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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 read a romcom series called Shiroyama and Mita-san, where a couple of eccentric and weird high schooler students build up to moving to Tokyo from their small town in the boonies. It's an odd series. I finished it with a generally positive opinion of it, but I think that it is a romcom that is not traditionally romantic, or even that funny. The titular couple have a weird relationship, in that they become a joined at the hip unit willing to essentially elope with each other within the the first 20 chapters, but the only public display of affection they have with each other is to sensually hold hands in the final chapter of the series.
I think the one thing that holds the series together is that the characters have some very solid coming of age moments. They have very real and relatable struggles centered around finding your place in the world, and while the couple are never physically intimate, they are emotionally supportive of each other in genuine heartwarming ways.
Finished Revolutionary Girl Utena this week. It's the kind of show that I would have to rewatch a few times to really understand. There's the obvious deconstruction of gender roles, the themes of coming of age and overcoming trauma, the childish desire to grow up, but I'm hardly capable of any deeper interpretation. I look forward to seeing a great many video essays and reviews, because there's a lot to chew on in this show.
I really like the architecture in this series, especially in the movie. Buildings are surreal, too big for what they house, with bizarre (if not impossible) geometry. This person wrote an essay about the architecture in the movie fifteen years ago, using fancy words like Constructivism and Deconstructivism.
Before hearing anyone else's interpretations, I'm giving it a 7/10. It's a bit more abstract than I'm comfortable with, it took a while for me to actually get invested in the show, but I can recognize a good story when I see one (even if I'm not fully equipped to understand it).