What have you been watching/reading this week? (Anime/Manga)

I read Lady Snowblood, which I was excited to get to because of the connection to Kill Bill through its film adaptation, but I really wasn't a fan. There were occasional pretty panels and it's pretty bold for a manga from 1972, but there's a constant scummy feeling to the whole thing as it half-asses trying to justify its senseless erotic violence by inserting vengeance and constant rape scenes that feel more like justifications for the protagonist to fight naked than atrocities with real weight. It's not stylish enough to make up for that.

Though I've dipped my toes in it in the past, I started watching Initial D, which has been wonderful. Even as someone who refuses to drive, I feel a certain kinship with car people and the love and care many of them give their machines, and I love when anime / manga force me to love something I previously didn't care about. It's a good time, and reliving ancient eurobeat memes is a good feeling.

I started the second season of Mob Psycho 100 which is currently airing. I really liked the first season when it originally aired but this second one is blowing me away. One of the most pretty TV anime ever (and certainly for this decade), honestly. It's also obviously very earnest and charming in a way rarely seen with anime, everything with the Body Improvement Club being particularly wonderful in that way.

As AniList manga reading challenges opened up, I've been doing a bit in that area. I had some experience with the Ghost in the Shell manga but I recently finished it and wasn't super impressed. I give it credit for some great ideas and aesthetic choices borrowed by the movie adaptation, but nearly every change from the manga to Mamoru Oshii's film was the right one to make, leaving this one as strictly inferior in my mind. The political focus in particular is very clumsy and takes away from the experience.

Watashitachi no Tamura-kun was also something I checked out just because I trust Yuyuko Takemiya to deliver quality, but this felt pretty immature compared to her other work. The ending is pretty sweet, but it's just a rushed work that doesn't really make much of an identity for itself.

I'm currently reading The Drifting Classroom, which is currently blowing me away but thanks to its similarity to Lord of the Flies could end up falling flat in my eyes, I don't know. I'll just take the description since it's not as popular as I would think:

Following the occurrence of a strange earthquake, an elementary school mysteriously disappears, in which only a giant hole where the school once stood, remains. While the police and worried parents alike think that everybody in the school were somehow killed, the students and staff find themselves and their school in the middle of a barren wasteland. As chaos and panic begins to engulf the school and its inhabitants, sixth-grader Sho Takamatsu and his friends attempt to find out just what happened to them, while trying to stay alive.

It's working within my favorite area of post-apocalyptic fiction, which are the ones that are actively about trying to build something positive (in this case, organizing and government ran by children) in the face of extreme brutality and hopelessness. I don't know where it goes and it could easily fall apart, but honestly right now I feel like I just discovered a classic on the level of Monster or Nausicaa but that only gets recognized as an inspiration to other things and is hardly ever talked about.

I don't watch much anime, but my wife watches a ton. We were looking for something to watch together the other night, so I just picked something random that she had in her Crunchyroll queue but hadn't started yet, and we watched the first few episodes of Angels of Death (Satsuriku no Tenshi).

I didn't know anything about it beforehand, but it hasn't really grabbed me so far. It's been pretty formulaic for the first few episodes, and the "floors" setup definitely makes it fit into the monster-of-the-week style really easily. The characters are pretty one-dimensional so far too, but hopefully that'll improve. I didn't know that it was based on a game, but it didn't really surprise me to find that out. Something about the style just made it feel like a game adaptation for some reason, I think I might have felt like they were making references to game-like things that seemed irrelevant to the anime itself.

I'm not totally sure if I'll continue with it, has anyone already watched it that can recommend whether it's worth pushing through the slow start or not?

Just watched the first 3 episodes of Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari. It goes in an opposite direction than you expect, and so far it skirts around the usual tropes of the genre. Minimal fan service, too.

Dororo is off to not-bad start, too.

Just read one that was called badluck, which is about a girl who has the power to curse other people. It’s a comedy so you can imagine, she cursed the class prez to be 100% honest and I laugh so much