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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!
Madoka Magica, 3rd film: Rebellion
This was recommended to me by @moocow1452 here, where I have my opinion to Madoka series, which is kinda relevant to this. Tl;dr: Madoka is great, watch it! But the ending is weird.
So, Moocow:
Thank you for your recommendation, I guess? I'm not sure what to think about it. I'm not sure if I liked it. It was ... weird.
I couldn't resist but to make notes while watching this:
I'm certainly grateful to you that you mentioned it. It was weird, but certainly wery ... strong experience. Before this, I wished I dropped Madoka after Homura's special episode (10th or so) - the ending kinda weakened whole series for me. Now, I ... I don't know. It was weird. I think I'll need to rewatch Madoka once more to form an opinion. This was too much at once for me. It was so fast paced to the end I had trouble trying to put everything together. If they cut the beginning a bit and made the end slower, I might enjoy it much more.
I'd recommend the film if you already watched last episode. If you didn't continue after 10th (or so) episode (the one with Homura), well... The ending is not what you expect, but it was not bad. It was just ... weird. It steers whole series in another direction.
It showed me the world from Madoka series in completely different light. I'm not sure if I wanted to know it, but I'm glad you mentioned it, Moocow.
Yeah, Rebellion is kind of notorious for being either unnecessary trash that makes the series worse or insightful criticism on the nature on the show, similar to End of Evangelion to it's series, and The Last Jedi to the Star Wars saga. A number of people have written a lot of words on what it all means, and I'm going to continue that tradition if you don't mind.
Rebellion
Rebellion the movie is all about the act of rebellion, in the sense that people have set a plan and a contract in play, but people involved weren't informed and decide to fight the power. Madoka rebelled and created The Law of Cycles, the Incubators rebelled and trapped Homura inside of her own witches labyrinth. Homura rebelled against her labyrinth, her friends rebelled against Homulilly, and Homulilly rebels against Madokami, ripping her out of the universe "for her own good." Now obviously, conflict is a part of any story, but the point to all this is these characters are part of a system, find it unjust, and rebel to change it to their liking.
That twenty minutes at the beginning you thought could be cut was studio going down the list of what some people wanted out of a Madoka movie, all five girls fighting together and being girls and having fun, cause they won and all is well and Madoka is just another moe show, but it's not. You would have to rewrite the universe for it to be even possible for all five girls to be alive and friends with one another, so they do, and it goes okay, until Homura catches on and rebels, and the world is revealed to be a fabrication.
At the climax of the movie, Homura embraces the fabrication of reality, and expands her labyrinth to encompass all of creation to make a perfect world for herself and her friends. Homura's wish was to have the power to protect Madoka, and as Madoka installed herself as a fundamental force of the universe, that option is on the table. Is it moral though, as Madoka said she would be sad if she had to leave her friends behind within the Labyrinth, but that Madoka wasn't aware of the situation, and she probably wouldn't want Homura to be the one who would take on her burden. So IMO, Homura was capable of become Satan, it's not beyond her character to do so morally, and it was one of those selfishly selfless decisions that make assigning a measure of virtue to it difficult.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk, and if this ramble has a fraction of the incomprehensibility of the movie, I feel that it has been a success.
I either need a good night sleep or rewatch whole Madoka. Probably both.
Btw, thanks for mentioning Homura’s wish - it makes more sense now, I didn’t consider it at all before and wondered how did she managed to do it all.
Still, the very ending in school was... I had to rewatch it three times to make sure that no, there is really no hidden connection to original pre-11th-episode Madoka.
I originally didn’t get the ending, but considering Homura’s wish, it actually makes sense.
Still, if I had one wish, I would like to watch Madoka once again, untainted by previous experience. But this time, only up to ending of 10th episode.
If they ended it with 10th episode, I would probably like it more? The whole rule rewriting part was really too far into fantasy for me, as opposed to primarily psychological anime, which it has been evolving into since 3rd episode.
Episodes 11 and 12 were delayed after the big earthquake and flooding that year, so you might have gotten your wish in another lifetime.
PMMM eps. 11-12
But I kind of think that the finale was kind of instrumental to the show, both because it was an ending and the girls still needed to fight Walpurgisnacht, and Madoka needed to make her wish to create the Law of Cycles. Would it have ended on episode 10, it would have been Homura going back in time, rolling the boulder up the hill again and again. Madoka was able to use that snag in karmic destiny to break the Incubators control and make a system where magical girls don't become witches and the Incubators get enough adolescent girl angst to stop entropy, and Homura gets to rest. For now, they beat back the darkness and with it, the existential nihilism that nothing you do matters, except to make it harder for your friends or more tragic when you turn. They won, until Homura undoes that, and if they hadn't, it would have been the adventures of sisyphus girl, not the tale of the girl who challenged the gods and won.GRANBELM
Show, you're eight episodes in and I get you want to play this close to your chest, but I swear to God if you are slow rolling your way to the villain being GRANBELM itself when we all kinda knew it from the beginning, I take back every good thing I've said about you.Maidens
This is turning out way too well for everyone 8 episodes in, and I'm expecting a massive falling out, because Niina decided "I should take my pedo mentor's advice and start a love triangle! That makes me an adult!"Demon Girl Next Door
Somehow still my AOTS, as the plot has moved past Demon Girl getting Magical Girl's blood to break her rent curse, and now has the newly empowered Demon Girl being trained by the depowered Magical Girl to stop Light and Dark Clans from picking fights while she's recovering, so it started as a gag a day, and turned into Bleach, depending on how it sticks the landing. They're intoducing a new magical girl next episode, and I'd like for it to go into how the whole Light Clan/Dark Clan thing started and maybe how these two can end it, but that might be beyond the scope of the show.Astra: Lost in Space
It's a mystery, I kinda read ahead and the characters aren't really doing it for me.Cannon Busters - ep. 1-5/12
It's a whole lot of things, all from the '90s. It seems to have settled on a road show with a bit of palace intrigue, and it's probably going to be somebody's favorite show, but not mine.Vampire Hunter D
A solid action movie, exactly what you expect it to be. I dig the look, so it was mostly a bit of eye candy for me.Belladonna of Sadness (nsfw, trigger.rape)
This was a pretty awful film. It's beautiful (despite being a whole lot of still frames...) and I can appreciate it on that level, but it's exploitative of rape in a way that reminds me of *Lady Snowblood*. Using rape as a motivator for a revenge plot feels a bit off, but I could accept that if it didn't consistently make those rape scenes sensual, like watching this character be raped is supposed to be hot. It's disgusting and I hate it. The whole rape and revenge genre is icky to me, but this is especially bad. Other than that, it's just boring and I don't care.Buddha
As a work of fiction, this is nearly perfect and has such an overwhelmingly broad scope that just thinking about it makes me want to cry. I love stories which combine so many perspectives to tell one long tale at a massive scale.It works less well the more the reader remembers that this reflects a real major religion and philosophy, something which is inevitable. It's hard to look at something like the Buddha's handling of certain positive movements and truly see him as being enlightened. While real world Buddhism has a lot of nuance which understandably isn't taken into account here and I'm not all that educated on anyway, here we get hardline hippie Buddha, which can get overbearing and out of touch with what's happening around him.
It's excellent, just a bit frustrating at times.
Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!: Take on Me
I wrote a review here. Spoiler: It takes risks while also being a fan-pleaser and I love it.One Outs
This one is really tense, a good watch. If you like the clever mindgames of sports anime but don't want any of the personal moments, school life, romances, or whatever else gets thrown in others, watch this. I love those things in my sports anime, but this is *purely* about the sport. It's great.I just finished up watching Tada Never Falls In Love! It came out mid last year and I never really heard anything about it. It's a one season anime but I thought it was so sweet! It was nicely paced and how the characters' feelings get explored was really nice and kind of a breath of fresh air. It only came to my attention because youtube recommended me a video about it? And I think it only recommended it to me is because of my interest in Wotakoi: Love Is Hard for Otaku (a rlly great anime/web-manga) so I'm pretty happy that I was able to "find" it! No one I've talked to has heard about it which is a shame. It really is a sweet anime, and a quick watch. It was very tempting to binge but I resisted!
Ah, I started that as it was airing but fell off of it for no good reason, I'll probably go back and finish it.
Have you seen Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun? It's got a lot of stylistic and staff overlap which is what lead me to Tada-kun, so it's a pretty natural place to go if you haven't.
Definitely would recommend to finish it! There was a couple of things I was bummed about that the final episode(s) didn't address but overall it was a pretty cute ending!
I have seen Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-Kun!! I loved the anime so much, and I've been keeping up on the manga. I wish it got more frequent updates as well as a second season. It's such a fun show.