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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!
A couple weeks ago I finally got around to starting Flag, a kinda docufiction/docudrama series which has been on my PTW for years. It follows a photographer who is trying to track down a junior colleague working as an embedded journalist with UN peacekeeping forces in the midst of covering a vaguely Nepalese/Bhutanese civil war.
I'm currently on episode 7 of 13 and I'm not sure that it's quite found its voice just yet. It's been a slow burn so far, which is no problem, but it has only dug fairly shallowly into the political and emotional aspects behind the few catalytic events up to this point, so the impact of each has felt kinda muddled. Its unique conceit, showing much of the story from a first-person perspective through the camera lens, may have added to my difficulty of parsing it at first but I think I've settled into it now, so I dunno. I'm definitely still going to follow through to the end. Hopefully it comes together; I'm all for anime that the audience can take seriously and this at least attempts to be one.
Been watching One Frame Man, though episode 9 was decent.
I've also been watching Digimon Beatbreak though it hasn't really pulled me in. The plot seems to be a slow burn but a bit too slow for my liking.
I watched a One Piece theory video that got me to go and catch up with the manga (which to be fair was only 6. chapters).
I really enjoy One Piece, and I watched also watched a video that explained some criticisms that the video's creator has for current One Piece which I agreed with, with the main one being that the cast has become bloated, and now key characters aren't getting as much development post time skip in recent arcs. There are also so many characters that get introduced in each arc that it can be hard to really connect with some of them, or feel any attachment to them.
One other criticism they had was that One Piece's panels now are so "busy" compared to earlier One Piece and that some action scenes aren't able to "breath" for lack of a better term. I completely agree with that, as I noticed in my reread that as the story went on there's always so many things going on in each panel that it feels like Oda is trying to get in as much story/action/development in on each page as he can. That lined up with something I remember reading years ago, where Oda had expressed that he wished at times that he could write longer chapters to explore some things, but he is capped at the Shōnen Jump limit of 18 pages per chapter.
I don't think that Oda would obviously listen to the opinions of some random guy on YouTube, and I don't think any of these at the end of the day stop One Piece being an amazing manga. Manga is also an art form where you can see the artist develop and change over the years in an almost linear fashion. I am sure that the day One Piece ends, I'm going to read the final chapter and then immediately start a binge read through the series again.
I also watched a few more Armored Trooper Votoms, but I'm going to wait till next week to post my thoughts on those once I finish the episode I'm on. Fantastic series so far!
We had a decent snowstorm yesterday, and I started rewatching Fullmetal Alchemist (2003). I've gone through it every few years since my buddy in junior high first gave it to me 20 years ago on a dozen or so burned DVDs . I don't care for most anime, but this show is like comfort food to me.
Watching season 2 of the Ranma 1/2 remake. This series is really just so endearing to me and I've been enjoying each and every episode since it came out. Love what MAPPA has done and hope to see more soon (if the season ends off at episode 12 like season 1 did).
I also started watching Apothecary Diaries. It's got me hooked so far--so much so that I watched the first four episodes the same say I started it. Very interesting premise, although there's a lot going on that is... daunting, to say the least. Nothing I can't get past though.