Topic: Anime & Manga (NO SPOILERS PLEASE)

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

@Pizzamorg 100% this! Sometimes it seems the arc is well thought out, and other times it eh. And he makes all these cool characters only to never mention them ever again, and some characters needed more development like ururaka, or heck idk, half of the female cast or the other Characters that never showed up again, I feel like the show needed more time, and not take maybe, a time skip.

The Yakuza arc feels like it was made to make me not like the series anymore. Like it has a good ending but otherwise it is devoid of focusing on character who are even characters. "Hi I'm villain, my character is villain". "Hi I'm little girl, my character is little girl". "Hi I'm Bakugou's friend, I'm sure I'm definitely the character you want focused on". Just a giant waste of my interest in the series, and season 5 is widely regarded to be mid so I've just not bothered. And while part of me wants to get caught up, I have just no interest in getting through all of season 5 for the hope of season 6 making me like the series again, even if its great. It's not like there's a shortage of shonen action anime to watch without it.

@Snatcher honestly think the last arc for MHA is complete garbage. Plot points pulled out of thin air at the last second with characters who had zero development since day 1 suddenly being the focus, the heroes generally being dumb as s***, fights with zero choreography that are impossible to follow - altho that's MHA in general - and I legitimately despise what Horikoshi has done to some of the (mostly female) characters. And don't get me started on Deku and the OFA vestige shtick.

At this point I just read up on what happens in the chapters so I know how it's going to end but there's zero passion for it left, just morbid curiosity how dumb it can get.

@Dom_31 Dude if you don’t like how it is now, I’m not sure if it’s gonna get any better for you. I guess we get so ok female character development, but not much, and it’s only for one of them. There is a super cool arc I think they should have stuck with for a wile or resolved it in a less cheesy way, oh yeah and the arc is ended super quickly, trust me everything just gets crazier from here, oh and the Villain gets worse in my opinion.

@Snatcher I'm talking about the Manga lol

@Dom_31 Dang it my fault sorry, I misread your comment, yeah I agree with you on all fronts.

@EaglyTheKawaiiShika Yeah I just deleted it Lmao. I’m sorry btw.

@EaglyTheKawaiiShika Ok thank god, I didn’t want to ruin something for someone just because I can’t remember how to do this, I mess it up so often.

Spongebob dies oh now you wanna work!