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What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)
What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.
If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!
I ended up watching Monster. I had heard great things about it and decided to give it a chance. It turns out that it’s right up my alley. I love the character drama and the characters change over time and the very heavy use of dramatic irony. One thing I appreciate about it is that it doesn’t hold the same tension all the time; the story has different arches which explore other characters and perspectives which all have their own meanings and objectives. And for a show called Monster there is also a lot of forgiveness going around.
It was all going swell until I got to the last episode. Right now it’s Netflix who has the streaming rights in the US, and for some reason they thought it was perfectly fine to only provide us with 30 episodes out of 72.
The show abruptly stops in the middle of a gunfight. Seriously.
I am so pissed about this. I honestly feel kind of offended that it’s partly here. There was zero indication that it wasn’t complete nor was there any notice on the page as to when if ever the rest of the episodes will be available. It’s been a hot minute since Netflix had produced a show I really wanted to watch so now I am seriously considering unsubscribing.
I gotta be honest, I'm not really feeling this season of Anime. Maybe the abundance of quality titles from the last year or so have spoiled me. A lot of them give me really mixed feelings. The plus side is that the visuals are all really great across the board.
The one that kind of bothers me the most is Onimai; it's got the cutest aesthetics and the best animation, and the jokes are surprisingly good. But the whole concept is just too damn thirsty and that really turns me off of it.
The Fire Hunter might be the most interesting one to watch, but the first episode gave me really mixed feelings about the storytelling; Sometimes it seems like they are trying to explain things entirely through visuals but then later on people start talking about it instead, sometimes using a narrator to literally spell out what's happening. And then in the last 5 minutes they start introducing new characters who are in a vastly different setting who have vastly different goals.
Then there's the new Trigun. Honestly I was kind of excited to see it just because I wanted to see what Orange would do after Beastars. And honestly, the animation just blows my expectations out of the park. But at the same time I don't like any of the characters, I never really liked the western aesthetic to begin with, and, strangely, even though the story is written to show you Vash's origin story right at the beginning the way the first episode still makes you feel really alienated from the character. The problem is that a lot of the action in Trigun is very cartoonish, with impossible action sequences and big exaggerated bad guys and tons of explosions. The original project accomplished this by hiding the drama parts until the end, where Vash stops being a clumsy and playful cartoon character and becomes a serious and dramatic character. I feel I shouldn't be too harsh on the story though, because they are telling a story where much of the audience already knows that twist; it's a cat they can't put back in the bag.
A little while back I started watching anime again after quite a long hiatus, and I've been mostly checking out short films and animator expos. That led to me coming across Artiswitch last week, a 6-episode series of 8-minute shorts with a ton of visual style. I watched it on YouTube over the course of a couple days, and I surprised myself a bit as to how much I enjoyed it. It's "artsy" in the sense that there is a good amount of symbolism to tease out, as well as implied storytelling, but it's not at all obtuse. Plus, the YouTube comments have so many people's interpretations of each episode that whatever you don't catch yourself, you're sure to pick up from reading. It reminded me of both Kuuchuu Buranko and Death Parade, and I was impressed with how well they managed to tell a pretty complete story in each 8-minute episode. As effective as it is with no fat to trim, it's made me wonder if we are heading down the road of such short ONAs becoming the norm for the ever-decreasing attention spans of the younger generations. It also showcases how much better 3D computer animation has gotten. I very much recommend it.