12
votes
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!
Kaguya-Sama: Love is War
TL;DR: Really enjoying it!
I just thought the first episode was okay, but I liked how the premise of the show addresses a common problem with romantic comedies: why don't the two just talk to one another? Since the two main characters are both highly competitive, over-analytical, and romantically inexperienced, they're afraid of being the "loser" to confess love first.
And the more I watched, the more likable the characters became. I think an important part about the main couple is that, while they think that the person who confesses love first becomes subservient to the other, they never actually want to dominate the other, they're just afraid of being the loser. It's a bit of dramatic irony, and makes them a lot more sympathetic. There's even a recurring joke about other students coming to them for relationship advice, and they actually give good advice just by faking expertise. The fact that they can reason through a situation and support others, but are too anxious to help themselves, is a surprisingly nice and realistic touch.
Then there's Chika, meme queen. I hate the "dumb character" archetype, but Chika manages to occupy a similar space but in a much smarter way. It's not that she's dumb—quite the contrary—but that she's oblivious to the game between Shinomiya and Shirogane (and that makes sense, because their stand-off is so silly it probably wouldn't occur to anyone else). So, combined with her general goofiness, she can keep throwing wrenches into their plans without turning into a lazy or mean-spirited trope.
Plus, the voice actors are absolutely fantastic, and I think they're all relatively new up-and-comers. The animation is also pretty great, making plenty of subtle but really neat choices.
Interesting, it was quite the opposite for me. I really liked episode 1, but from there on it went downhill. I agree that the premise was used in a tasteful way and your analysis is spot on, but it was not used to it's full potential.
The first episode established the premise which I found especially great because it makes fun of the trope I usually really hate. I also loved the visual trickery (which is apparently SHAFT's influence) that added a lot to the already ridiculous situations and character dynamics were off to a great start - each had their own moments and the comedy was quite funny too. I was quite looking forward to how the schemes, to get the other to confess, would evolve into evermore bizarre and silly ones. But watching the subsequent episodes I was left waiting. I think it never went far from the initial episode and remained a tad too tame and became repetitive.
My dissapointment probably has it's roots in my own expectations, but I feel like the show never reached it's full potential. I thought it would develop into something akin to JoJo's tense mindgames with multiple outrageous twists, overblown reactions and sweaty foreheads. They probably did this to avoid going too far into absurdity and risk losing immersion when the eventual confession comes. I don't know wether they actually did any confessions, because I dropped Kaguya at episode 8, but I see no other reason why they didn't want to up the ante. It would've been far more entertaining if they scrapped the kind of repetitive structure though and went for something a bit more out-there.
(That Chika ED was a banger though!)
Yeah, it might just come down to personal preference. It's mostly a sitcom with some mind game elements there for structure. I'm okay with that, since the mind games are there to give the characters understandable motivations and get them into entertaining situations. If the draw for you was the mind games themselves, and you just liked the romantic comedy element as the framing device or for a funny contrast, I can see how you'd like the ratio less.
So with the first episode, the overly dramatic game about the movie tickets kind of fell flat to me. It was moderately entertaining in its own right (personal preference), but I wasn't invested in the characters yet, and I could see it getting boring after a while.
It's also based on a manga which I think is still ongoing. If they just kept escalating it, you're right, I think it would get absurd. It's like the problem of escalation battle shounen have. JoJo's manages to avoid it by having interesting stand powers, and—importantly—introducing new characters and powers for the characters to interact with. That's not really an option when this show's pretty clearly centered around two characters.
And that ED came out of absolutely nowhere, but I'm so glad it did. :p
Ah no, I loved the mind games! It's just that I wished they would've gone beyond what they did. I would've preferred the absurdity over the repetitiveness. I felt as if they were held back by the idea of needing a cute happy ending (which I might be totally wrong on, because ultimately I didn't finish the show). But it's definitely a matter of taste.
By the way, if you've got an animelist, would you mind dropping it here? I'd be interested!
Oh, definitely, that's what I meant to get across. If you preferred the mind game side of things, I can see how you might not dig the show as much for not taking them far enough. I just liked it well enough as a sitcom that the level of mind games seems about right.
And sure, I've got profiles on Anilist and MyAnimeList. I only started using them recently, though, just to check them out. Don't even have enough experience to tell if I prefer one or want to keep up with them. :p
There's also AniDB which, while a bit less user-friendly, I've read has the largest and most accurate database, and no ads.
My Profile
Damn, never heard of it, but at a glance looks quite good. Is there a way to migrate from other sites?
You can import a MyAnimeList export (or anything else that exports in that format), though I haven’t tried that
Added! I'll poke around a bit more soon. :)
Ah, gotcha, must've misunderstood you.
Yeah, it's a tough choice. I opted for MAL, but keeping both up to date should be easy because Anilist has a MAL synchronization button somewhere. Added you on MAL though - to give you 1 more reason to stick to that ;)
Added!
Now that I think about it, is there a Tildes group on either of those? It might be a fun idea.
Hmm, I doubt it, Tildes is still quite small. But I never used them as social platforms, so no idea. 🤔
Ah, yeah. Honestly, I wasn't even thinking of it as another social platform, more as a way to create a list of Tildes's favorite anime. :p /r/boardgames did something similar on BoardGameGeek, a similar site for board games. Never use the forums there, but it was a neat way to see what games were popular on that subreddit.
Oh, but of course! Yeah, I see that being really interesting. Actually could make a whole separate post about asking for Tildes' favorites, I mean who doesn't love to talk about their favorite stuff? In fact, I'll go digging - I never thought to search for favorites here on Tildes since I'm used to reddit where, every time a favorites thread is posted, the answers are always identical.
We've done some threads based on anime lists in the past but it's been a while and probably time to do it again, either framing it like that or just asking for people to share their lists...functionally not all that different, I guess.
One-Punch Man! The web comic and the manga, not the anime, although that premiered earlier today on Hulu, apparently. The illustrator of the manga adaption, Yusuke Murata, recently released the glorious Chapter 106, which has everything - Saitama, a good portion of the S-Class, reaction faces, Genos doing dishes. On top of that, the original web comic artist ONE released Chapter 110 just yesterday or the day before, the last chapter of which was released over two years ago. That's craaaaazy. Say what you will about OPM, but it's just the sort of entertaining, whimsical non-story that you want to curl up with on your phone and binge sometimes.
Been watching the more recent version of Space Battleship Yamato 2199 on and off for about a month now. It's not bad.