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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'm so glad to see others mention City: The Animation! At this point I'm going to say this is the one of the most wholesome anime I've ever had the pleasure to enjoy. Even Azumanga Daioh had that one creepy teacher, Spy X Family had a high body count plus weird siskon, and Ghibli has a lot of creepy or scary stuff. If I need to recommend anime to brand new normal people, City will be it.
It's been a few weeks since this episode, but I still can't get over Dan Da Dan hiring the lead singer of DragonForce for English localization to Exorcism Song . If you're not watching the show yet but is/was a fan of DragonForce or glam rock or XJapan, give episode 18 a try
Can't agree more, though personally I feel like the Japanese singer hits the notes better. Either way the song is incredible, and I'm now on a power metal kick. I also heard, though I can't confirm, that they had Marty Friedman arrange the guitar for the song, which might be why I enjoyed it so much? I think I have a new goal of learning the song well enough to play along on the drums. I'm definitely not fast (or technical) enough right now but that can be fixed with some practice!
I usually only watch anime in JP because of old habits, but quality of dubs are really good these days. For this episode I greatly enjoy both :)
If you can play power metal and dress for glam rock that is the most amazing thing ever lol
I fell behind on some anime I've picked up recently like City The Animation, but I'll be catching back up on that slowly.
For manga, I've been into Tower Dungeon by Nihei Tsumotu. It's a pretty neat fantasy series that I've enjoyed for the past week or so and it's a good change of pace from the other mangas I've been reading lately.
Finally started Maison and the Man-Eating Apartment. Fairly recent ongoing series drawn by AKIMA (Tokunaga Akimasa), an artist I really love the illustrations of. It's very interesting so far! Surreal sci-fi with a big spoonful of Blame!.
Holy cow batman! It is pretty amazing
edit:
...and I wrote a userscript to restore spacebar scrolling on that site lol
In terms of anime, I'm actively following DanDaDan, Witch Watch and CITY: The Animation (though the latter I'm watching with a friend and we've fallen behind a few episodes). All are really fun in their own ways.
I'm also reading One Piece. I've long since given up on reading it in Japanese, the classical language in Skypiea broke me and I just got frustrated at how slow reading was. I'm now somewhere in the early 600s, so in the middle of
OP Arc
Fishman IslandThe last few arcs were all amazing, and I'm very excited to see where things go from here. Apart from a few arc names I know nothing of what's coming in the future, the only big OP spoiler I knew ahead of time was a certain event in the previous arc.
I'm procrastinating on starting work on the first week of the new term, so this morning has been me watching a bunch of anime that I had on pause while I was doing other things.
I watched the ending to Takopi's Original Sin, and now I'm a complete mess. It's the ugliest, most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
I honestly don't even know how to talk about this show because it's so traumatic and profound. It's amazing that someone can write a story that is about people being absolute monsters without being misanthropic. As someone who went through childhood trauma that took me decades to get over fully, this story feels like it was speaking directly to me at times. It's amazing. Happiness comes through talking.
more TW than spoiler.
One thing I thought was missing from the entire saga is **where are the adults?!** How on earth can they see her with bruises and cuts and dirty clothes and her desk covered in cuss and do nothing? Her parent being terrible is one thing. Where are the school adults? The people who sell her stationery not asking questions about why she needs another one?I went into the series thinking Takopi's being unable to understand human suffering and continuing to be cheerfully oblivious is the biggest and most awful original sin. That Takopi is an alien and that's their excuse, so where's ours.
In-universe, I view the adults as the source of the misery. Some may be going through stuff but they really don't have an excuse for their behavior.
But from a more literary perspective, the adults in the world represent forces outside the main characters' control. The main characters are depicted as children to represent how litle control they have over their lives but are otherwise everymen. Kind of like the kids in Lord of the Flies.
Oh absolutely the parents are horrible sources, eg hurt people hurt people etc. But I was still shocked by the non stakeholders being completely non existent as well. The big brother is the only perhaps resembling human adult.
I like your interpretation, that from a literary perspective they're more outside of characters' control and more distant than the stars.
I really loved that character. He did a lot to illustrate the point that talking leads to happiness, since he's initially introduced as a major accessory to Naoki's source of pain but a simple conversation with him was all it took to completely change his perspective on life. I've definitely had that kind of scenario happen when I was young.
But the absence of adults is particularly interesting when you think about how the police are portrayed. They literally only exist to antagonize the children. I thought that Japanese police were a bit different than they are here in the US but I have started to think maybe they're more similar than I imagined....
I think the discussion that follows here is on the money when it comes to the literary reason, but unfortunately adults are also very often willing to look the other way. Getting involved is messy and most people don't want messy.
If you watch anime you probably already know this, but I blew through Spy X Family and it was impeccable lol. Probably, genuinely, the best on-screen representation of parenting I've seen, and don't get me started on how it feels to see actual weaponized autism presented so accurately & honestly—guys I don't even think it's about being a spy.