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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!
Finally finished Lone Wolf and Cub manga after several months and 28 volumes. Overall review is I liked it, and would recommend to anyone who enjoys a very serious samurai story, and doesn't mind some occasionally gratuitous nudity and plenty of violence.
More in-depth, I feel like the series was padded out, and that a third of it could've easily been cut without impacting either the narrative or the vibe of the story. And that not to say I think a series should just railroad the main narrative at all times; in contrary, the "adventure of the week" style that most of the series takes is something I praised in an earlier post, and still does a good job of showing the "world" of Edo period Japan and the context the story takes place in. What I do mean is that the narrative itself gets drawn out: seemingly invented diversions get created for our hero at several points, including some that end up contradictory,
spoilers
like, he spends several volumes getting and figuring out the secret of the Yagyu letter, and then just decides... nevermind?
There's also an escalation of enemies that feels like the author kept having to one-up himself; every other volume some new, even-more-elite-than-the-last group of warriors gets introduced, shown to be badass, then promptly dispatched by Itto and forgotten.
Regarding Itto over the course of the series, I wish his power scaling had been treated differently. He starts the series as a pretty dang good swordsman, but also a really clever guy who uses knowledge and subversions of Edo standards and customs to accomplish his goals. As the series goes on though, he loses his cleverness, and instead just becomes "really, unrealistically good at swords".
He really jumped the shark for me when
he defeated an entire mounted and armored army by just being good at swords, and especially later when in a drug-induced sleep his warrior reflexes still dispatch an entire group of enemies attacking him, including deflecting projectiles thrown at him, all while dead asleep.
It seems like Koike got tired of trying to come up with clever situations, in favor of a god-like samurai narrative instead.
Yagyu spoilers towards the end
The reverse heel turn of Retsudo going from a scheming guy willing to do anything into an honorable samurai during the Abe arc also felt really out of character, and was then even more confusing by his ending re-heel-turn of going back to dastardly tricks with the exploding ninjas and breaking the sword. And then after all that, he lets Daigoro kill him??
That's all to say, it's not a masterpiece of consistent characterization or stakes-progression, but despite my criticisms it was still a very enjoyable read, and I would recommend it with only little reservation
It's not the only thing I'm watching, but I wanted to mention the underrated gem that is Megami "Isekai Tensei Nani ni Naritai desu ka" Ore "Yuusha no Rokkotsu de", also more reasonably known as Megami, My Ribdiculous Reincarnation or (apparently, according to MAL?) Ribsekai. I'll use "Megami".
It's a heavily episodic show that's a little like Isekai Ojisan. Unnamed protagonist "Ore" is a goofball who dies before his time, and is given by a complex cosmic divine bureaucracy the chance to reincarnate. The goddess in charge of his case "Megami-sama" will let him become whatever he thinks will help him find fulfilment, but all the juicy roles in all of the worlds have massive waiting queues, so in the first episode he chooses to reincarnate as one of the hero's ribs.
That only lasts for one episode, and "ribs" are never mentioned again (bad title!) Ore is out of ideas so he uses a random lottery to decide on increasingly more stupid and unhinged things to reincarnate as, at a rate of two per episode. He never finds satisfaction and always returns to Megami-sama with a souvenir. Together, they use a device that plugs into his memories to watch and comment on his most recent life.
Each 10 minute long adventure, which takes place in its own world, is drawn and animated using a completely different style. Megami feels like an art school's student project exhibition, presenting the viewers with a vertiginous parade of papercraft, stop motion, pencilled backgrounds, watercolors, 3D animation, live action, even a little bit of generative AI (thankfully not too much so far). The little stories often incorporate and subvert clichés from the Isekai genre - for example, there's typically a hero or a demon king - but they're never meant to be taken seriously. There are other cultural references which might be varying degrees of recognizable or not to western viewers.
We're only a few episodes in but so far Megami does a good job of keeping fresh and interesting within the confines of what it's trying to do. It's an undemanding show that can be enjoyed without too much investment into any long term story, since even between reincarnations, Ore and Megami-sama interact with each other mainly like a slapstick comedy duo.