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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!
Serial Experiments Lain
A Jade Girl is jaded.
Summary (spoilers):
Hylic Layer: The Outer Lain ("Childish 玲音")
In a twilight world where the reckless creations of tech companies are alienating our youth, Lain Iwakura must decide whether she is merely their product or her own person.
Psychic Layer: The Inner Lain ("Advanced レイン")
A young woman, Alice Mizuki, is walking along with her fiancé when she spots a girl who reminds her of a dream she once had, a glimpse through the looking glass that prompted her to connect with and befriend her withdrawn schoolmate, Chisa Yomoda, back in 8th grade.
Pneumatic Layer: The Secret Lain ("Cunning Lain")
When we lose someone, be it a dying friend or even our childhood self, a person-shaped hole is left in the fabric of our reality. Lain is the fear and compassion that comes about when we fill that gap with our memories, our grief, and our coping mechanisms in a life that inevitably continues on. Lain is the pieces of ourselves that we see in others. Lain is the uncertainty and anxiety we experience in reconciling those oft disparate parts. She is no one, she is everyone, and she is only herself.
I need to rewatch this myself. I don't know if I'll ever truly understand it, but you've given me food for thought.
It's a tricky show, but that's what makes it so delightfully interesting.
If you'd rather the process of self-discovery on your rewatch, don't read the spoilers below. But if you want some further takes (with massive plot spoilers), then feel free to read on.
More Spoilers:
Beyond the Alice in Wonderland theme which is brought together at the end, we have a story of the timelessly difficult transition from girlhood into young-adulthood. On the one hand, Lain is Alice grappling with her own maturation. On the other, Lain is wonderland-Chisa's spirit (or rather, a construct of everyone's memories of her), after her suicide in the first episode. In that sense, Lain's family represents Chisa's family, slowly crumbling after their loss.
Back to the transition from girlhood, we are presented with events that many young girls face in both Japanese society and abroad, such as the pressure to participate in more adult activities like the Cyberia club, to the drugs that are quietly sold there, to judgements over the kinds of clothes they wear, to even the dicey interactions of invasive internet social circles. It's 1998 and these girls are already texting in class, and the rumor mill is already spearheaded online.
The idea of Lain as an aspect of the Buddha is something that the series writer actually mentions in a blog post. But, it's also completely on display in the end credits of each episode, where we see the fetal-positioned Lain, sleeping at the center of the artificial universe. It's a representation of tathāgatagarbha, the cosmic womb or innate nature of a person. 2001: A Space Odyssey is probably a more well-known depiction of this.
On the subject of Lain as the bodhisattva Guānyīn ("Kannon" in Japanese), I mention the Jade Girl 玉女 as it's actually an epithet in Buddhist and Dàoist esoterism for the originally enlightened self at the center of a woman. What's interesting about Lain's name in Kanji is it's meaning; 玲音 is "the sound of clinking jade," which ties into Guānyīn's role as the one who "perceives the sounds/cries of the world." The Lain seen radiating through the parted clouds is also another cultural depiction of Guānyīn.
But let's set the subject of enlightened womanhood aside for a sec and talk about Eiri Masami. He's not just the Tetsuo to Lain's Akira. In a Buddhist sense, he represents a deva that has fallen for the allure of the heavenly realms, rather than continuing onward to buddahood. When the series brings Jungianism into the mix by introducing concepts such as the Collective Unconscious, they are also opening the door to comparing Eiri Masami's godhood to that of the Gnostic Demiurge, the false god over the lower realm of physical existence who, like a prideful deva, is ignorant of the higher workings above him.
Eiri Masami also provides a good transition to the series' socio-political commentary. Not only do tech companies like Tachibana General Labs represent the troubles of highly accelerating capitalist innovations, they also play a role in representing some of the negative influences of Western culture, a notion that Serial Experiments Lain was meant to portray a sort of resistance to, according to to the series' producers.
Lain's airing came only three years after the Tokyo subway sarin gas attacks that were perpetrated by Buddhist/Christian Fundamentalist eclectic cult Aum Shinrikyo. It's leader, Shōkō Asahara, declared himself to be the Christ and advocated that in order to save others from both the immanent end of the world and from further accumulating their bad karma, members of Aum had to kill and liberate people from their bodies. It's this then-recent cultural backdrop in which we the viewers are introduced to Eiri Masami, a false god of The Wired who is encouraging children to give up their bodies through suicide in order to join him there.
Attributing the statuses of "supreme god" to Masami and "buddha" to Lain is also a way of exploring the idea of (implicitly Christianized) American might being at odds with the (folkic/Buddhist) Japanese culture, especially in the post-reconstruction era. Sidenote: whereas Lain is looking at Western social and market imperialism, the fear of political imperialism from within at the height of post-reconstruction is a theme at the heart of the aforementioned Akira. With Lain's subtle occasional references to Akira, what the show's also doing is building further on ideas of near-future anxieties in the advancing society of Japan.
Hopefully that provides some more food for thought.
That's opened up a couple new rabbit holes for me - fantastic, thanks! I had a decent grasp of the social context of its release but I didn't catch the finer details of the religious symbolism. I don't know how much of what you posted has been considered by fans (I've never looked up any analysis of the show as I've been meaning to give it another go first), but the allusions to Akira are new to me. Is there any discussion of that you an point me to, so that you don't have to type up another storm?
Also, have you ever watched the 2019 Blade of the Immortal ONA? Given your knowledge in Buddhism and Daoism, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it.
I think the show's been rather thoroughly analyzed, and pretty much everything I've shared has been typed up by people before me, if not on the English internet, then certainly in the Japanese spheres.
More Spoilers (Akira and some yadda-yadda-yadda):
Well, I can't find any direct statements from the producers on what animes they referenced, but there's a few different forum posts over the last two decades that point it out. But at a most basic level, Lain's trope of a shadowy agency experimenting on kids, and its themes of post/extra-human identity, maturity and agency in young adulthood, and the body-horror of change are all shared with Akira.
Some of the standout references come in episode 11, when Lain emulates the Navi within her mind. We're given a depiction of the fiery black core of digital enlightenment that's eerily familiar to Akira's physical awakening. After Alice's confrontation with the alien Lain, time skips to the next day. As Alice contemplates what is and isn't real about her situation, we hear the slow beat and long reverb of a taiko drum, which also reminds of Akira. In reality, Akira's soundtrack in meant to remind the cultural viewer of a Noh play (Ghost in the Shell is doing the same thing with Bunraku). (Also, Noh is an important aspect of understanding a similar psychological individuation piece, Perfect Blue. Alongside Utena, the pair of anime pieces manages to cover a lot of what Lain did a year before it came out. ) (Also-also, the flute track in Akira: the lyrics are Buddhist chants. There's a whole rabbit hole to go down with Akira's nationalist and Buddhist ideas, especially with its visual exploration of the conceptual city as a collection of organs that form a macro-organism. Back to Lain, though!)
The writer mentions an another blog post that in episode 12, Eiri's reincarnate form was, at least on paper, supposed to be reminiscent of Cronenberg, but once animated, people inevitably drew allusions to Akira, even though, as he points out, the meanings of the respective scenes are opposite (Tetsuo losing control, Eiri exerting it).
I have not seen Blade of the Immortal, but I can tell you right off the bat that the life-giving "bloodworms" are probably a mirror-flip of the Sānchóng. Also, in Japanese folklore, Yao Bikuni (八百 比丘尼, lit. "Eight-hundred [year old] bǐqiūní/bhikṣuṇī/'Buddhist nun'") was a woman who ate
ningyo, sorry, ningyo flesh and gained earthly immortality. Anyway, it sounds really interesting! I'll put this on my need-to-watch list!EDIT: It's also worth mentioning that Lain's story writer, Chiaki Konaka, also co-wrote Armitage III, an OVA that came out in the same year as GitS the film. It leaned heavily on cyberpunk tropes, but its iconic scene of androids being burned alive in a mass pile has been referenced by later works such as The Animatrix and GitS 2: Innocence. A III is also a major influence on the 2023 French animated film Mars Express.
I've made a bunch of Lain notes and bookmarks and will likely compile my own little rewatch companion when I finally get back to it.
At the risk of overselling it, Blade of the Immortal is one of only two anime I've ever rated as a 10. Now, I won't quite say it's perfect - it has a lot of graphic violence, which is plainly not everyone's cup of tea. Also, it's nowhere near as cerebral as Lain. There are some fairly clear philosophical themes threaded through it though, and perhaps a few not-so-clear ones as well - that's where I was hoping that you would have come in lol. The excellence is in the overall execution, as a series that doesn't hold its viewer's hand but leaves so much in the details for the attentive viewer that scrutinizing the subtext isn't discouragingly painful. By all accounts, the manga it's based on is fantastic, to the extent that many of its readers were upset about how much was left out, and that content would probably have highlighted the themes more explicitly. Still, I absolutely vouch for this adaptation.
BUT WAIT
I can't believe I didn't think of this first.
Have. you. heard. of. Nine Sols??
The lore of this Taopunk gem has got to be right up your alley. I know it was right up mine!
Thanks for the warning about the violence! I'll definitely check it out in the near future, though!
Ooh, you know, I have not heard of Nine Sols. I'm pretty behind on the current world of video games as well, hahaha! Looks like quite the romp from the Heavens to the Yellow Springs. I'll be sure to give it a good look!!
It's been so long since I've watched it on potato quality realmedia downloads. I need to rewatch it and come back and pick your brains
Gahhh!! Realmedia?! That takes me back! That's how my sister and I watched the last season of Sailor Moon, way back when. Oh gosh, hahaha.
Yeah, feel free to discuss when you get around to it! It's a bit dark and rather grim at some points, but it ends on a happy and hopeful note and it has such a positive theme of compassion.
I read Masakazu Ishiguro's Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru/And Yet the Town Keeps Turning, which I've seen a few people shorten to Soremachi. It's a slice of life coming of age story about a girl named Hotori Arashiyama, who is a high school student who works at a small local restaurant, whose main hobby is reading detective mysteries. It is very cool, because it is told non linearly. Each chapter is a small slice of her high school career, but they are not in chronological order. The backgrounds are a littered with pieces of continuity, so you can actually place them in a timeline, but doing so isn't necessary to understand the story. The main theme is that her growth into an adult is built brick by brick. She becomes a new person through small incremental changes over a long period of time.
Hotori is a very compelling protagonist. She is an infectiously good person. She is a very kind and nurturing older sibling, a reliable friend, and an ardent supporter of her local community. But it's not like she's some perfect saint of a character. Her goodness is shown through small consistent acts of kindness in between her moments of failure.
Spoilers
I think she has a very strong arc of going from a foolish and naive child, to being a rational but still whimsical adult. This is most strongly shown through her relationship with detective novels. At the start of the series she literally wants to be a Sherlock Holmes style detective. Several chapters are dedicated to her trying to solve mysteries, some successfully and some not. Through those experiences, the series culminates into her becoming a writer, which allows her to experience the things she loves about mysteries in a more realistic and achievable way.
Overall it gets a big recommendation from me. Probably a top 3 SoL for me. I don't think anything will ever beat Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba&! for me, but this puts up a good fight and depending on the day, it may beat out my other favorite series, Hitoshi Ashinano's Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. I'd also heavily recommend Ishuro's currently ongoing series Tengoku Daimakyou. They are dramatically different series, with TD being a violent sci-fi action series, but they both use the non linear story telling formats, so if you enjoy that aspect in one of the series you'll probably enjoy it in the other.
Soremachi has an anime that I have not watched. It's animated by SHAFT, so I assume the visual quality is fairly high, but I don't know how good of an adaptation the story is.
This is hands down my favourite Ishiguro series (although Tengoku Daimakyou is also excellent). The whimsical way the dialogue is written, the silly expressions and sense of humour - even down to the little homages to old manga like Doraemon - all so good!
The anime adaptation is pretty good (and light on the Shinbou-isms as he was only supervising), but only covers a fraction of the manga, so I'd still lean towards recommending the manga.
For anyone who enjoyed Soremachi, I'd also recommend Dai Nana Joshikai Houkou, which is very stylistically similar and has been praised by Ishiguro himself.
I started reading Dai Nana Joshikai Houkou a while ago and stopped for some reason, should probably get back to it at some point. It's obviously much more sci-fi oriented, but I'd agree with the stylistic similarities between it and Soremachi, and I'd also recommend the parts that I did read.
Nearly finished with the currently available SpyxFamily manga, starting vol 14 now. Would recommend, fun slice of life with very goofy elements (relating to the main trio and their unique powers etc).
I do want to say though, I'm worried. I'm fairly new to manga, but it seems to be a custom that at the end of each volume the writer (and artist if it's someone different) will write a little blurb about whatever, usually something random from their life, and it's endearing. The last several volumes of SpyxFamily the author blurb has been all about how he feels overwhelmed and overworked and has no time for anything but making the manga anymore. I really hope mr manga guy takes care of himself, obviously I want more issues but more than that I don't want him to burn out and hurt himself on something he loved :(
The blurb you're referring to is usually called the afterword, and it's pretty standard in manga and light novel volumes. The content of the afterword can vary drastically depending on the author, with some clearly more interested in writing them than others. They often include thanks to readers and staff, small talk about their real life, and/or news involving their series. Mangaka schedules are often pretty brutal, so mentions of stress and deadlines aren't uncommon.
So many things. I've finished finals and I'm in a slow time and I've been taking advantage of it by doing so much nothing.
Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show is something I started watching entirely because of the aesthetics. It's campy as all getup which makes it fun to watch even though it's not particularly, uh, good otherwise.
I started watching Uglymug Epicfighter even though It couldn't possibly be good. I was surprised at how good it is for what's essentially "trash". Not all of the jokes are at the expense of the titular character's ugliness, and they can be surprisingly funny. Unfortunately it starts to fall flat fairly quickly, though; after about 4 episodes or so it just isn't that interesting.
The Water Magician is probably the one that surprised me the most. The slow take on the isekai formula is very much appreciated, and I like the personalities of the characters; something about the direction makes them seem more realistic and relatable - except for the fact that the main character is, of course, a low-key godlike figure. It also seems to lose some of it's steam roughly 5 episodes in - there's a major battle that happens sometime around here fought by the other characters that has slideshow animations and seems to have been treated as if it were a filler of sorts.
But the best show of this season that I've seen so far is Takopi's Original Sin. Basically everything about it is a spoiler and it's insane so I won't really go into detail.
Takopi
Best, wow, really. I read the manga but haven't watched the anime yet. I kept expecting one thing to happen but until the end it never did so I felt a little disappointed in the overall story
I don’t know if you’ll enjoy the anime after reading the manga. The thing that I’m enjoying the most out of it is that it’s kind of a rollercoaster that is really hard to predict. So here’s to hoping that I’ll enjoy whatever you were expecting not happening. 😅
I just finished reading Dr. Stone what a beautiful and inspiring story, from the characters to their goals I think it all works amazingly together.
Kids around the world should be exposed to it to foster the next generation of scientists.
The reboot was a bit more crazy than the main story, but also with a beautiful message, I would also recommend it if you enjoy the main story.
I've become too invested in the anime (I find it hard to not love anything that comes out of TMS), so I'm holding out until we get an ending out of it. But I honestly kind of want to read the manga just to look at the art. All of the samples I've seen of it are amazing.
This is the exact reason I decided to read the manga, I wanted to know the mysteries of the petrification device, I rarely read manga but the story was so intriguing that I needed it at a faster pace.
The anime is a good adaptation with basically no discrepancies in how the manga goes, so as long as you are fine waiting more to know the ending it's a good way to enjoy the story.
I read it several years ago and totally agree with you. It's a bit cheesy as an adult (as many WSJ manga are), but is still a really fun and motivating all-ages story. I loved how it's set up as an "edutainment" series, including plenty of real and interesting science tidbits, even if many of them end up being used a bit fantastically later in the series. Easily recommendable to pretty much anyone.
It's been a few years but I'm still a big Senku and Kohaku shipper.
This anime season is the last season isn't it? I hope we get an extended epilogue that fully animates all the many scenes at the end.
And man, I know Reboot is fanfic, even if it's from the official illustrator fanfic, but
Click to expand spoiler.
I just want Senku to have his father back....It seems to me that Kohaku has been a Kohaku/Senkuu shipper the whole time, but Senkuu has science to do lol.
I'm currently still on the first cour of the current season, but yeah, I believe the second cour is supposed to wrap it up. I've been watching since the first season aired.
Yeah he busy lol our man isn't above a political marriage or agreeing to date his EMS person afterall. There's no corner of his heart he would not turn over to the world for five Science points.
But there are little clues, he's not totally disinterested, he busy.
CITY: the animation
How can I convince more people to not pass on this gem?
Do you like your anime wholesome? How about cute critters? Crazy hijinks that yet feel grounded, nostalgic, and something that we've all experienced? Do you like creativity and pushing the craft of animation, colour, and visual art as storytelling media?
This season's Dan Da Dan pushes some boundaries of animation and I absolutely love them for it. But CITY, while deceptively "simple" in art decision appearances, gives them a very good run for their money as best anime of the year. And I mean it.
A typical episode of anime uses about 3000 drawings. One of the recent CITY episodes used 16,000, yes, in one episode. And it looked like it. It was so impressive I sat and rewound and watched it over and over again and I feel like I am still missing something. KyoAni adapted an entire Tankoubon volume into this one single episode, with the result being wholesome, rich, layered, hilarious and warm, and with no feeling of anything being rushed or crowded or cheaped out upon. They spared no expense. It is an utter achievement both visually and in tone, absolute masterclass of using audio visual medium to convey a singular mood.
Do not sleep on this, fellow animation fans.
Trailer . Edit: genre - slice of life, comedy. Same creator as Nichijou
Ooooookay, I'm convinced! City just moved to the top of my list. This looks so heartwarming, I'm gonna explode!
The only reason I haven't watched City is due to where it's streaming. I definitely want to see it though, Nichijou was a masterpiece so it's probably up my alley.