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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!
I just watched Mirai for the first time with my daughters. Really beautiful movie! They completely captured the dynamics of a house with small children.
Adachi to Shimamura
Pros
Other thoughts
Adachi to Shimamura was my first exposure to yuri anime, having been assured by the internet that this was a proper yuri anime and not just yuri-bait. That said, I can't help but feel slighted:
(Maybe spoilers)
while there's definitely a heavy romantic tension between the female leads, after 12 episodes nearly nothing has happened.And where are the dudes? I don't mean that in a "what about the menz" sense. The anime essentially just replaces all male characters with females ones such that the anime may as well have been about a generic, platonic hetero relationship. I really would've hoped for more social commentary, especially since Japan tends to be somewhat conservative (although I wouldn't go so far as to call Japan homophobic).
References
There was this anime called Flip Flappers that was premised as Quantum Leap, but into dreams. One of the leaps was into a similar setting where it was cute girls being cute together, but if there was anything more explicit than hand holding, they would be disappeared and nobody would remember them. The whole episode was a commentary on this sort of situation, where the girl love genre rejects anything that's more involved than two girls being comfortable around each other, as that would put off the homophobes who were still a valuable demographic.
I’m reading volume 4 of Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha. This is not a historic or religious account of the life of Sidharta, but rather a personal and highly fictionalized narrative with lots of conflict and adventure. It is also very irreverent – this Buddha is not an otherworldly ascetic, but rather a tridimensional character very much involved in mundane affairs. A fun, beautiful story full of comedy, that conveys, at the same time, a lot of valuable insights.
And the art is beautiful (to my taste at least).