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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 had a lot of free time at work recently, so I've been reading quite a lot. I completed Tsutomu Nihei's BioMega and read all of the current chapters of Yoshihiro Togashi's Hunter X Hunter.
BioMega is a sci-fi action series with a plot that I did not fully comprehend on my first (and currently only) reading. It's broken up into two parts. The first part follows a small cast of characters as they deal with an outbreak of plague/disease caused by humanity discovering life on Mars. It's sorta like a zombie virus, but it's more like people are mutating into weird cyborg things. The second half of the story happens because of a mutation event caused by a transhumanist faction that forces the virus to assimilate with Earth, which gets transformed into this multi lightyear long line in space (I think this happens because the remains of humanity were taking shelter at the end of a space elevator). The transformation event caused a wormhole(?) and so the cast of characters end up scattered across the mega structure. The protagonist Zouichi ends up at one end of the structure several thousand years after its creation, and his goal for the rest of the series is to get to the other end. Zouichi is essentially the same character as Killy from Nihei's more popular series BLAME!, he's a genetically modified super soldier with a laser gun that is absurdly strong for its size. He's slightly more emotive than Killy, but the main difference is that he has a kickass sci-fi motorcycle.
BLAME! can also be accused of this, but BioMega is really just a vehicle for Nihei to create images that make dudes say, "Hell yeah!" Most of the appeal is visual spectacle. I wouldn't recommend it over BLAME! or Knights of Sidonia, but I would heavily recommend it to people who loved BLAME!.
HUNTER X HUNTER is an experience for sure. I think I spent equal parts loving it and hating it. Frequently its strengths are also its weaknesses. It is an action fantasy series that is (loosely) about a boy named Gon who sets out to find his absentee father who is a high ranking member of the Hunters Association, which is a hard to describe private military association/illuminati type group whose requirements for membership are essentially just extreme martial prowess and obsession with the peak of human ability. It is labeled as a shounen series, but it is pretty gritty.
I think the main adjective to describe HXH is that it is incredibly dense. There is a magic system that is meticulously thought out. It could very easily be turned into it's own rpg system. It's also a story that is filled with competency porn. Random unimportant goons are frequently portrayed as smart logical adults. I find the combination of smart characters with complicated powers both very compelling and super obnoxious. There is tons exposition. Pages and pages of people explaining their powers and people reacting to those explanations and trying to draw conclusions from the information they have been told. It is a very hot and cold thing for me. Sometimes it is cool, and sometimes it feels like Togashi is just wasting time on shit that really does not matter. Some things get explained in incredible detail that for sure will never be important ever again (I'm talking about Greed Island). If you told me this was your favorite series because it was really complicated, I would get it. If you told me you hated it, I would also understand.
There are two other quirks of the series that I think are of note. The first I've already hinted at, it's that the series has a weird stance on morality. It is a plot relevant point that the Hunters Association doesn't really care about the moral integrity of it's members. This is how you end up with a character who is a pedophile clown serial killer as the character with the third most screen time. I wouldn't say Togashi condones the character's actions, but it is just an observation that a lot of the cast can just be described as evil. I don't know if I would even call Gon a good person, so I think it could be a major turn off to some readers that the protagonists are kinda shitty people.
The second quirk is something that I would assume is just a reader's only experience. The art fluctuates a lot over the course of the series. Sometimes it is good, sometimes it is shitty. Togashi has a phase early on in the series where the art becomes a little more abstract, and there are parts later on that are mixed media with drawings over real photographs. I'm not super versed on it, but I'm aware that the series has experienced a large number of hiatuses over the course of its almost 30 years of publication. I'm not going to complain if the quality changes because of health problems, but it simply is just something that a reader would experience compared to someone who watched the anime (I have no clue how far into the series the anime covers.)
With both the hiatuses and the general weirdness of the story, I'm not sure HXH is a series I would recommend for someone to read. I still think the good parts are good, it is just that the series has multiple asterisks next to it when I call it good. One has to be okay with multiple caveats before I would tell someone to read it. It puts me in a silly location because I think my favorite arc is the current one. I'm at a real threat of never seeing the end of it, and I have to say that this weird series hits it's stride 300 chapters in.
I think I'm generally on the same page regarding Hunter x Hunter.
My favourite arc was Greed Island because the obsessively detailed style of writing / world building / describing the rules for everything fit perfectly with what was happening in the story (i.e. people playing a literal video game). I actually loved that sometimes there'd just be a D&D manual-esque page with a bunch of cool items the writer came up with that never show up in the story at all! However, the same meandering writing that likes to wander into all sorts of side streets put me to sleep in the election arc and is doing no favours for the current ultra-complex succession arc with its giant cast and dozens of plotlines running at once, many of which seem completely unimportant (but by contrast, the more narrowly focused stories like the plotline with Nobunaga's team and the current flashback plotline are still enjoyable for me).
As I understand it, Togashi has had difficulty regularly putting out Hunter X Hunter due to back pain issues, but refuses to let anyone else take over the art in spite of it suffering in quality and often effectively just being published in rough form. This has also meant some incredibly long hiatuses between chapters coming out in the past (albeit improving recently) which would have gotten anyone else cut from even the most reasonable magazine, let alone Weekly Shounen Jump, which has a reputation for being ruthless about cancelling serials at the drop of a hat.
I'm guessing part of that is that Togashi is well known for putting out popular stuff in the past (Yu Yu Hakusho / Level E / early Hunter x Hunter) and is kind of difficult to can or move to a less prestigious magazine, but the other half is probably that Togashi is also fabulously rich from his earlier work (and married to the similarly wealthy Sailor Moon author Takeuchi Naoko to boot), so the editorial staff don't really have a lot of leverage over him either. Whatever the reason, it's kind of funny that Hunter x Hunter remains in their flagship weekly magazine despite not having been weekly for a long time now.
What I would add is that you should be prepared for a lot of reading, particularly in the later arcs where Togashi clearly still has a lot of ideas he wants to get out but his body isn't producing the art to keep up with it.
For Hunter x Hunter anime, the 1999 show stops right after the Greed Island arc. It’s got some filler episodes scattered throughout, but most of them are surprisingly decent for anime-original filler and I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t looked it up. Most of it consists of traditional cel animation with a contrasty art style that gives a darker, moody atmosphere and is generally a vibe. The exception to this is the Greed Island arc, which was among the earlier digital transition shows, and as a result looks a lot more generic. Worth a watch despite only covering a fraction of the source material.
The 2011 anime stops right after the Chimera Ant arc (or was it the Election Arc? I forget). It strictly follows the manga and has consistently high quality, but suffers a bit from that washed-out look that was popular at that point. It delivers on the most important moments, though, and for the most part is a good time. I would say its main issue is that it dragged out the pacing on the Chimera Ant arc too much… that could’ve probably been cut down by a third or maybe even a half and would’ve been as effective.
I haven’t read the manga and keep hoping that Madhouse picks back up where they left off with 2011, but that unfortunately seems unlikely.
Just started airing on Crunchyroll today with a double-length first episode is https://myanimelist.net/anime/59205/Clevatess__Majuu_no_Ou_to_Akago_to_Shikabane_no_Yuusha. It was pretty decent and I plan to continue to watch it.
Lots of spoilers
The basic premise of the show is that a being far beyond the strength of humanity, or humanoids as this show puts the collection of different races (which are actually unique?!? not just human+elf+dwarf), has decided to wipe out humanoids after they attacked his land and him. This being could roughly be approximated as a proxy for a dragon or demon lord or any other kind of living calamity due to being characterized by overwhelming power and a general sense of timelessness (he remarks that prior to the events of the show it had been 1000 years since he last encountered humanoids). I like both the visual design and power design of him.
The humans that attack him are called the 13 heroes and get promptly wiped out. After this he seeks out the king that sent them, attacks the capital, kills the king, and makes the decision to destroy humanoids. As he is leaving to start building his army he is called out to by a woman (? the character was kind of androgynous in design and voice so was either a woman or a young man, I don't recall and it isn't particularly relevant so I'm just going to say woman because it is more convenient for me if they can be disambiguated by just pronouns) asking him to save her baby. They have a brief conversation before she dies and he ultimately agrees to her request, even though he's the cause of the building crushing her her during his attack on the capital and king. He's in no rush due to how long his lifespan is relative to humanoids and delays his plan to destroy humanoids, ultimately deciding to stake the decision on whether or not to eliminate them on the outcome of raising this child.
In addition, he goes back to where he slaughtered the heroes that attacked him and revives a woman as effectively a zombie. His reason for picking her was that he assumed she would be able to feed the baby, though she cannot. As he doesn't know anything about raising human children they set off to raise this child, which begins with trying to find a wet nurse. It does do some generic anime-y stuff like him telling her to expose her breasts and her thinking its some sexual thing but its really just him only having a surface-level understanding of how humanoids biologically function.
Something about the revived hero is that she can think and act independently, but when commanded is unable to disobey. This is an effect of that she was revived as something equivalent to a zombie servant. She would like to get the child away from him and to safety. She would also just like to die rather than being a zombie servant. But more importantly she's aware that for some reason he has made the decision to raise this child and won't go back on it to the extent that if the child were to be taken or killed it would likely mean the end of all humanoids.
I'm too late to post in last week's thread, but I was also disappointed with the conclusion for Lazarus.
spoilers
I was expecting Skinner to speak at the end about his motives and how Hapna tied in to the issues faced by humanity, but it's really more of a "Well done, you cleared my game! Here's your prize!" speech with almost no allusions to anything other than the airport incident.They really tried to cram too much into the one final episode. The pacing might have been better if they'd just dropped the entire plotline with the assassin and focused more on the Hapna plotline. Feels a bit like he was put in just to facilitate all the cool fight scenes.
Spoilers
Semi-joking, but he should have had a line about how Hapna isn't to kill people's pain and is instead to kill the Earth's pain.
Totally agreed on the assassin plot too. It was kind of nothing.
And trying to tie it together with the airport incident felt silly. And this was a man that could demonstrably get his message plastered onto every screen in the world, but I'm to believe that he couldn't tell the world about the weapon?
And I'm to believe that no one recognized him? I recognized him in that scene originally. Well obviously not enough for a positive ID or anything, but I remember thinking "that guy looks a whole lot like Skinner".