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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've been getting my wife into anime a bit lately with shows like Restaurant to Another World and Delicious In Dungeon (among others). Apparently we both greatly enjoy anime depictions of food and the over-the-top reactions to it :) Once we finished those, however, we weren't really sure what to watch next.
But then we found it. The ultimate combination of those two shows. Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill. The humor and fantasy of Delicious In Dungeon combined with the real world crossover of Restaurant To Another World. It's perfect.
Here's some other good food-based anime that I've enjoyed (mostly for absurd comedy):
Thanks! We'll have to check these out, as I think we're nearing the end of what's available for the incredibly long-named Campfire Cooking show.
Ben-to is really a product of its era. Low budget nonsensical fun that felt it really, REALLY needed to lean on the fan-service to draw in viewers. My wife and I watch lots of anime, and when this popped back up on Crunchyroll after the Funimation merger, I remembered the absurd comedy of discount bento battles, I totally forgot however that it filled basically every other second of airtime with fanservice or an immediate pathway to the next fanservice. I got lots of judging looks about my younger self then!
Ahh, it's annoying when that happens. I get my kids all pumped up on an anime that I remember liking when I was a kid, then start watching it with them only to realize they probably think their dad is some kind of perv now because I forgot about all the fan service.
I read Tegami Bachi, which is a adventure fantasy series about a boy becoming a postman. The world that the characters live in is a caste society which is lit up by an artificial sun, which is directly above the capital. The countryside outside the capital is filled with giant bug monsters that feed off of human emotions. The postmen are the people who venture through the monster infected zones to deliver goods and letters between the human settlements, and becoming one is pretty much the only way to obtain upwards mobility in the caste system. The main character decides to become one after being delivered as a package to his aunt after a group of government agents abduct his mother.
Overall it was a fun young adult adventure series. While it has a lot of very dramatic differences, I think it has a lot of parallels with Full Metal Alchemist. It's an action series, but it really isn't focused on drawn out fights the way a lot of other shonen series are. Steampunk level technology. It maintains a fairly small cast of likable characters. While the MC has their own personal goals, they get wrapped up in a significantly larger government conspiracy.
My one complaint about it is that the ending feels pretty rushed. Feel like it might have been on the brink of cancellation, and the author was given a hard deadline that was earlier than they were expecting. I think the broad strokes of the story still end very nicely, but development for some of the b plots feel like they got eaten up in the crunch.
The art is fantastic. The artist has a very chunky lined, ink heavy style that I really just enjoy, and they also thrown in a lot of fun visual gags into the backs of panels. This series gets a recommendation from me. It's a solid 7 or 8/10. It has an anime, that I have not watched. No clue if it is any good or not.
I finally finished Macross Delta.
It was kind of bad. The main characters seem to somehow become even more flat towards the end somehow, and the ending is really rushed. There is practically zero denouement. The bad guy seems like he turned extra evil for no particular reason. And while a Yoko Kanno soundtrack will not likely ever be bad, it just didn’t hit like I wanted it to. Immediately afterwards I watched Macross Plus, her first scored Macross series, and it was better by leaps and bounds even if a bit dated in style.
I also binged all of season three of Re:Zero because I thought it was over and ready for me to consume. It was not. Now I’m upset that there is no conclusion. Though I do admit that it’s been a real roller coaster. Subaru has a really good monologue halfway through it, and it does good by the series standards of such things.
I've started watching Ayakashi: Japanese Classic Horror which consists of three separate horror stories. The first one was okayish, I guess. I probably wouldn't recommend it for casual viewer. Acting was stiff and visually it was very average. Which is why I skipped the middle story for now, and watched the last three episodes because the last story is an original that introduces the main character of Mononoke. Those 3 episodes were an improvement in every regard and are certainly worth watching as an intro to Mononoke. Then I've watched said Mononoke which shares the structure with Ayakashi by splitting the season into several smaller horror stories. Each of them is interesting and tragic in its own way. The series has an unique visual style and great sound design, which allow you to get well into the disturbing mood of the story. The show gets 8/10 from me.
I am reading the manga Tomie, by Junji Ito. It is considered a classic of the horror genre in manga. As a modern, non-Japanese, ADHD reader, some things are not ideal for me. I sometimes find it difficult to discern who is the character I am looking at. They often look very similar, names are not always used, and when they are used they are long Japanese names that I find hard to remember. I had to look up the recap for the first volume and then read it all over again, just because I failed to understand the plot due to failing to identify several characters. That is something reviewers never talk about, but it is something I find very relevant.
That gets easier in future volumes. Horror is sometimes defined as a genre seeking to cause fear and repulsion. In my opinion, Tomie is more about the latter than the former. Tomie causes me disgust more than it scares me. The art is usually quite pedestrian, but it gets progressively brilliant when nasty things occur. That seems intentional, as the simple "real world" within the fictional universe is contrasted with the complexity and elaboration of the grotesque elements. This works very well.
I don't know if the chapters in this Complete Tomie volume that I am reading were released in sequence as a single series or if they were interspersed with other stories. I can only say that reading them in sequence gets tiresome. We always know that whatever background each story has, they will eventually take a turn in which Tomie shows up. We also know that any man will be preyed upon and dominated by her in some form. So, while there are exceptions, a lot of times it is easy to predict at least some events in the story.
I am liking this manga, but it is very different from what I imagined it. I thought that a Japanese horror master would be more subtle and sophisticated. Tomie is raw, disgusting, and in your face. I'm not sure if I think Junji Ito is a genius or anything like that, but Tomie is an enjoyable horror that is easy to read, with wonderful grotesque images that will linger on the reader's mind.
Ever since recent current events started happening, I needed to find ways to take my mind away from doomscrolling the news and I dove back into manga. This has been quite wonderful, as I've found a few titles that I've been enjoying reading:
Magilumiere is probably my favorite of the bunch. It's a rather "Grown up" story of a world where being a Magical Girl is a career choice and basically an exterminator of sorts. The story is geared for a very adult audience, mostly because it spends a good amount of time talking about work, professional ethics and the conflict of standards between idealists and the bottom line. It has a season adapted of the anime as well, and it's ridiculously faithful! I would definitely recommend either pathway to experiencing this story.
Dogsred is a hockey manga by the guy who wrote Golden Kamuy. He actually started this one as his first solo-venture, but dropped it after it didn't take off to create Golden Kamuy instead. Now that that story has completed, he's gone back to his desire to tell this hockey story by renaming it Dogsred and applying some of the lessons he learned from Golden Kamuy. The simple synopsis is that Rou, a figure skating prodigy quits competing despite posting the highest score ever in his category and storms off to Hokkaido to live with his grandfather. There, he gets dragged into playing hockey with the locals where he meets a eclectic cast of characters all looking to prove themselves. If you liked Golden Kamuy, it's basically that but instead of a historical period piece, it's a sports story. Highly recommend.
There are a few others I'm reading, but I'll save those for later weeks to discuss.
As for anime?
Demon Lord 2099 was a pleasant surprise. It's about a demon lord who was incredibly powerful and talented with magic in a fantasy setting getting killed by the big hero and being resurrected 500 years later in a cyberpunk city. He quickly finds out that he's not as powerful relative to everyone else now, and needs to figure out how to improve himself so he can ultimately reclaim his throne as ruler of the world. This anime was really surprisingly good, way better than I expected it to be. I thought it was going to be something silly as filler while we fished for something better to watch but my wife and I ended up really enjoying this.
Princess Nine is our newest watch, pulling from the vintage closet of 1998. My wife and I are both older, so it's been a delightful blast from the past to watch what a show that was close to what we would remember as "normal" for that era. It's a delightful story of the forming of a girl's baseball team, and a general "f*ck sexisim, we're playin' some baseball with the boys" theme to it. It's dated in other areas though, where there are items that are problematic, like the coach trying to recruit a delinquent girl to play on the team by hitting on her like a drunkard. I look forward to where this goes though, it's quite the product of it's time and it's amusing looking back on a show that we both missed because of availability in the era.
Struggling to think of how to describe Kyousougiga. I am not nearly good enough with words to give this show a meaningful review, but the entire reason I reply to these threads after every show is to exercise my writing.
A poor attempt at a review [no spoilers]
Kyousougiga is very abstract. In the simplest terms, it's a show about a family's relationship. A father carelessly bringing children into the world, and then abandoning them without realizing how he's affected them. A mother whose time with her children is woefully limited. A trio of siblings placed in charge of their parents' world whose relationship is turbulent at the best of times, but always loving. A daughter willing to break holes in reality to find her mother, to make up for a childhood she never really had.
Man, I think I'm actually tapped out. There is so much more to this show than I am capable of conveying. If anyone else has seen it and can offer a better review without spoiling story elements, please do.
One thing I can convey is that it is absolutely beautiful. The visuals are what put it on my list. Honestly, it's worth watching 10 episodes of it for the animation alone. 8/10, and it's on the rewatch pile.
Now for something more grounded, so to speak. Orb: On the Movements of the Earth. Look at my username. An anime set in 15th century Poland about an astronomer studying the heliocentric model of the solar system? This series was made for me specifically. I'm only two episodes in right now, but so far it is promising.
The subject of the show makes me wonder: if I was a 15th century Polish peasant, would I be a heliocentrist? Probably not. Infatuated as I am with astronomy, I'm very trusting of experts in the field. I've never checked claims of stellar parallax. Maybe I should try that. Expect an update in ten years if I manage to prove that Sirius isn't actually 8.6 light-years away!