sorta creates a weird clash.

That isn’t to say I am not enjoying it though. It has been so far well paced, it is pretty consistently well animated throughout and while I don’t watch a lot of sports anime, whenever I do, I tend to find sports anime deliver hype moments of a level like nothing else. I guess cause they fear it might otherwise be quite boring. Like man if you haven’t seen Haikyuu!! my word, an anime about volleyball has no right to be that incredible.

Anime's Goodest Boy Arrives in Time for Christmas.

Street Fighter II: the Animated Movie - A certified classic that I haven't seen in awhile, and I'll be waiting a bit more as when I unwrapped it to take this picture it was somehow missing the damn disc. I ordered it a couple weeks ago now & I don't know how I'd get across that the disc was actually missing, so I don't know if I should fight for a refund/free replacement or just order a new one. This has never happened to me before, but I suppose it was bound to eventually.

InuYasha set 1 - Luckily this one seems to be complete. This is THE comfort food anime to me (practically being my life in middle & early high school), and whether anime or manga (through official or illicit means) I manage to go through it once every other year or so (just finished up buying/reading the entire manga on Kindle a few months ago), so I figured it was about time to start collecting it physically. I last watched it in 2020, when I binged it on Hulu in preparation for YashaHime (which kinda sucked, but let's not go there yet).

Jungle De Ikou! - Oh god, this is the most shamelessly degenerate anime I've seen, lol. Now, I enjoy a blatantly ecchi anime from time to time as a guilty pleasure (and I vaguely remember seeing at least part of this online somewhere years ago) so I decided to give this a shot, but now I know why I probably never finished it back then. It's a parody of the magical girl genre (young girl gets the ability to transform into a powerful adult form) where almost all the comedy comes from blatant sexualization & innuendo. I wouldn't have a problem with this if it was just focused on the transformed state, but they make sure to get in a lot of "loli" stuff too. Sad thing is I can't even really bring myself to really dislike it either. The humor (and fan service) can hit when the target is more palatable, and it has that quintessential 90's anime aesthetic that I absolutely love to look at. Think I'll just bury it at the bottom of the pile, lol.

Bonus: Alternate Box Art Under the SFII slip case:

Finished up Akira Toriyama's Manga Theatre this morning. A collection of one shots & mini series he'd released over his career.

The most fascinating story (though not the best) was Dragon Boy, which was clearly a Dragon Ball prototype (which had proto versions of Goku, named Tangtong with dragon wings instead of a tail, Master Roshi, same name & still had nimbus but wasn't a pervert, and Puar, can't remember it's name but it was a cat creature that could transform into different things).

While that one seemed to have influenced DB the most, some elements of the Adventures of Tongpoo (which was the next story in the collection) made their way in to. It's female lead was much more of a Bulma-like, and it introduced the idea of capsules.

Really interesting collection overall though. While they weren't all hits, I liked stories like the Elder, Cashman: Hero of Savings, & Mamejiro.

I wanted to ask for those who are caught up with MHA, how do you feel about the direction it’s taken? Gotta say, I’m not the biggest fan.

What do you mean? I thought this latest season was one of the best single seasons of anime I’ve seen in my 30 plus years of life, no hyperbole.

@Pizzamorg in the Manga. The anime at this point is great, and the next arc is amazing, sadly it’s gonna be cut way to short, there’s just a lot of stuff going on currently, that I’m not sure how to feel about it. And please don’t take this as me saying I think it sucks, faaaar from it, MHA is one of my favorite mangas ever, and It was one of the two I first started reading manga for, so I really do care how the story’s going. It feels like he needs more time.

Ah my apologies! The anime recently went on break, so when I saw the term ‘caught up’ my mind went straight there, my mistake.

@Pizzamorg oh no it’s alright, I should have been more specific, I’m glad your enjoying the season, I know the next seasons gonna be amazing as well!

Anime wise, MHA is probably one of the most hit or miss shows I keep up with, when it is good it is really better than anything else like it, but I feel like there are whole arcs I’d never want to watch again because they are either boring or just not very well written. There are also some odd moments too, like Deku’s fight against the Muscle Guy might be the best single fight in the whole series, but I remember nothing about who that Muscle Guy was or what the story was around that at all. I am pretty sure he was also beaten in a one and done and has never been mentioned again lol