Nah bro, this shit fell off. I was going to pull some punches here because I am an old man full of regret and self-doubt. It could be that I'm just bitter, I don't know what's funny anymore and I should just shut up and go to the bingo on my 4-wheel scooter. Maybe that is all real and true but NAH BRO, THIS SHIT DONE FELL OFFFFFFFF!!!!!
Konosuba was amazing. It played with the isekai and fantasy genre so effortlessly. The gags were always funny despite themselves, the characters were endearing and consistently written and likeable and likeably animated. Everything about the production of this
...
show in seasons 1 and 2 was complementary to the fun characters that on their default settings just interact with each other in such a way that they constantly spit roast the harem, fantasy, and isekai genres while being a pretty good entry in each category on merit. The animation style, the art style, the exaggerated expressions, the sound design, Megumin's random Sakuga explosions, the comedy, even the pervy stuff like when Kazuma assumes Darkness is part of the succubus dream service and acts all dominating and she was totally into it... konosuba has always been a harmonious ham sandwich of laughter and each episode a treasured bite. The world building always went kinda hard for me by revealing itself primarily through debacles and not really caring if you understand anything going on in the world overall as the viewer. Kazuma and the girls don't care either, they been chillin'.
The magic of the show was finding comedy in the gap between the potential, status, and random good fortune of the main cast who just cannot help but to turn it all to shit or a pyrrhic victory through narcissism, greed, perversion, and ego. Their faults always end up biting them in their collective asses time and time again, turning triumphs into catastrophes and making easy wins spastic fiascos. I was here for that shit. There was always this undertone in the show that everything was definitely going off the rails and getting ruined and you couldn't help but laugh because there is also this undertone that everything would just be so easy for them if they could somehow stop being a degenerate/crybabybimbo/masochist/egomaniac! That random URL of character traits I just listed clearly defines to anyone that has seen seasons 1 and 2 (and probably 3) Kazuma, Aqua, Darkness, and Megumin. These characters are fucking iconic and they were presented so well and interacted even better. The dialogue was always selling us on that core strength of the show. In season 3 it just really feels forced out. Because it feels forced and off-brand, that breaks immersion and makes me feel like these characters that have made me laugh so hard in their better moments, are being milked for their popularity. And that shit is corny as fuck and makes me frowny face.
The little sister lolibait premise? Corny as fuck.
The body swap artifact? Corny as fuck, used in a corny way for corny gags.
Darkness getting depressed and leaving the party or whatever? Corny as fuck.
Sneaking into the castle to steal the artifact? Corny as fuck.
Kazuma and Aqua at fine dining after getting all that money? Had its moments, but they overplayed that gag where they just freeze framed on each of their faces for like actually 10s, multiple times within a minute-ish? Corny as fuck!
I actively don't want to go back and remember what happened in season 3 because it just hit me as so damn corny and off-brand. It felt like someone was trying to capture the magic of the show and its characters on a much lower budget, with much less experience, and really didn't care if they did a good job. This season of konosuba has so far been way more in the spirit of that random Megumin spinoff, because like that show it doesn't seem to have a good grasp on what made konosuba great in the first place. Also, the production values on this show seem notably lower than previous seasons, the sound design is off and sticks out, the detail is lowered, the same expression is used for like 35% of the gags on multiple faces of characters within the gag which looks terrible. Best part of the season was the OP, and it is mid.
I could point out some moments that got a laugh out of me, but really I was expecting to hit the highs from previous seasons at least a handful of times. I wanted a hit of nostalgia, to feel like "konosuba is back, baby!" when I watched each episode the way I felt when I learned season 3 was coming out. None of that happened for me this time, my konosuba boner is at an all time low right now and that makes me sad.
Jun 3, 2024 Not Recommended Preliminary
(7/11 eps)
Nah bro, this shit fell off. I was going to pull some punches here because I am an old man full of regret and self-doubt. It could be that I'm just bitter, I don't know what's funny anymore and I should just shut up and go to the bingo on my 4-wheel scooter. Maybe that is all real and true but NAH BRO, THIS SHIT DONE FELL OFFFFFFFF!!!!!
Konosuba was amazing. It played with the isekai and fantasy genre so effortlessly. The gags were always funny despite themselves, the characters were endearing and consistently written and likeable and likeably animated. Everything about the production of this ...
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Feb 18, 2024
Vinland Saga Season 2
(Anime)
add
Mixed Feelings Spoiler
The main thrust of Vinland Saga S2 is Thorfinn becoming a farmer. I can appreciate that angle, despite all the off-model character animations and CGI/3D issues that were noticeable even to people like me who print nines, sevens, and fours so badly that the sharingan would be unable to distinguish them. The production values of Vinland Saga overall aren't great, but South Park needs almost no production values to be consistently hilarious because it is a satire on stupidity in the world and therefore looking stupid is actually a bonus. Demon Slayer, JJK, FLCL really do need the production values because they live and die
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by the Rule of Cool. What is needed as a baseline to produce sufficient and necessary quality to "get there" in Anime is subjective, but obviously the bar is different depending on the story, the waifus, etc. Vinland Saga definitely gets there, and it has some sequences that distinguish themselves, and really really nice artwork from the source material, so all together it sells us well enough on the gravitas of its characters and the time period visually. Besides there is so much more to Vinland Saga that is definitely worth making fun of.
Vinland Saga does not do "power scaling", alhough it's supposed to be a period piece. It happens less in season 2, but it's not like they fixed it compared to season 1. Swaths of grown men are constantly getting hewn from their lower halves by aerial blasts like we're sending Getsuga Tenshos through a bamboo forest. Any random edged weapon wielded by a named character in this anime could have easily overcome Gojo's infinity. One time, this big guy named Thorkell threw a spear like 2 miles and skewered four guys on one spear. There's also a guy from season 1 that is a cake from Netflix’s “Is It Cake?”, and predictably he is cleaved in two by a firm downwards pressure. Nobody could believe his metal plate helmet was cake all that time. A viking longboat is at one point casually sailed over a waterfall and we are worried it might sink, but it goes underwater and comes back up like a rubber ducky as expected. Four guys one spear man Thorkell, also enjoys sinking viking longboats by skewering them with pointy logs he launches off London bridge by hand. To be fair it is markedly better in Season 2 all the way until Thorfinn says "there's a trick to getting hit" and Anime gon Anime. I do understand the need to embellish for the bottom line. However, it would have been nice to see a more consistently human level of feats in Vinland Saga. As a medieval character drama Vinland Saga is great, especially Thorfinn. But as a period piece, it is pretty uninspired. The artwork in the source material is superb so it holds the eye, but not much needed to happen to construct a passable narrative given the period in history in which it is set and for that reason the only passable narrative with remedial fucking plot holes was unfortunate. First though, lets talk about the good stuff - Mr. Thorfinn "The Farmer", son of Thors "The Troll". Well-written characters Askeladd and Thors come together to motivate Thorfinn's archetypal journey, the son coming to understand his Fathers. There are so many visceral and poignant moments in Thorfinn's development, because we can respect his Dads as characters, we can understand their motivations and see their fatal flaws clearly. In Season 1, it is kind of a tragedy that Thorfinn gets his Dad killed because he's just a dumb kid that ignored that Dad's wishes and snuck onto the boat with the adults only to quickly be used as a hostage in the first scuffle they run into. It is also a tragedy that Thorfinn embarks on a quest to avenge his Dad, after he got him killed by being there at all, which plays right into the hands of the guy who killed his Dad, who adding insult to injury becomes his surrogate Dad. All of this is a cool setup for his character development but we kind of have to wait until season 2 for it to pay off because Thorfinn spends all of Season 1 screaming “You bastard! I’ll kill you! You bastard!” in that special Shounen MC tone that makes it feel like an ice cube just went up my asshole unexpectedly. When Thorfinn says "I have no enemies" after getting his face rearranged I really wish he'd just said that to Canute instead, after Canute agreed to meet him instead of not doing that. Canute being Hamlet at Home in season 2 created that stupid situation and it was super weird because he was just like "nah, I'll skip this one" and not "well he did try to kill me last time so maybe I shouldn't". They didn't even get the motivation right, he just said nah on a whim. Canute also apologizes for killing Askeladd which is weird after he said nah let him walk by. Also, his goons just let him through to see their KING after receiving a direct order not to, because the man won a bet about getting hit 100 times without dying? Ok, guys. Oh. Kay. Also, how fucking useless can Einar be at this point? Why is he there? I get that in the Season overall he's reminding Thorfinn of himself before he became a murderer and stuff but why is he there at the end, with Canute, who is apparently so hard to gain an audience with? Man gets in the ring mid-bet, he follows Thorfinn to meet with Canute... it was crazy. You know what else? Canute is so bootleg dude. Can we recall that Canute began the series as a NEET that likes cooking and does kuudere pinch-tugs at the tunic of his manservant, whispering in his ear so that the manservant will speak for him because he's scared stiff of public speaking? Then later on in season 1 he reflects on some passages from the bible or something like that and goes full greenpeace eco-terrorist, instantly and forever after producing testosterone at 10x the rate and gaining a new skill - Neo's open palm bullet freeze technique, which he uses to stop a rampaging cyberpsycho that is 10x his size and strength and had just killed about 800 people a minute ago. My mans character arc is whiplash on TRT. Unlike Canute's father whom Askeladd beheaded easily, Thorgil's strike at Canute's neck was blocked! V-I-S-U-A-L storytelling! Unlike his virgin father, Chadnute can send his rear guard off into a battle he shouldn't have attended anyways for also no reason, creating the opportunity in the first place for a beheading but then being able to block it too. Bruh. Canute is regularly conversing with his father’s disembodied head, in his own head, but saying out loud stuff like “finally someone who I can talk to” to the disembodied head with his servants able to hear him, as the inanimate crown twirls menacingly in the air sometimes enforcing its will because we might not "get it" otherwise. Hamlet copypasta and Hamlet was mid af anyways. Lets fix Canute. Hear me out for a sec. Lets say we've already got all the Kuudere pinch-tugging and cooking scenes animated and for whatever reason all that bullshit is non-negotiable about the character and remains in the show. We COULD STILL have let Canute take some of Bjorn’s berserker mushrooms in that one episode where he transitions. Picture that - after taking all the ridicule he could handle and probably not even that much tbf, he just wants to stop feeling like such a pussy and he just saw this raging behemoth eat these fucky mushrooms and he likes cooking. At least we could have a dumb funny instead dumb dumb reason for Canute's fever dream. Frankly Canute's brother Herald seemed like a much better character to follow around from that one flashback we got, but Canute unnecessarily poisoned him so its cooked. Remember when Thorgil (English VA was amazing for Thorgil btw) sneaks up behind Canute and tries to behead him then Canute looks at Thorgil wistfully as he swims off into the ocean and thinks “what a daring man… if only I could bring him back to my side…”. got it, so you need daring men but not the ones that are blood related. Gay tbh. Thorfinn says, “There’s a trick to getting hit.” and I say Thorfinn u can fuck off mate. Saving the world one missing tooth at a time is a wild strategem. When I watched that scene, I could literally hear Sylvester Stallone in my head giving his speech from Rocky Balboa (2006) “It ain’t about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!” and forever more I will believe in my heart that this speech is in fact the origin story of Thorfinn’s entire existence. Rocky even ends that speech with the line “don’t forget to visit your mother”. The dialogue with Canute after Thorfinn gets his face caved in for no good reason is the dumbest faux-deep and contrived interaction ostensibly establishing mutual respect and common cause in the subtext ever. The inner monologues of both characters as they each witness the others' radiant "hey ChatGPT draw this character in the style of Jesus Christ" backlighting have lines like "This man… look at this man… a man like that… how can a man like that... with a man like that..." and honeslty it's super gay. Canute demonstrates that he cannot in fact stop the waves of the ocean, saying something like "Look I am CANUTE! I will stop the sea! Look, it didn’t stop though! As we expected… can you tell me who controls the ocean? Is it god? Then I will raise an army, and fight god in heaven here on earth... muhahaha! I am CANUTE!" and for some reason Thorfinn is all like "I see. Then I will take the people who think that is retarded to Vinland. Please leave this farm alone, sir…” and Canute DOES, guys. He leaves the farm alone! What the actual fuck am I watching/hearing right now, why is this happening? Is it just the dub that’s so retarded? Why is Canute on this shitty spittle of coastal farmland fighting a larger force than his own with his heavy hitters, losing “daring men” he apparently cares so much about and his elite mercenaries to a guy named Snake. Thorfinn, who he had no idea was there, and Thorgil who he fucking KNEW would be there, are also depriving him forever of Yams vikings and thaneguards that each likely cost him, and even worse earn for him much more per year than nationalizing this one spittle of farmland will. He is PERSONALLY attending to this annexation, with a force that is far, far too tiny to justify the risk to his person while the payoff is also far, far too tiny to justify the expense of the Yams vikings (I know it's not Yams, but I always think of yams when they say yommes or w/e). Vinland Saga creates a much smaller world than necessary from its story and characters. Can we at least give a line to somebody to indicate how one might approach populating Vinland and funding its construction and the migration thereto? Can anyone other than Askeladd come up with a fun plan or a good twist? Even if Thorfinn’s character arc is just acting out that one speech from Sylvester Stallone in Rocky Balboa, we do feel for midwit Thorfinn consumed by anger when Askeladd kills his father. His age makes his responses believable. He wags his tail for master manipulator Askedaddy all the way through those teenage years and after both failing to extract his revenge and realizing Askedad cared about him for realsies he's quite reasonably done with it all. Askeladd’s death traumatized him all over again and the fact that he had now lost two fathers and found himself void of character sent him into the void. Depression. Watching Thorfinn proceed to rebuild himself in his father’s image in season 2 without even knowing that he is doing that, after failing miserably to understand anything about Thors and doing the exact opposite of what Thors would have wanted at every fork in the road in season 1, it really is a nice touch that he primarily navigates that inner journey by reflecting on his time with Askeladd. By giving Thorfinn a life similar to that of his father, Thorfinn ends up on the only kind of path by which he could become like his father - or he would have matured eventually regardless, it is left open ended and I like that. Einar is a great foil here, the only use he actually has in the show at all - he is the version of Thorfinn that never had an outlet for his loss, his anger, murdering all those people so he could secure the occasional duel with Askedaddy. Thorfinn fathers Einar to a good extent, in a similar manner to how Thors fathered him, and Thorfinn discovers in himself through this the desire to lead when leadership is needed. To protect the weak, work the land, to build and grow things. Slowly, Thorfinn feels himself pulled towards an idea, a call to adventure that was instilled in him as a youth before he was contorted by the death of his father, something he continued to forget at intervals but always spoke to him when he was reminded of it at key moments by Leif Erikson in seasons 1 and 2. Vinland... Starting in severe depression, Thorfinn's slave arc begins with him believing wholeheartedly that “nothing good comes from living, because nothing good has ever happened to me”. But then he naturally responds to the murderous intent of a more capable warrior, who shows him that his body still wants to live and he can't argue with that I guess (?). This weird moment flips the script on Thorfinn. In releasing his trauma Thorfinn starts to find a new kind of strength, the ability to connect with others on the level of ideas and pursuade them with his vision and commitment. He is able to impress others as the tales of Vinland told by Leif Erikson once impressed him as a boy, and it is now his dedication and poise not his enormous swollen face or his secret to getting hit although apparently those also help through which he can enforce his will and negotiate with others - by realizing that he has no enemies. He has the vision that Thors lacked, as Thors was focused solely on establishing freedom for his family and never progressed beyond that point which eventually lead to his death when the entity he ran from caught up to him. He had nothing prepared for being located and exploited as he was, but Thorfinn has a greater vision and this is effectively why he is able to successfully turn away Canute although the themese are a lot stronger than the story and dialogue here which did not sell Canute's change of heart in any way. But thematically, it works for Thorfinn so fine? The dialogue is bad, and the Thorfinn x Canute reunion is also needlessly homoerotic HOWEVER. Canute recognizes in the changed Thorfinn a strong ally in his life's ambition, and he is willing to concede to a radical and seemingly disadvantageous change in his plans such as Askeladd once recognized in Thors before killing him. Askeladd had asked Thors to lead Askeladd and his men, and although Thors said "no" and was promptly dead, Askeladd again did the thing when Canute got on the gear and committed himself to Canute's vision. Whereas Thorfinn previously cared nothing for communication on this level when he lunged at Canute for killing Askeladd, thinking only of his personal vengeance, Thorfinn "the Farmer" is now getting Canute to buy into his vision closing the circle. In taking the first steps towards Vinland as a realized ambition, approved by the powers that be, where he will not simply hide but instead take the hits and build... Thorfinn has in some sense surpassed his father Thors and revealed Askeladd’s motivations in acting as his surrogate father during his "you bastard I'll kill you, you bastard" phase. The spark of Thors "the Troll" to whom Askeladd would have sworn himself, Askeladd also saw in Thorfinn's refusal to back down from a flatly unwinnable fight, refusal to die alone in the wilderness, unwillingness to kill Askeladd in his sleep demanding it be an honorable duel, etc. Askeladd himself having killed his own father in his sleep, and being willing only to nurture, follow, give his life to the vision of those who are not like him in this respect calling all the men who mutinied against him except Bjorn dogs... Askeladd is basically the glue that holds the shitty story together. Askeladd really shines in season 1 as Thors’ murderer, Thorfinn’s surrogate father, King Canute’s catalyst, savior of the welsh, descendant of Artorius and rightful king of Britannia, who has chosen to believe his mad mother's bedtime stories about her bloodline rather than submit to the ways of his father Olaf, generally the ways of the world at large, whom he first degree murdered in his bed after gaining his trust and respect over 2 years and thus the access required to kill him in his sleep for disrespecting the bastard Askeladd's sickly slave mother. In season 1, we hear Askeladd romanticizing the Roman Empire and harkening back to the good ole' days of Britannia when his ancestor accomplished great feats while cohabiting the land with the local peoples rather than ruling over them with taxation and tyranny. The slightly cartoonish roman columns and night sky in a more children's storybook art style while he monologues his thoughts on the matter with Thorfinn in earshot betray the cynicism (excellent Art Direction!), because he has no idea what it was really like in that time but he has allowed his mother's ideals to brainwash him and he draws strength from that inner lie. From being Lucius Artorius Castus the true king of Britannia, and he would share this with Thorfinn inauspiciously. His self-effacing delusions in this area betray that he does not have a solution himself, a way to make the world a place where his mother would not have been a slave sleeping in a stable with her son telling him tales of her noble ancestry. Askeladd does not elaborate on his feelings towards Thorfinn before dying, but we get a concerned side eye as he tells Thorfinn to "Stay back, you idiot!!!" and that really says it all. The ostensibly mercurial Askeladd, murderous mama's boy and closet iconoclast like Thors, Canute, and eventually Thorfinn. He wishes the world to be free from unjust war and slavery, but doesn't believe that good things can come from living - instead he seeks the one that does. There is the notion of “everyone is a slave to something” at play in the show, but generally it gets a shallow treatment. For Askeladd his love for his mother, his respect for Thors and anyone with a viable path to regional peace his people might enjoy, his friendship with Bjorn, his hatred of his father, his delusions as Lucius Artorius Castus king of Britannia, romanticizing the Roman conquerors of antiquity... in this character the show finds the depth that is lacking from the rest of the piece. That said, why the hell did Bjorn have to duel Askeladd? I get that it is a foil for his relationship with Thorfinn, what he sees in the boy, but it just didn’t make any sense at all that they would fight to the death right there. Thors also did not receive much development and there isn’t much to him beyond badass that went pacifist when he had a child with a woman he loved. While Thorfinn’s growth and soul searching is laudable, for all of season 1 he is just some douchey kid that duels Askeladd and Thorkell and inexplicably doesn't die except that the blood of "Thors the Troll" runs in his veins. Hamlet at home Canute was more interesting when people were vying to use him as a patsy, since this offered an interesting lane for plot development, but he found jesus instead then also turned slightly evil and is shown to be a terrible strategist. Thorkell is a joke, he is shown fighting alongside Thors in season 1 episode 1, he is Thorfinn’s great uncle, and yet even the exposition that takes place during Thorkell and Thorfinn’s duel basically goes unreferenced within the story. We see Thors' backstory but Thorfinn does not consider it which would have been the thing to do. Thorgil was a way better potential plot device for setting up fights and his English VA was amazing, but he didn’t get a chance to actually do anything except break Canute's sword in a failed assasination attempt and swim really fast. The power scaling for the physically gifted OR ostensibly talented viking warriors like Thorkell, Askeladd, Thorgil, Snake, and Thorfinn was basically Miyamoto Musashi in Vagabond when he bodies 70 trained samurai in one go because he studied the blade. At least in the Vagabond manga the fight itself was handled brilliantly and Musashi suffers serious injuries and wrestles with his recovery and trauma in a very humanizing way. In Vinland Saga people lose eyes and fingers and ears and it just doesn't really matter because they are vikings, immune to infection and able to use the reversed curse technique. I think for season 3, they should drop the act and go full magic system. Everybody tries to sail to Vinland, gets confronted by Jorgmander the World Snake and before he kills them can have a scene where that one guy Snake the mercenary has his name called out like "Snaaaaaake!" and Jorgmander is like “you are a Snake too!? what a coincidence!” then Jorgmander without elaborating further isekais them all to valhalla and there are valkyrie waifus and no slaves and its called Vinland and all fights are settled with games because you can't die in Valhalla anyways you just wake up in the starting zone again and Thorfinn can pursue his true passion - farming - which is going really badly until he realizes he has a unique skill even though he's only level 1...
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Feb 2, 2024
Jujutsu Kaisen 2nd Season
(Anime)
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Recommended
This is it, this is peak right now fam. If you like action in your Anime, it doesn't get better than this. It happened here in 2024, and it might even hapen again and again in the future from MAPPA and perhaps even their competitors on yet more projects. Which blows my mind and body, because comparing JJK S2 to what else has come before especially in the shounen genre (Naruto, Bleach, HunterxHunter, FMAB, pick anything)... watching JJK Season 2 is a peak experience as an Anime fan. Not only that, it peaks itself harder and harder and harder as the episodes roll in until
...
all you can do is sit there taking it with your jaw agape saying there can't possibly be any more than this as JJK S2 just goes off anyways. I was entranced. Witnessing a one-off event of unprecedented awe-inspiring importance and value, a UFO shaped like a unicorn running astride a double rainbow across the northern lights during a full solar eclipse in the southern hemisphere. The kind of mesmerizing masterclass where you don't even stop to turn to each other with "can you believe this is happening right now!?" energy, the vibe is beyond that.
The ferocity, at such a velocity, the style and the range on display in the animation and the banger OST with its variety, leaning all the way into the mangaka's penchant for unbridled brutality, checking all the tropes at the door, an exaltation of motion and everything else my visual cortex values, infinite hype that pays off and builds again and pays off and builds again and again! JJK S2 is sublime, the animators who made this possible are goated, beautiful humans with brains so wrinkly they're basically wormholes to another dimension from which they draw upon unrivaled gigachad rizz that is channeled into their tablet pens and pencils. There is no reason not to watch JJK if you have ever been impressed with any animation of anything before. The dazzle itself of something so far beyond is a masterpiece on the merits of just the animation, sound design, art, choreography, and direction alone. Just the technicals, the production values, on their own qualify this Anime as I have described it, a unicorn and peak. It is INSANE that I am not exageratting for effect, that I am just stroking off my precious memories of having experienced JJK season 2 because it is just that far out in front right now and it would not surprise me to see it described as a turning point for the popularity and quality of Anime overall in a few years time. Not that the story is without its flaws. While this is a masterpiece of delivery, of animating a narrative, accentuating characters, bringing out the maximal dose of cool factor from the source material with near flawless technique, there were aspects that did not suit my taste. While the art direction was masterful, the direction of the narrative elements made debatable choices on several levels as to how to deliver the story to the audience. JJK S2 made a decision to jump around between past and present events in different sub-arcs of the season. The timeline was not linear between the first episodes and later episodes, nor the movie (JJK 0). Like with Netflix's The Witcher season one, the decision to tell the story out of chronological order killed some of the hype here and there although I didn't dislike it. There was also a choice made to rely heavily on backstory in the movie JJK 0 that was released prior to JJK S2, for the Shibuya arc to have narrative weight with the audience - basically, the "why should I care?" of the Shibuya arc that takes up most of JJK Season 2 runtime is found in the movie JJK 0. To me this was especially strange because just by flipping those two, making the first few episodes a standalone movie and starting the season with a few episodes that contain the events of JJK 0, everything would be in chronological order. The movie felt a bit random because it focused more on a new character rather than Gojo, arguably the most popular character in the series, and from the perspective of the narrative elements in the show it might have been better to let the standalone movie contain Gojo's arc from the start of the season. With events presented in chronological order given how that would affect the perception of Geto's character, when we timeskip to the start of the Shibuya incident the hype would have been even more bananas. There are also parts of this story and decisions made to emphasize elements of the story visually that I did not care to see. Even though the reception was overall positive, Gojo's Ayahuasca-I-am-the-honored-Purple-one scene was over the top for my tastes and Nanamin going zombie mode also seemed like they were taking liberties with the character. The rabbit scene with Mahito over-indulged, same with Nobara's episode, and a couple of the asspulls during certain fights or the "I'm mad" scenes had me half-rolling my eyes at the edge overload. I did not love the many times some annoying no-name straight bodied characters I liked, especially when I would have picked the bodied ones to have taken those fights, because clearly it was at MAPPA's discretion to make the fight seem more one sided and embellish the one-sidedness and that detracted fromt the free-for-all vibe of so many strong individuals and factions clashing and tagging in at intervals. I disagreed with a few of the choices to go into backstory for extended periods of time, especially because it felt like it was overdone and we were being hit over the head with the feels stick just to elicit yet more feels when they were already at a good level. Speaking of and going meta for a second, it really sucked that MAPPA had been cracking whips on the animators because the animators did such a world-beating job animating JJK S2 that these issues I had with story, direction, character writing, minor pacing stuff, which are usually some of my favorite elements that really polish a show into a hidden gem or ruin an otherwise solid premise/production for me, I just don't care at all from a critical standpoint here. The broad strokes were still deft enough, and the execution of the direction within each episode was masterful. JJK S2 as a package is thicc and juicy and rare. They never forget JJK S2's straws, napkins, plastic cutlery or condiments. JJK S2 is HIM, and we have these animators who were apparently treated like dirt by MAPPA's executives from start to finish to thank. Animators who have built MAPPA's reputation as a goated S-tier studio. It is such a dissapointment, but I am hopeful that the irreproachable quality and impact of their work on JJK S2 will force MAPPA's hand to give them their due respect on future projects. Whether it is your first Anime or your 400th, make no mistake that JJK Season 2 represents a highlight and a milestone to most people who have seen it. The work is seminal in its consistent technical artistry, the sheer volume of it, getting us there over and over again with an adaptation of source material that goes further beyond. Shounen's "best moments" which many of us have waded through hundreds of episodes including baseless filler to briefly perceive, to experience the possibilities of the narrative weight and that sense of wonder, the strong feels, can be expected in every episode of JJK S2. The show is an absolute monster, it has absolutely no chill and you cannot go wrong experiencing it for so many reasons. One of the coolest things to be done ever, and especially in Anime. What Anime and especially the shounen genre can induce in your brain that other mediums find hard to achieve, JJK S2 delivers in such a compact and powerful format that comparing it to other shounen right now is like comparing the iphone to two cups and a wire. You might think you could find some classic stories out there that are better, some goated bespoke Animes and other basically-Animes like Avatar or Castlevania that have higher highs, cooler worlds, more narrative weight, better character development or dialogue - but nah, JJK S2 would win.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Sep 5, 2023 Recommended Preliminary
(7/12 eps)
Spoiler
Zom100 just gets it man, like all of it. As a slice of life, action, comedy, with brilliant animation, stellar art direction and dialogue, a cast of likeable and relatable characters with realistic, endearing backgrounds that are filled in for us as they become relevant... Zom succeeds at so much in just the first few episodes. Even without the production values of the gods to back it up, Zom100 is a great story. It is a grand adventure and a psychological drama, poignantly contrasting the zombie apocalypse setting with the everyday corporate world. Without saying it Zom makes the reasonable point that risking personal, financial,
...
societal collapse even - you must get over and away from the sunk costs that people pleasing your way through life incurs. If you fail at this then eventually, you will become a greyscale zombie and all the colors you kept bottled up inside you that might have painted your life in vibrance will pass with you unseen. Worse yet you might infect others and consign them to the same tragic and common fate. So thematically, the use of color to replace any blood splatter in the show is such a great visual metaphor while also functionally framing the zombie threat as secondary to figuring out how to bring out your best self in the face of adversity - works on a few levels, and it looks great.
Zom is off brand and wild with punchy action sequences, an episodic format that gives each episode a standalone impact while still advancing the plot, and some of the most poignant art direction and use of color to back up the central theme that I can recall seeing ever - Zom100 is the chosen one this season and it is going hard for a place among all-time goated Anime right now. If you gave it a pass due to the crazy premise I would recommend giving the first episode a chance just to see what it has to offer. Also the MC detroit smashes a zombified land shark at some point and it was amazing, Zom100 really does do it all. Going to talk about other things I like about Zom below, so minor spoiler warning. As the first episode begins, we see that the promising young man MC Akira Tendou is entering the working world with gusto. Unfortunately, we soon realize that he has been suckered into working for an exploitative corporation in an entry-level position. After a few years working here, with no time for anything but work and stressing about work, he is finally reaching a point of complete character implosion. His world is becoming dark and lifeless, he goes work he goes home he goes bed he goes work. His locomotion becomes more and more zombie like, and he can be heard grunting and groaning quite often now just moving around. His personality and dreams have been crushed, he is becoming a corporate zombie and he can’t even really remember what he wanted before or why he started working for this company. We don’t really hear from his inner voice much anymore, other than to complain or narrate scenes that depict the degeneracy and extensive dysfunction of the company he works for. So, so funny. Most people have probably had a job that was like this in some way and you will absolutely die with laughter. Various droning low-frequency sounds underscore that he is becoming an employee number with an address and his life has effectively flatlined. He can’t take it anymore but there is no fight left in him to make a change. But a stroke of luck at last! The Zombie Apocalypse has begun! Chased by zombies on his way into work, it dawns on him as he is fleeing for his life that he doesn't have to go to work EVER AGAIN and suddenly the real soundtrack for Zom100 kicks in. The melody is tight and the bass is booming. A look of pure exuberance takes shape on his face in slow motion and color explodes back into the world. He is running for his life, the world is in shambles, planes are falling from the sky but finally he is free and alive again. Behind him is just a bunch of zombies with nothing to offer him. Once he escapes the horde using his college rugby powers, with a big smile on his face he sits down in his apartment and pens the beginnings of his bucket list - 100 things to do before I get turned into a zombie. The inaugural item is to confess to his office crush who he hopes is still okay, and was probably the only reason he stayed at the company so long although she was also banging the married CEO. However, in Akira Tendou’s defense he was in a rather pathetic state at the time and his bar for best girl just wasn’t very high. He finds her address on the emergency contact list, and heads over. urns out both she and the CEO are zombies now, but he did get to confess to her zombified corpse and cross “confess my feelings to the girl I like” off the bucket list! Especially in a zombie apocalypse, there is living and then there is just waiting to die… Later, Akira goes on a beer run and meets Shizuka at the convenience store. Shizuka saves his life, pays him no mind, but a new and improved crush is established and in a later episode we are given a glimpse into Shizuka’s orderly apartment and three-monitor workstation and list of “100 ways to avoid turning into a zombie” to contrast with Akira’s bucket list. Two different approaches to the end of the world, two lives intertwining. Except Shizuka sees Akira as reckless for going out to the convenience store in a zombie apocalypse just to get beer, and due to the likelihood that contact with him will decrease her odds of survival she declines to provide her number. Oof. Zom really transcends the genre of Anime. The story is just so relatable in a lot of stupid, fun ways. The show also makes such immaculate use of the medium of Anime and what the medium is best at - stuff that doesn't work well in mediums like live action, e.g. vibrant colors splashing out of the zombies and people onto the surrounding scene instead of drab red blood. Such a nice visual metaphor, where bleeding out and spreading your infection as a zombie is tinted with all the color that could have been on the outside of your life. There are also these great moments of emoting, with really well drawn facial expression and visual storytelling and mood setting and character moments because Zom isn't afraid to spend a lot of time getting it just right for each scene, or giving the sakuga treatment to ridiculous stuff like a person’s daily routine in the case of Shizuka’s apartment which does so much to establish her character. Also the absurdity of the zombie landshark human centipede fight scene was so satisfying and the amount of joy that production took from creating that scene is palpable as you watch it. It feels like they are watching it with you, like they want you to see it so that you can have a little piece of that joy. The zombie fodder doesn't even escape this attention to detail, and each zombie looks and feels purposefully designed to compliment the scene they appear in. Even morphing and disfiguring character designs that we previously saw the living version of in a way that emphasizes character flaws and says “there are 2 zombies inside me”. It gives meaning to each of these encounters even if they are over quickly and creates the feeling that we are really on a journey with the characters as they brave this wild environment, it keeps the scenes from feeling forced or the zombies from feeling like a plot device swiss army knife. Further, especially with the colorized blood splatter, it adds this cool factor to the scenes that does the opposite of suspending disbelief and gets us to engage with the action on a more exuberant level rather than looking at it like there is risk and tension that the characters must overcome. The fun is just flowing out of this one in full spectrum multicolored blood splatter, but when the content goes deep it strikes at the true and real. The backstories of Akira, Shizuka, and Kencho are all immaculate and naturally fall into place in the story. Absurd as a Zombie Apocalypse setting may seem for what is partially a slice-of-life, the way the environment is used to emphasize themes and construct a grand adventure for the main characters is inspiring. The action is Trigger level fun but more polished and without the one-uppisms and complete disregard for physical law. When I saw that BUG FILMS also did Summertime Render, it made sense because I loved that too. Will have to look out for the next BUG FILMS banger, and it is my opinion that you would have to be a zombie to dislike Zom100 so put it on the bucket list homie.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Jun 25, 2023
Tengoku Daimakyou
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings Spoiler
*NO SPOILERS YET*
Vibes like The Last of Us with a compelling ruined world for the main duo Kiruko and Maru to explore, great action sequences, and great horror! A rare treat, really. The animation, fight choreography, dope old-school/new-school fusion character designs, and impressive artwork to emphasize OP special tactics of the super disgusting monsters known as “maneaters” made any conflict between the MCs and the maneaters just electrifying. Most of all, there’s about five layers of mysterious to this show and the homies puttin’ in that WORK just to get the lowest tier of clue to point them vaguely in the direction of someone who ... might not lie to them about an actual clue somewhere, if the place they’re trying to get to at the end of all this is even a thing! Random survivor groups the MCs run into are scraping out a living in this ghetto ass post-apocalyptic Japanese economy and have super fascinating side-stories and hustles going that sometimes culminate in a seriously twisted or sad outcome, sometimes a happy or cathartic conclusion to a brief story arc, and sometimes just a good beat down. The folks that dip in and out of an episode or two have a lot of umami to their character designs, good lines, and concise backstories when we need that glimpse for their bits to land with the viewer. Refreshingly, we are not told how the world fell to ruin. It has been a long time and people either don't really know themselves, or are too preoccupied trying to live in the wreckage scraping by and surviving to care anymore. The fact that everyone still alive is making a go of it, living together, organizing society to varying extents, and only coming into conflict or falling into the banditry business as the exception to the rule is also a refreshing take. It gives the world life and potential, and that accentuates the threat that bad things pose because they interrupt that hopeful aesthetic. So why mixed feelings? It's clearly a banger of a show, right? Well… it was. Most of it was. Ugh, why do they have to do us like this every time man… There is some objectionable content that was rather adeptly animated, taking place in the final episodes. It is hard not to recommend Heavenly Delusion anyways, so if you can stomach it I would tell you that no matter how you feel about the controversial events I will discuss below, the show is a bit of a gem. I think the step you could take to bypass “the controversy”, would be to skip the last couple minutes of episode 12. Basically, when it gets sus just go to 13 and you’ll probably like the show a lot better overall. *SPOILERS NOW* Randomly injecting the “theme” of an underage girl with body dismorphia who's actually mentally a guy getting bound and banged just felt like someone shoved a gay porn in the middle of my Anime, took a picture, and tagged me on insta. The reason for including that scene, I wonder? Well 99% it was intended to start a bum fight on twitter and generate buzz Oshi No Ko style. At a 0.9% chance, it was intended to awaken something in me I guess? Lastly, there is 0.1% chance the scene was included for plot reasons. Specifically to awaken something in Kiruko’s male-brained character like "hm, I guess my sister might still be alive in this body because after two days of getting r-worded by our father/older brother figure some of her memories are coming back in my head". The notion rings hollow and smells like burnt hair stuck in my sinuses. It would have made way more sense to at least not show the scene because it wasn't exactly horrific, it was just a decent start to a hentai that was ruined as so many are by some wild futa bullshit appearing. All they had to do was play the freddie krueger music off with the shower scene and handcuffs, end there, clue us back in next episode the following morning - JUST THE ONE - where Maru can be all like "hmm.... Kiruko didn't come home tonight, something feels off I better go check on he/her". Not TWO NIGHTS LATER. One night is the TV and film industry standard for *wink wink* you know what must have happened, right!? WoooOOOOOooo so scandalous! Setting up a multi-day, multi-night it puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets hosed again situation in a show that is not a primetime crime drama or hollywood horror/thriller is just tasteless. Are we to believe Production I.G. had no discretion here? What are they trying to make space for by upping the debauch duration to 2 days, flashbacks? Christ. I challenge you to find me an Anime that has tried harder to catfish its audience with a trap character than Heavenly Delusion. If the show had anything more substantial to say on the subject of body dismorphia than "guys would be attracted to guys if they had a biologically female body, WOULDN'T THEY GUYS!?!?" then sure, knock yourself out. Initially when they did the gender flip scene with Maru and Kiruko a couple eps in, it was mildly entertaining. In a get rekt kid, your crush is a dude! OOOOOOOHHH!!! Schoolyard drama kind of way. Then there were some decent gags that came from that reveal, the degen-o-meter was about a 7-8 out of 10 for most of those scenes and they got a laugh out of me. Even as a purely psychological plot device, it was great. A brutal situation, sibling absorbed by some freaky tardigrade and you almost got eaten too, made infinitely more than totally fucked up to navigate by the mind swap. Was it the tardigrade or that creepy doctor!? Also where tf are my homies? It just added to the depth of the mysterious and brutal post-apocalyptic setting, was a great origin story for the character and her sick design, plus a decent excuse to balance out the artwork with a female character in that special Anime way they do it. That was enough, that was the sweet spot. It would have sparked joy if they had stayed in the sweet spot. So I’m left with something awakened in me - disappointment. The timing was pretty bad, because I spent most of episode 13 just wanting episode 12’s sour taste to dissipate, and a lot of the final episode was about episode 12’s “finale” too. But it also led to nothing, and the beat down was pointless as catharsis because pedo-Robin was just the instrument of some dumb shit production tried to gin up on social media. Further, the maneater in the closet that was right beside them, that he was trying to get into the room with, was just left as a cliffhanger which further erodes any semblance of consistency with the R scene. So instead of being super stoked on Heavenly Delusion, I have mixed feelings. I would definitely watch season 2, and feel like season 1 is worth watching anyways - but the ending is a miss and it’s a shame because the path to a banger ending was so wide open. Instead the last bit of the 2nd last episode and the fallout from that scene in the last episode broke that sense of immersion in the story because it didn’t add anything. With how much emphasis the direction placed on it, literally ending the second to last episode and devoting multiple scenes from multiple character perspectives to resolving it in the last episode and just begging the audience to “react” and reduce the show down to that one scene… it was a huge turn off. Out of step with the rest of the excellent work they did on this show, the part least worth watching, and if I could recommend anything to someone who hasn’t seen the show yet but does know about this ginned up “controversy” it would be when things get sus in episode 12, just skip to episode 13 and thank me later. I’m reminded of that meme with the Mom and her kid in the car, where she turns and says “Why can’t you just be normal!?” and the kid just screams “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!” in response. That’s what that scene and the final episode felt like, but the rest of Heavenly Delusion is bascially a masterpiece.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jun 23, 2023 Recommended
Everyone: Golf is boring.
Bandai Namco: Hold my game controller. The enjoyer of Birdie Wing: Golf Girls' Story will be a person that can appreciate the culture of the OP as the lead singer cries out "my, my, my I have a VENUS!" in a thick Japanese accent. They kept the OP for S2 as well, big W play by Bandai Namco. Listening to the OP alone is worth it for the lulz, but the Anime itself is also hilarious if you've ever golfed before or have some idea how the game is played. The story and golf tournament arcs also manage to keep hype levels high ... and have you rooting for the MCs, Eve and Aoi, so oddly Birdie Wing manages to succeed as a comedy, traditional sports Anime, yuri-bait and character drama while focusing on... golf. We live in strange times, friend. Some of the biggest laughs Birdie Wing got out of me were from the ridiculous golf power system introduced for the various golfers as they compete, some of them even yelling out the name of their "attack" as they swing on the ball "GREEN BULLET-O!!!" or "SHINING WINGS!!!". The affinity that organized crime has for using underground golf matches to squash various beef in this Anime is also a major highlight. Categorically impossible shots like driving a ball between two cars of a moving train, hitting the flag on purpose to drop the ball straight down into the hole, or clearing a specific branch in the forest out of the way with your first drive in preparation to hit your next shot off the tee on EXACTLY the same trajactory so that you can get out of the forest back onto the golf course now that the branch is no longer in your way are some choice examples. Had me rewinding and laughing harder each time, and the fact that Bandai Namco managed to hit the mark almost everytime on these "Golf the shonen way" gags is really what kept me engaged with Birdie Wing and looking forward to the next episode. The balance betweeen the level headed supporting characters and golf fanaticism is particularly funny because it is a great jab at real life golf nuts. Often they have most of their life sorted out, they tend to be successful family people - but they will do ANYTHING to improve their laughably trash golf skills. Lessons, clubs, ridiculously expensive golf balls, thousands of dollars on golf trips and green fees, the anger of the spouse left alone with the kids for 8 hours every Sunday and/or Saturday every Summer... it gets a bit crazy. This Anime manages to make fun of that without making fun of that, by taking it to the absolute extreme and representing mob bosses, C-level executives, and frankly most of the show's cast as obsessive golf weirdos whatever their other talents and responsibilities. It's important to mention that you absolutely do not feel like you're being forced to watch golf as a sport the whole time, or like you're an unwilling participant in a golf lesson. The golf knowledge is fairly lite, and gets dropped into the middle of high stakes moments in adequate but concise bouts of exposition at a slow drip just so you have what you need to appreciate the gags and sick plays. It felt like this was the right decision, not to take things too seriously and to keep it light. Overall, it's a bit of a shock to see this combination of Anime nonsense and golf have such good chemistry. You can sense the fun that the production staff were having with it, and overall the storytelling is also quite smart which keeps the understated humour from getting stale. The plot navigates a many twists and turns for multiple characters throughout, with one big reveal after another, but still manages to wrap up with a good ending. IMO the story holds up mainly because the clowning is limited to the way people approach golf strategically. The anime-ification of their golf powers basically extrapolates their "winners mindset", whatever their personal philosophy on what it really takes to win, into a golf-related JoJo's stand. The rest of the story, the aspects that bring characters into and push them out of the various golf dramas, is thematically more mature and that helps a lot with buy in and hype levels as we go through the many, many golf tournament arcs. It's also commendable that the tourny arcs are short and sweet. You aren't forced to wait on a cliff hanger repeatedly until you don't care about the outcome anymore. In fact the pacing is a strength of the Anime. Character arcs outside of the golfing are just super satisfying as well. A lot of the characters are just brats with a good heart, but they each have an admirable work ethic. In general, they also either adopt the approach of their mentor towards competition or have their own unique philosophy on it, which sets up clashes of ideas played out through golf. Many characters end up with a rather adorable, complicated working relationship to each other and these evolve over time. In general the characters going through these moments of growth, connection, and realization as to what they need and what they want from each other professionally for their careers to move ahead, are cute girls and there is a fat dose of yuri-bait in the show - how do you get people interested in a golf Anime, gay girls innit? It's also quite apparent at a certain point that not just the young upcoming talent, but also the over the hill adults in this industry are in some way just being used. Their passion for the sport traps them in unfavorable and outright awful personal circumstances, but they accept them as the price of pursuing it. This more cynical theme that runs through the plot isn't overemphasized, rather it's just this background feel to the whole thing that still allows for moments of exuberance and meaningful wins and losses for the characters and I quite like how it was handled. While I doubt this will be anyone's favorite Anime of all time, and it probably won't win or contend for anything or make many "top X when Y specific criteria" it really does show that with the right approach you can make anything substantial into a worthy Anime even golf. The worlds slowest and most boring spectator sport, that is insanely frustrating to play, yet this Golf Anime is a gem. If you're into sports Anime and if you have some exposure to golf you'll probably find Birdie Wing worth the fairly small time investment of two seasons.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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May 24, 2023
Isekai de Cheat Skill wo Te ni Shita Ore wa, Genjitsu Sekai wo mo Musou Suru: Level Up wa Jinsei wo Kaeta
(Anime)
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Not Recommended Preliminary
(8/13 eps)
Spoiler
This is the most shameful, straightforward, senseless portrayal of a power fantasy self-insert I have ever seen. The idea that this was created, ostensibly to appeal to and entertain some percentage of the Anime watching human beings on planet earth distrubs me and strikes fear in my heart. More so than ChatGPT, this Anime makes me question the future of our species and whether there is really any point after all. The sheer depth of the abyss this work will chisel through your appreciation for the medium, makes it a 10/10 masterpiece work of art because it makes you question even the most mundane desire
...
or appreciation you may have expressed even briefly for a strong and capable Anime protagonist. Perhaps this is a cry for help, and the Anime industry as a whole would like us to stop supporting OP protagonist Anime because it is making them as hollow and dead inside as this is.
The MC starts off as a fat, lonely, loser kid whose family abuses him brutally. Except grandpa - he was always grandpa's fav, and was left everything in the will when he died including his house where he now lives. He still go to the same school as his (half? I forget and it's not important anyways) brother and sister, and they bully him relentlessly. But then he discovers a door to another world in grandpa's secret room, when he learns some skills and stuff in the other world he returns to the regular world to crash and wakes up the next day as the hottest and most interesting man ever to walk the earth. He walks down the street, and as a high school boy the ENTIRE SOCIETY rubbernecks like he is an A list celebrity wearing a full marvel superhero costume. He randomly saves a random rich girl on the street who tracks him down and invites him to join a school for the nicest, hottest, coolest kids imaginable. His brother and sister hire (Yakuza? kids hiring organized crime wtf?) a motorcycle gang to attack said schoo and he leaps from the fifth story to defeat them all with kung fu and super strength saving the random rich girl we mentioned before. Why not take it a step further, since he is just a kind fat kid at heart he forgives his jerk brother and sister who break down crying in awe at his grace and everyone thinks he's so cool. On a school retreat, he fights off a bear (there's fucking bears in Japan!? just looked it up, Ussuri brown bear wow scary...). Just wrestles it, saving his hot teacher in the process. That teacher had just proposed to him last night, when he cooked a meal from ingredients he foraged in the forest that was SO DELICIOUS his classmates and his teach had to inform him that although they ate fine cusines nearly everyday cooked from the best ingredients by professional chefs at their super school... they had NEVER tasted something this good. His questionable teacher was drunk, and in front of all her students proposed marriage and cupped his head to her bosom petitioning him to accept while his female classmates attempted to pry husbando back out of her cleavage. A soccer ball is kicked at his new classmate (waifu war participant #5) accidentally during gym class as she is rizzing him up cause he's just that hot, and his reflex is to bicycle kick the ball away from her head into the net from 300ft away. He can use all of his magic abilities from his isekai world in the real world btw, including teleportation. In the isekai world things are going similarly as he is able to save the princess who is randomly in the dark backwoods close to his hobo hut from evil goblins and stuff, so naturally she proposes marriage to him on the spot. When he goes shopping one day, the male model that was going to show up for a photoshoot at the mall was late so the director picks MC out of a crowd and he accompanies a famous model posing as her boyfriend for the full day photoshoot as onlookers marvel at the sheer genetic supremacy of the stunned, rigid, deer in headlights MC and utter stuff like "oooh isn't she famous? but he's so good looking he must be famous too! Why haven't I heard of him!?" or similar. Who cares about honoring contracts when there's high school guys that hot just walking by you that you can insert next to your famous female model I guess... the male model that was originally contracted for the role eventually does shows up infuriated and after trying to force himself on the female model in front of about 1000 people he gets confronted by the MC and while expressing "nani!? but I train boxing" gets judo flipped into unconsciousness. Literally through all of these activities all day almost like a laugh track, every SINGLE person in the background is FOREVER turning to gaze upon the figure of the MC, and exalting their new looks-jesus. Of course this situation where he cucks the chad model everybody knows by name is no different and all the background lines are something like "wow! he just one-shotted that guy and that guy is so famous! he's so cool! I would go gay for him, fr" He is offered a job in the modelling industry, which he politely declines. In another episode he goes shopping with his school mates and when the mall catches on fire and somehow only his three female companions are trapped inside, he uses his water magic and superman powers to go in and rescue them all. Carrying the three girls out of the mall on his back by crushing through several stories of rubble, the beta-male firefighters can only scold him for being so reckless as he emerges from the wreckage of the shopping centre. The girls cry into his chest as their fathers thank him profusely for saving their lives and no one questions him further. In between all this, he has been learning OP magic and obtaining legendary weapons in the world beyond. He meets a sexy assassin lady in the forest that he saves from orcs, and seduces her without really trying to in fact she makes the move. Later that assassin tries to kill the princess that propossed to him, and he took them both along with the princess' entourage back to his hut. I can only imagine what happens next. This is not really for anybody. This is trolling. The way Eminence in Shadow makes fun of everything isekai is subtle and endearring and generally funny, then it is backed up by fairly superb artwork, world building, and animation. It is for the audence's entertainment, it lands as intended. The way this one is doing it feels like it is making fun of isekai from a place of autism, where the jokes are so poor you cannot tell if they are jokes. You don't even know if the people writing them think they are funny, or what the hell they are thinking. But they are backed up by fairly superb artwork, and animation, even world building, which just adds to the consternation.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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May 24, 2023
"Oshi no Ko"
(Anime)
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Recommended Preliminary
(7/11 eps)
Spoiler
So I saw a Gigguk video recommending Oshi no Ko. Said something like just trust me on this one, I am a man of culture that used to work for the BBC. But after only one episode my feeling was that Oshi no Ko is only just above mid. I mean the sheer length of the first episode! An hour and 22 minutes!? Just for a slice of life idol-isekai genre mashup revenge plot that does almost nothing whatsoever with the isekai aspect of the story? Entertained though I was the first episode didn’t put me on the edge of my seat waiting for episode
...
2 and it took me a while to catch up with the show. Weeks later I binged episodes 2 through 6 in one sitting and I get it now.
Oshi no Ko is going to be a classic Anime, it is special. It understands the meta of life and relates it to the viewer in an electrifying performance that embraces the two wolves inside us all. The plot makes use of certain unfortunate and outright toxic aspects of various online and entertainment industry spaces, contrasting these with the ganbaru attitudes of the people who do the work and suffer anything and everything for their creative recognition and status in these same spaces. Oshi no Ko is at its best when depicting moments where through all the bullshit, deception and exploitation a true signal and validation come through organically to creators and creative types who put their names and faces out there in front of their work. Even if the moment is contrived by a duplicitous third party for their own ends, it doesn’t lessen the impact of having their vision understood, or their performances valued. One of the best examples so far of these bittersweet moments of affirmation is when a mangaka is getting their work adapted into a live action online TV show and the adaptation is generally just an awful, low-budget affair. There simply isn’t the acting talent or resources on set to realize the mangakas vision, but admirably and probably what you would see in real life she doesn’t even care. She is just happy to see her work getting an adaptation at all. Then unexpectedly in just the one scene, in just the one episode, the MC who has a part in this show as the villain creates for his own selfish reasons an opportunity for the production staff and the other leading actress to adjust to his off-script performance and do one big moment from the manga justice. Fans are glad but overall disappointed and take the typical frame of disappointment that the entire show couldn’t live up to the high point set in that one episode. Just about how it would be, isn’t it? But for the mangaka when sits down on her lunch break to watch the short episode, expecting more of the same… she cannot help but tear up. It means SO much to her, and why wouldn’t it? She isn’t bawling and sharing her life story with us or her coworkers sitting behind her at her desk. Just picks up her drafting tools or whatever and continues her work, and we never even see her again in the show. Episode 6, “Egosurfing” was another meta-moment that will make you feel things. If you have ever lost someone to preventable and unfair circumstances, maybe you feel guilty or angry that nobody could figure it out or that you didn’t do enough or see it coming. Maybe you felt enraged and angry that they could allow this to happen when so many people cared about them. Well, at the end of episode 6 when Aqua pulls Akane off that ledge it is a cathartic self-insert that also hurts a bit. He managed to make it in time because he is not actually Akane’s clueless teenage friend telling her not to leave her house in a typhoon idiot lol in their group chat, but a medical doctor reincarnated as a teenager who has 40 or so years of life experience under his belt. Obviously much better equipped to recognize and prevent a tragedy like this, but even so how did he even find her in that storm? The way they did this scene, the feeling of wishing you could physically step in and stop bad things from happening and this guy actually managed to get it done, hits extra hard if you’ve spent time in online communities like gaming discords, reddit, or youtube comments where toxic carpet stains sometimes appear just to ego about topics they aren’t even invested in because the build up in Akane’s mind was so horrifically believable. IRL people just aren’t going to be so ruthless, but for certain personality types there is no distinction when you are on the receiving end and it absolutely can and does break them. Building up to the end scene of “Egosurfing” it just wasn’t an overreach that Akane’s character got to that point. The show wasn’t sending a message or preaching on the topic. Just demonstrating how this would happen and in the end commiserating with us to express the wish it never did. Not once did my cynic brain kick in and think “well that part is a bit much”. Instead dread and danger and discomfort sets in as we watch Akane sit motionless, taking it in, scrolling on this slippery slope when she’s already in a bad place going through it personally, feeling like an idiot. She took the wrong advice and made a mistake that was immediately forgiven, but she just isn’t the type to forgive herself so easily. Her inner critic agrees with the assholes online. You just get these constant pangs of “that sucks” as she scrolls through people burying her online and wish she could just bring herself to stop scrolling. Intermixed with the present day we are shown bits and pieces of Akane’s career from childhood until now as the episode progresses. It is very clear how much work she put in to get where she is now. At first the balance of scenes depicting her ascent as a child actress is mostly positive and only sometimes we come back to the present with the online bullying. Moments of triumph and dedication to her craft, approval from her peers and elders, are shown and it is clear these are meaningful memories that keep her grounded and constitute her self-worth and story. Many of the scenes have no dialogue but say a lot, her focused and determined facial expression as she stretches for example. They all clearly demonstrate how seriously she takes her work, it is obviously her passion. Akane is determined and strong, but she is also demure and identifies too strongly as the learner. She is quick to self-depricate, she is approval seeking, she is socially awkward and anxious. Then we start cutting back to Akane getting buried with negative comments online more and more, reflexively scrolling through all of it again and again in private, alone. All the positive moments in her real life that would contradict the criticisms leveled at her are slowly drowned out and get less screen time, they are just flashes in the pan now. Her focus is so much more often and more easily brought back to the online backlash over her actions on the reality TV show she was on. The level and tone of the online criticism evolves, and her mom keeps asking her intently what’s the matter at dinner. Multiple times in an increasingly direct and concerned tone, but Akane won’t say anything. She is determined to handle things on her own and be strong, so she shrugs it off says nothing and silently leaves the table and closes the door to her room. She will not talk about it. Walking through her agency Akane overhears her manager getting chewed out by his boss about her performance on the show, yelling at him at full volume and sounding just about ready to drop him and Akane. Leaving the office, her manager sees she had been passing by in the hallway and heard the whole thing. He reassures her but clearly he is shaken and overwhelmed, she isn’t convinced. Former fans start posting, getting on the bandwagon and deciding everyone else is right and although they supported her until now she’s changed, Akane is different and they can’t support her the way she is now. She has no talent, she’s such a bitch, her face got ugly. Akane tears up, completely convinced that these are her real fans throwing the towel on her because of what she did. But as the tear rolls down her cheek, without moving a muscle or blinking, alone in bed, we just hear more “tap tap… pause. tap…” as she scrolls. We’ve also heard for the last couple minutes now this sound building up in the background, some kind of interference, a buzzing in the ear. Somebody says “just die” online. We start to see some visual effects together with the sound design just oozing a sense of dread, like all these comments are flooding out through her screen into reality and drowning her mind. It just keeps building, it’s too much and as the viewer you know where it’s going by now and you just want it to stop. This droning, buzzing sound keeps building up and the pace of the comments is just constantly increasing, too fast to even read through anymore as we frantically bounce around on the screen between multiple sites and the sound is just getting to be so toxic and unnerving... you want her to come to her senses and put the fucking phone down already. Why isn’t anyone there? Where are the god damn adults man? We’re shown moments of concern here and there, things that could in theory interrupt the build up but everything that might have served as one of those turnaround moments just kind of… doesn’t pan out. Then you see her group chat and her friends are worried about her, asking if she’s eating okay but she’s not replying, then she says she’s hungry and she’s going out but you see in the replies “It’s a Typhoon lol. Don’t go out now lol” and I would have hated this fucking show forever, because she does go out into the typhoon. Then she’s standing on the edge of a pedestrian bridge above a highway, they show the food she bought all over the bridge on the floor where she just dropped it. She wants to stop thinking, we hear her thinking that she wants to stop thinking and she has a moment of believing that she will find release if she just steps off into the traffic below and the traffic lights all merge together and become warm and welcoming and that terrible sound starts to end in a high pitched feedback noise that is drowning out the rain now and it is so relieving that the buzzing is gone but at this point that makes it horrible, horrible… and it was really unclear if they were going to take the piss or not and send Akane over the edge, then we see her jump. But Aqua makes it in time! Right at the end, and that triumphant ED music kicks in and he literally bear hugs her around the chest a millisecond after she stepped off and pulls her back onto the ground restraining her as she freaks out, and we had no idea it was going to be a happy ending until that moment. In that moment Aqua is basically all of us, how we all feel about it. If we could just be smart enough and bold enough and know enough of what was going on to step in and stop this shit everytime, everywhere forever. You can tell how much the author, the production, the animators, the sound people put into this sequence with that singular intent. It felt like a sincere desire to give anyone in that situation plot armor, and with me at least that was felt. Contrast this movement with the production staff within the plot of Oshi no Ko, who stoked the flames online to generate buzz for the show through the negative press over what Akane did n that one episode of the reality TV show. The director who encouraged the studious, serious Akane when she asked for advice on set to act out. Were these actions immoral? In any case, it turned out that the online backlash was helping to bring more attention to their reality TV show and when it started, they did what they could do within that grey area to capitalize. We found out in episode 7 that in fact they had even cut the show together in such a way as to fan the flames of controversy for clickbait, editing Akane’s screentime to make her appear dislikeable to the extent that they could. Nothing insidious, just show business right? Episode 7 after Aqua has pulled her back and she’s recovering from this whole scare, has Aqua lean on the show’s production staff implicating them in her suicide attempt to secure clearance to use the raw footage so that he can counteract the onslaught of criticism by releasing an “Aqua-cut” of the show. The Aqua-cut shines a more realistic and positive light on Akane, partially restoring Akane’s image and conveying that if you can sell the narrative on both ends bad things are good for business the worse they are and the responsibility for that must lie in part with the dumpster diving consumer that engages with these narratives as content. Oshi no Ko has this IRL-ish atmosphere and maturity to its characters, and a “just the way it is” take on modern business practices in entertainment while exploring them and using them as devices on a technical level. The cliche murder plot going on in the background is one of the strangest uses of the isekai trope yet. The way the characters develop realistically, over multiple decades, and the way they're written to have believable backstories, the way the VAs have been nailing their lines and creating dialogue... you can feel the emotional content in their lines without understanding the Japanese, it’s all just top notch. The sound design and especially the music as evidenced by the OP getting No. 1 worldwide on the billboard global charts in early June. Frankly Oshi no Ko just oozes banger energy in most every aspect, it has a live action vibe, it’s chic and twisted and cathartic and captures complex themes in story moments so perfectly it is hard for everyone not to clap. You could technically call it a slice of life but there's this grimy, visceral undertone that cuts through the glitz and glamor of the show business setting. Artfully, edginess and oversimplification simply have no home here in this vibe. Most of the characters, most of the themes, they are mature and layered. They feel quite believable. There aren't many forlorn "over it" characters, because the characters aren’t afforded that kind of arc. They simply can’t take such an entitled stance, nobody is floating above the difficulty of navigating a career or dealing with the other intelligent, motivated people all around you in a demanding line of work. There aren’t a plethora of overconfident, inept patsies for Aqua to pull out his deathnote and Light Yagami 4D chess his vengeful will upon. Still, my single criticism is that the motivation of finding his mother’s killer at all costs feels a bit twisted and forced because of the isekai angle taken to kick off the story in Oshi no Ko. Having the show start with this odd duality between Ai’s fan murdering the MC for being her baby doctor, then having that guy also murder his isekai-mum as well after Aqua becomes her unborn child only to setup the revenge origin story in a 1.5h movie/first episode wasn’t to my personal taste. But, it no longer seems relevant. I can only imagine that the manga impressed each member of the production team personally, because the effort to forward the weight of these moments in Oshi no Ko to the audience with high fidelity is clearly above and beyond normal. I went to check what else the studio behind it, Doga Kobo, had done previously and found… Dumbbell Nan Kil Moteru? The cute girls do lifting Anime? How on earth does one go from that to Oshi no Ko. The twists and turns have been abrupt and find their mark. The unexpected developments and unintended consequences of decisions feel unforced, natural. The production of Oshi no Ko really has so much charm and quality going for it, and I tip my hat to Doga Kobo for forcing its way onto my "oh, that studio!? could be a banger!" list.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Dec 7, 2022
Bocchi the Rock!
(Anime)
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(9/12 eps)
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Credit where it's due, this is a K-On! reboot. That said I'm basically reviewing it to point out that this is the "I'm a professional musician and I fixed K-On for you" version.
Beyond that even, I'm indifferent to cute girls do cute things (ohhhhh..... CGDCT!) as evidenced by the fact that I just realized what that acronym meant as I wrote this sentence. Bocchi the Rock is more like a "cool girls do cool things" show. Playing guitar myself plus having weirdly intense social anxiety to do most anything in life at first including play in front of people, I really have to give ... Bocchi the Rock 10/10 magnificent smugfaces for the way it writes MC Hitori "Bocchi" Gotou and the supporting cast in such a lighthearted way, with a positive spin, but keeping a realism and depth baked in to each character to give the show it's genre-breakout quality and make space for the comedy bits to land. Really they could have wrapped the show at episode 9, and I would be rating it 10/10 and considering it a favorite. Leaving a point off for now seems fair since the last three episodes of anything are well known for treachery, but supported by an original OST where the band is playing multiple songs that are OP/ED quality and animation of instruments being played accurately to the fret and finger position of the guitar parts in those OP/ED quality tracks, Bocchi the Rock really goes the extra mile and admirably succeeds at being more than K-On! could ever hope to be, at least based on the first episode of K-On! which is as far as I got for the sake of this review. But I do think it makes sense to talk about this show briefly in comparison to K-On and other shows I actually did watch to the end like Ya Boi Kongming, Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song (?), Guilty Crown (wait, uh...), and Takt Opt Destiny for reasons. So about that first episode of K-On. The characters are just less likeable and the plot kicks off in a far less dynamic way than Bocchi does. I'm sure most of you knew that one kid who was really good at X instrument or thing in high school, probably knew a few kids even that were "just amazing bro, just A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!" at something and maybe they even stuck with it. If those people are likeable or your friends, you can't help but cheer them on a bit right? Bocchi the Rock sets itself up like that, with the kind of believable real-world challenges that talented and hard-working young musicians lacking experience might actually face. You can't help but feel a bit invested in Bocchi's band's road to succes, even if the stakes are pretty small to start. That might feel like it's too serious and niche to bite into with so many power-fantasy issekai out there to catch up with, and CloverWorks probably thought so too - so they also made Bocchi the Rock a sketch comedy that takes extreme license in the art style and animation techniques to set up the gags. They embelished the funny parts of the plot and character dynamics as often as they could get away with and it looks like they were given a lot of freedom to have fun with that, which to me made it a hit. Either aspect alone - realistically written upbeat story with likeable characters working towards a difficult but doable goal in the world, or whacky character-centric sketch comedy that takes great liberties with immersion and art styles - might not present a mass appeal. But for me at least the combination did the trick and I think this is one of those shows anyone could enjoy that comes recommended with a blanket "just trust me you'll like it!". Bocchi is really at it's best when the band performs the original OST tracks. Bocchi the Rock knows it's subject matter and conveys it expertly. The individual characters who have each spent years just to get good enough at their instrument to put themselves out there and collaborate with others (and also lead singer that's just into the bassist because yuri-bait... sigh they'll never stop this is just how it is now). Then they meet up, in a believable way, and together take those painful first steps through months of effort to get a decent live show together and play original music for a crowd at a venue. Importantly, the show keeps a commiserating, upbeat perspective on what that experience is and how it's both scary and hard as well as immensely gratifying if you can get it done. Passion for music, making music, and the connections you make with people you make music with basically glows into your eyes from the screen at all times, and the character dialogue even as they get into the gags really elevates this sensation that you're watching an origin story - or a cautionary tale, unclear just yet. But the mood is hopeful! Now, contrast this with K-On which suffers in the first episode from a generic uh-oh club will disband if we don't convince this idiot to join plot. Plus, all the band members in K-On! are true beginners, less likeable, and spend 90% of the time protrayed in the high school setting as students which is a boring start especially when it's clear that's where a lot of the show is going to stay. Bocchi very purposefully takes us outside the high school setting, and then stays out of it 90% of the time. Taking a more nuanced approach to the "let's start a band" theme, Bocchi selects it's cast from driven individuals who attend different high schools and does not confine their origin story to a clubroom. In some world K-On is being "more realistic", and sure if you randomly grab 4 high school girls from the same high school no shot do they make for an interesting bando out of the gate. But if you grab that one kid from 3 different high schools who's really good at X instrument, then give the lead vocals to the only band member of somewhat dubious musical background if any maybe you do have something after a couple months to practice! The second premise was just more interesting altogether and better thought out, and on top of that the pacing is great. They take time where it's needed to fill out the characters and setting, but this is often an afterthought within a gag and much more emphasis is placed on real time events to develop the characters and their relationships. The few serious character moments are thus given a lot of space to land and they do since they feel like the natural conclusion of a build up. Time and the "squad goals" for the main cast as we get into the story march along very clearly, and exposition coming mostly together with comedy and fun keeps that "listen up! Here's what you need to know..." feeling completely out of this show. We don't even know much about any of the characters other than Bocchi for most of the show, which kind of makes sense for a group of girls who only meetup to jam in a band and just started that this year. Personally, this is exactly what I call good writing. We see the character emerge over time through the scenes and the dialogue, without flashbacks, and even if it would be natural keeping the fun as the focus and trusting the viewer to absorb non-essential backstory passively as it's referenced. Bocchi the Rock doesn't drag characters out into a bore or force them to join hands in a shonen sob story circle jerk just to give us all the update and paradoxically cause us to lose interest in the character. We see what they're all about with their actions and dialogue in different situations - you don't really need the backstory to interrupt the flow that way and CloverWorks did a good job of that here. It should go without saying, but obviously I think the characters are kind of awesome. The personalities and circumstance of Bocchi's bandmates and the other supporting cast members straddles that thin line between believable/relatable and interesting/cool/fun and because they're all like that the interactions between them are great. Bocchi's character is a standout though, and they take enough time to set her up before really getting into the plot. Her dedication to practicing guitar as evidenced by a staunch online following, her completely absurd levels of self-indulgent and unrealistic ambition, and a willingness to push through her intense social anxiety to pursue those ambitions although she ends up needing support from her friends are just very likeable core traits in this character. A nice running theme is that she cares so much more than she is able to clearly express or reciprocate about her bandmates' friendship because she struggles so much in social interactions while they are oblivious because they don't see their relationships in a context of scarcity like Bocchi does. The balance between embelishing her fatal flaw for comedic relief and showing steady growth and a bit of grit when it counts to get through important events despite herself - as opposed to a random metamorphosis into a social shonen butterfly about halfway through which is honestly what I expected at first - really allows us to root for the character and thus enjoy the comedy. K-On just seemed like it was bullying an unfortunate for plot reasons. Overall, Hitori "Bocchi" Gotou is the best and most likeable NEET-kun character writing I have seen in a hot minute. I really appreciate the script flip to "hindered but working on it" versus the standard "helpless and happy about it" that other shows tend to go with, even Yua Serufu from Do It Yourself this very season which coincidentally the only other CGDCT I like because making shit is also guitar cool. Together with the excellent music and animation of the live performances this really helps sell the stakes because Bocchi has no other path out of her sad state and cares so much but doesn't have the soft skills to coast on that investment alone. K-On maybe goes to a place like this later, but after the first episode I already didn't like the guitarist and didn't care if she became guitarhero-san IRL. The drummer that initially meets up with Bocchi, Nijika, is a confident go-getter with a clear goal and strong motivations tastefully revealed much later on. As with Ritsu in K-On, Nijika gets the band together. Both have a plan and they're both gonna make it happen, but Ritsu of K-On just comes off as annoying at first while the bassist and keyboard player in K-On are just her yas-queen lackeys and they end up bullying a dork into joining the club by applying pressure in a fairly innocent way. Honestly I don't mind this approach, and I particularly respect shows that present characters I begrudgingly come to like or just ham it up with a cast of jerks that still make me laugh or hold my interest - but Bocchi does it better. Guitarist is great as outlined, drummer Nijika is great and gets better over time, the bassist is a bit edgy and into herself from a wealthy family and has a very direct and cold temperment but it works well to balance the personalities out, and the weakest link is the yuri-bait lead singer who's literally just into the emotionally unavailable bassist but does get some decent gags written on the basis of her people-pleasing personality. Bocchi's parents and sibling, the manager at the club and her friend, the random mentor that shows up wasted to a street performance once and I guess is part of the cast now - even the random fans that buy tickets to that first show. They're all great, overall very likeable cast with good chemistry. The setting is also much more interesting than K-On. Most things happen in the real world somewhere instead of the high school/classroom/home setting, despite the main cast being high school girls in both shows. Maybe K-On changes that but it doesn't look good in episode 1. Bocchi didn't make that mistake in it's first episode. Also, did I mention that the music is OP/ED quality? Original tracks performed by the band and recorded multiple times to be played back in different places and actually sound like a different performance, that is to say not a copy/paste of the same audio file! Maybe I'm alone in this, but to me it was a great diservice to excellent shows like Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song and Ya Boy Kongming and even stuff that just had a recurring "singing the blues" tune like Guilty Crown which isn't actually about the music anyways - the diservice being constant replays of That One Song. In shows where the impact of a song performed by X character(s) and heard by Y character(s) is part of the stakes, it just kills me when I don't like the song or don't buy the reactions. I'm left feeling like it was half-assed, phoned in, uninspired. Especially when the song is written in very poor, auto-translated English that didn't make sense in context when it was sung, and no one in the show ever got as sick of it as I did which made me hate all the characters who didn't hate the song which is usually every single character, sigh. In addition, I wonder if all these awesome OP/ED songs I will listen to seperate from an Anime completely make as little sense in Japanese as these "one trick pony" numbers make in English. Bocchi the Rock doesn't have this problem, like at all. The music is written professionally for the show and the animation is done by musicians or at least so well that you would think whoever did it knows how to play that part for that instrument in that song exactly, so the key moments they are setting up actually land - you feel in a small way like you're in the audience cheering and hoping that they crush it and feeling uncomfortable when they don't. I've heard that Carole and Tuesday has this going for it and it seems like a rare quality in Anime, so although I'm not sure that K-On can be fairly criticized past episode one I absolutely will tell you that the episode one band performance was burnt garbage in a urinal. I physically flinched in disgust when I realized that to continue watching K-On I may have to hear hyper-realistic audio clips from children in their first months of learning an instrument on the regular. Intentionally mis-writing a show and it's characters around the premise of That One Song being a siren song of myth seems... normal? Expected? Shows like Takt Opt Destiny and Ya Boi Kongming, and probably K-On but I haven't watched it so I'm just shitting on it baselessly, will do these things. The things basically in the category of glaring inconsistencies for anyone who is a sound enjoyer and has basically heard music sounds and thought "these sounds sound better than those sounds" and so on. For anyone with that level of expertise, when the musician in the Anime is playing the instrument/singing and everyone is going "So Very TALENTED! Omg I just can't get enough of That One Song in your repetoire it touches my very soul in this life or death situation also!" the musician playing that laudable loop just doesn't look very enthused do they? Or maybe the song actually isn't that good, is it? Or maybe it's not even close to good or appropriate for the situation, and you struggle to see how someone might hear that and feel things at that precise time. It sounds the same as the last time you heard it despite the stakes or setting being different, doesn't it? And so on. In Takt Opt Destiny, this guy played piano and supposedly has a chip on his shoulder about playing piano and all he cares about is piano and he's a grumpy asshole because he can't play piano and everyone who doesn't understand him can die and such - and I loved that character. He was just suck a prick about his piano thing, of course the prick is doted on by women who think he's piano jesus, and it was funny and well written. But then he PLAYS piano, and it turns out he's just a basic bitch! He doesn't move, he just sits there back straight, calmly playing the piano like he's a twelve-year-old at a piano recital. Actually I've seen better from such, plus he's playing what sounds like excersises from "Piano for Dummies", and yet everybody claps and compliments him for some reason despite his being a huge dick to them about it all the time and despite these people being professional, classically trained musicians in general. It was a joke, dude! A joke! In Ya Boi Kongming, the problem was that Eiko performs the same damn song for the first like 95% of the show no matter what. No. That's also a joke. Unfortunately, it really asks you to suspend belief to a degree I find unacceptable and I find that this trend is common in shows that blend action and some musical theme especially, and this is all to say that I see Carole and Tuesday, I see Bocchi the Rock as exceptions to this general pattern and as I had always suspected since I couldn't get into Carole and Tuesday so I only noted it probably helped a lot that the music was proper, the music being proper here in Bocchi the Rock elevates it to general appeal from just a fun and enjoyable show for some niche group of Anime fans like most of the others I mentioned there (Ya Boi Kongming was awesome ngl). This is "K-On: Re" in a lot of ways, but K-On suffers from a weak first episode opening with characters that are too plain or bratty to continue with. Unless they were a direct family relation, you would never on your life sub to these clowns on soundcloud. Bocchi the Rock learns that lesson, says hold my beer Ritsu, and brings us a much cooler cast of characters, great music, great animation, and strong comedy sketches - as of episode 9, that is. AND AS OF EPISODE 9, this is an instant classic by CloverWorks that will join the ranks of other glorious CloverWorks bangers when we find out about the murderous multi-dimensional AI locked in the basement (Wonder Egg Priority), the distant solar system that a planet sized space unicorn will anhilate with the power of already having a boyfriend (Darling In the Franxx), and get around to taking all the demon farmer jerrrrbs (The Promised Neverland). Ah yes, a classic in the making with a roughly 50% chance of sticking the landing by the numbers. Don't break a string, Bocchi.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Nov 7, 2022
Juuni Taisen
(Anime)
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10/10. Because this is the anti-hero of Anime, that doesn't fucking care what you wanted to see, or what you like, or how you feel. Juuni Taisen is edginess embodied, a multi-dimensional master of trash taste disaster. The fact that this made it through the entire process of making it and no compromises were made in the interest of making it more popular, even though it is so obvious that it made editorial choices that CLEARLY THEY WOULD KNOW would be unpopular, deserves your respect and admiration. They wanted to make it this way, they made what they wanted to make, and they didn't care
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what people would think about it - and I like that. Personally, I would have been the guy on this project going "but if we do that, then..." and "maybe we should..." but I was not on this project. Whoever was never asked or permitted any such notion of any such compromise, caution, or concern for how Juuni Taisen would be received - one question was asked and answered in the writer's room and that was all. How will we kill them, friends!? Psychotically!!!
Brimming with a highly concentrated "everything is just some bullshit anyways" fuck you fuck off get fucked everybody and everything sucks nothing is real and we'll all soon be dead regardless energy, the kind of energy that Isekai protagonists can only dream of hinting at, Juuni Taisen is a take down of everything you might have wished such a well drawn show could be as a general fan of the medium. What do I mean, you ask? Here's the gist - every single aspect of this Anime that could have made it popular and probably even a hit show by just doing what Fate and friends did, or identifying key characters to root for and keeping them alive by the skin of their teeth, or going big picture by pitting the warriors against the organization that put the Juuni Taisen death game/holy grail war together in the first place - was denied for the sake of the integrity of this piece. The integrity of something unloveable, a message and vehicle so angsty and confused and desperate that part of you just wants it to disappear entirely and just fuck off - and in feeling that way the piece hits it's mark successfully. Stellar cost-effective production values especially the artwork, the interesting character models and backstories, the storied kung-fu premise of zodiac warriors and existence of some supernatural warrior society that seem to all end up as mercenaries in modern warzones, and the fascinating death game, all wasted. Intentionally, purposefully, carefully, for the sake of nothing. Backstories for the sake of killing, all a flavor of killing, all fated to die in the least interesting possible format no matter how interesting the ways. For nothing, by the way. They also die for nothing. The stakes are nothing. Any typical shounen-ish format show would at some point relinquish it's hold on depraved wanton fatalism and serve up some overarching good vs. evil, save the world from the threat revealed in the big twist episode story. Or some kind of a "redemption" arc, or changing the order of the backstories or the order of the ED credits display of dead characters to at least keep the mystery there FOR FREE, without adapting anything differently at all from the source materal! They intended to ruin everything you could possibly like, and there was a lot to like, but they also didn't really try to make you like it directly. It was an ambivalent effort, procedural, to relate these characters to the audience and to their archetypes and that cavalier attitude really sold these characters. The fact that they were devices so easily disposed of and so criminally flawed made them tragic, pathetic. That could only have helped them sell this show and they must have known it, but they did not waiver from their intent to also treat these pathetic characters pathetically, to render them moot. Also, where is all the fake-ass intellectual 4D chess? Literally every attempt to make a 200IQ move is thwarted by a pathological psychopath necromancer rabbit in high heels, and then finally everybody is blown up in an explosion and we find out that one kid has this absolutely stupid pass/fail mechanic power that made even the overtly predictable, get rekt no one cares that there's no suprises, all your waifus are dead fam deal with it plot EVEN LESS IMPORTANT. The events we saw were all pre-ordained by the rat!? Deja-Vu, the fuck kind of foreshadowing is this!? Wow. This show manages to insult your intelligence by being smart, and make fun of your childish desire to see "good storytelling" by telling a disgusting nhilistic story competently. Then it robs you of any pay off you might have thought was coming in the final episode by revealing that the "strongest zodiac warrior", the MC, our guy... just so happens to be the most pathetic of all these pathetic characters. He goes through 100 possible ways to advance or resolve the plot in a typical fashion that the audience would typically get behind, and he chooses literally the least interesting, most upsetting, and dumbest one. But it was the only one that makes sense given the rest of the show. He chooses to make all that death and destruction and agonizing and effort meaningless, all the backstories and shocking psycho rabbit manwhore moments implicitly pointless, by forgetting all about it and by extension consigning all those characters and all their backstories and all their deaths and by extension their values and everyone who watched and made this show to oblivion on the selfish whim of some loser high school kid. Wow. Fuck you too, show. Insulted and impressed.... Would this show not have been amazing with just a hint of typical tropes and storytelling, just a bit of that mainstream formulaic drivel? Put these characters in the hands of anyone else for anything else, these backstories, all this stuff - and it's great. But Juuni Taisen manages to take all that potential and just wash it away in self-indulgent, annoying fatalism, nhilism, giving in and giving up. Killing because who cares. I'm shocked that this exists and I found it fascinating to an extreme.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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