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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 caught up on The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World, which was great fun!
I'd previously started reading the manga a while back, but I enjoy reading manga in big bursts, so I decided to set it aside for a time, let it get further along, and come back to it... and dang, was it great to come back to!
Yes, it's an isekai manga, so maybe that immediately DQs it for some people - but lemme try to sell you on it anyways, as I'm also not typically an isekai fan, but really enjoyed it!
Basically: The main character is Kizuna Red, the leader of the Kizuna Five, a super sentai / power ranger team. In the final battle against the evil Rejection King, they both strike a mortal blow against each other... and he reappears in a traditional fantasy world, with knights, wizards, dragons, but still with his ability to transform into a red "power ranger", with all the tropes and over-the-top drama that implies!
The first couple chapters are focused on action/comedy, and even they're pretty good! There's lots of great jokes about the juxtaposition of a power ranger in a fantasy world, such as the fact that whenever he transforms, there's a gratuitous explosion behind him, or that his 'stats' are things like Punching Power and Kicking Power rather than Intelligence or Defense.
After the first 2 chapters, however, the series begins to really develop. The setting is fleshed out with rich world-building; the overarching conflict and some great recurring villains are introduced; interesting and compelling main characters are added to the main party; and overall, the writing remains of quality! It's definitely not a masterpiece, but it's consistently funny, action-packed, and has surprisingly good character development, romance, and the like. (To its credit, it is also pointedly NOT a harem story!)
Spoilers for latest chapters
And in the latest chapters, the worldbuilding has been taken to the next level. Answers are finally provided as to *why* the main character reincarnated into this world, and at the *same time*, this explanation also answers a half-dozen other outstanding mysteries that had been open qusetthat had been the thrust of the story, in a way that feels not just tidy and logically consistent, but *interesting*. It's rare that I've read an isekai story nowadays where the conflict about choosing a world, and the dilemma of how to return, not only remain a significant feature of the plot throughout, but are *instrumental* to the plot in a way that makes sense!Overall, it's great fun! It may not be a masterpiece, but it's written with heart, and drawn with great skill. It's always a fun ride, but it's also capable of being heartfelt, serious, and introspective. I really recommend it, especially to fellow fans of tokusatsu.
(Manga) Frieren is back!! I guess it's been back for a few weeks now. One chapter has been released since the hiatus.
I hope the author has had an excellent long break. My enjoyment of their work isn't as important as their health and wellbeing.
My favorite pages are actually the coloured drawings at the end both how beautiful they are, and the hilarious cute reaction miniatures from other characters :)
My kid is always asking when there'll be more anime Frieren. Don't know, buddy, but we're all hoping.
Well, I've started the big journey. I'm 50 chapters into One Piece - or rather, into ワンピース, as I'm reading it in Japanese. It's going rather slowly (15-30 minutes per chapter as I have to look up a lot of words) but I can follow pretty much everything and it's already very fun.
Events so far
Zoro, Nami and Usopp have joined the crew and we're in the middle of recruiting Sanji. We got a ship, and Nami has just run off with it. Just now, Zoro has crossed blades with Mihawk and was utterly outmatched.Spoiler discussion
It's been over a decade since I first read it, but the scene where Zoro vows to never lose again is still one of my favorite moments in the series. Easily a top 3 Zoro moment for me.So I've got a few this time.
I read My Neighbor Seki and its small sequel My Neighbor Seki Jr. It's an episodic series about a girl named Yokoi being distracted by her classmate Seki goofing off during class. Seki is a mute eccentric who makes his own games to distract himself. Normally by playing board games with rules that he invents, or by creating elaborate arts and crafts projects. It's a very lighthearted series. Yokoi starts off trying to reprimand Seki, but quickly gets sucked into his antics. The series is not romantically focused in any way, but the sequel series is about them being married, and Yokoi taking care of their toddler aged son. It's cute, and a nice companion piece to the original. I don't think it quite captures the vibe of the main series though. The base series ended with a hiatus, which it has now returned from. I have not read any of the new stuff yet, but I'm glad to see it.
The other series I read was Magu-chan: God of Destruction. It's a series about a schoolgirl befriending a god of chaos from a different dimension. It's a fun little series. It's primarily a comedy series, but it has a few drama moments that I think land really well. In particular, I think it has a very beautiful ending.
My slow watch through of Taiyou no Kiba Dagram continues! I've watched through episode 35 so far. My watch through may slow down as I start a job next month which is exciting. I think one episode a week is doable but we'll see.
This last episode was great character building for the female MC. She has started working at a field hospital that is neutral ground and treats the wounded of both sides. I'm happy to see her grow more as she was lacking in depth to her character.
The male MC has also taken a step forward in learning that wars are not necessarily black and white especially one such as this involving a colonial position attempting to gain independence. He's been pondering this for the last couple of episodes and has accepted that things aren't as clear cut and that the Earth Federation isn't one entity just like people of Deloyer aren't a monolith.
Looking forward to the story continuing to develop as I approach the halfway point.
I've been wanting to read more manga but feel like it's a much bigger time investment to dive into it compared to reading a few pages of an ebook on my phone when I have a few minutes.
I randomly stumbled on Sasaki & Miyano after wanting to read a good gay romance story and though it wasn't really anything what I was looking for (I actually wanted something with older characters and these are high school students), it's been quite a breath of fresh air. It's a very slow burning story about two boys trying to process their attraction to eachother over a long period of time. It strikes me as being particularly realistic because of how the two - Miyano in particular - try to contextualize their feelings through their love of BL. I find it really enjoyable to see them try to follow a train of thought about how they think things are, only to realize that it's different. The BL genre is very often not realisitic in it's portrayal of homosexual relationships, and of course the characters know this but they don't really have any other resources to look to.
Of course, that lack of resources is not realistic these days - you'd think they'd try google searching "am i gay" or something like that. But I think the departures from realism really work well. They are at an all-boys school but they are the only ones who seem to have any same-sex attraction; everyone else is straight and one character in particular starts off having a character that can only be described as "has a girlfriend". Even so, their friends know what they're going through and don't judge them for it. And the cast of teenage boys somehow are not being overwhelmed by their hormones.
Overall, the show is less of a romance and more of a slice of life. To paraphrase a statement one of the characters makes midway through the show, BL just makes the story possible. The actual production of the show is just OK, and the character designs are just kind of OK in the scheme of anime - one character dyes his hair black around the midpoint of the show and he starts to look exactly like another. But the Japanese voice acting is fire. You can get away with just listening to the show and it would be pretty good. I think there's an English dub available and I'm tempted to watch it after I finish just to see how well they handled it.
On the most tangential of tangents, I have discovered that the Monsteress comic book series that I found out a few months ago had gone off of it's long hiatus hadn't been on hiatus the whole time I thought it had. I'm happy to have so much to go through, but I'm upset because I was trying to collect all of the actual comic books and it would be a pain to track down that many of them. As it is I am getting the hardcover book that contains a number of the trade paperback volumes to catch up, and it's still not enough to catch me up.