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Mar 11, 2024
Clannad Afterstory is the portrait of a life with a sense of scale and scope not often found in the anime medium. In its latter stages you feel a sense of history with its characters that accentuate and heighten their ordinary conversations, giving them a dimension beyond their original meaning. More than a story about family, it’s a story about the passage of time, executed with about as much intelligence and skill as you’d expect from a very talented toddler.
Right yeah, so Maeda watches the film ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, yeah? And so he watches this film, yeah, and it’s about this guy, you know,
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and he marries this girl, yeah? But they’re kinda broke, but they have to run this bank, and there’s this big evil rich guy who’s trying to develop the town, he’s trying to get a monopoly on things, and our main guy’s trying to stop him. And he sacrifices all these things to stop the evil guy, yeah? But he gets sad doing it and gets to feeling that he wishes he was never born. So some fat fucker who’s an angel in disguise says “Alright, bet” and he creates a world and invites the guy to view this world, a world where he doesn’t exist. And this world is on some 1984 shit, you know? Major dystopia. His brother’s dead, his cat’s dead, sister’s dead, mother’s dead, father’s dead, Biff has married his mother and owns Trump Tower and is also the president of the United Nations of the World. Main guy goes “nah fuck this go back” and the fat guy goes “Alright, bet,” and he brings him back to the real world and they all go celebrate Christmas.
It’s a good movie, sentimental for sure, but its sentimentality is offset by the fact that the miserable things that the guy James Stewart is playing goes through still happen, and that their outcomes still exist in the fictional world they inhabit. It also displays the power of fiction, of how an alternate reality with no tangibility can have a tangible impact in the reality we inhabit. By viewing a world where he doesn’t exist, James Stewart is made to realize that his life is very valuable to the people around him. You could argue Hollywood peaked with this one. It is a perfect sort of story, for film especially, having the necessary simplicity required for mass appeal while still retaining the depth necessary to remain relevant past the fashions of its era.
Yeah, so this is relevant because Maeda saw this and tried to emulate it. Source: telepathy. Source two: there’s a Tomoyo Afterstory visual novel with the subtitle ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. And the plot bears many similarities to the film. Guy meets girl, marries girl, is happy for a time, encounters hardship, is met with tragedy, wishes that he never met girl, encounters further tragedy, renounces his wish, which reverses the tragedy, and they all live happily ever after. Not a one-for-one copy, but the same beats are hit. The way Maeda does it is out of wack obviously, because the tragedy that occurs happens in the story’s real world, and so when it is reversed, it reverses what caused the wish in the first place. This is why many people feel that the ending in Clannad Afterstory feels so cheap and hollow – it doesn’t build upon what has happened before. Instead, it overwrites it with a new reality, that’s happier, but also less meaningful than the reality that existed before.
The characters have regressed. Tomoya is arguably the most interesting person in Clannad’s story, giving the moeblob atmosphere a harder edge with his delinquent status and his troubles with his father, and so to see him here as this kind of goofy kid in the middle stages of the story and a punching bag in the latter half is a bit too one-note to be interesting. Same with Nagisa, she’s sweet and kind and kind and sweet and that’s all she really is. A puppy to be run over. Same with Ushio, but here it’s a non-issue. Ushio is a really good part of the story. Maeda here is able to achieve a perfect union between the way Tomoya feels towards her and the way the viewer feels, which results in many emotionally fulfilling moments. Her introduction is the starting point of a good stretch of episodes where the show is plainly, really good.
Outside of that stretch, the rest is dubious. The girl and the robot has got to rank as the single most superfluous narrative of all time. Each time the story transitions to its world, it kills off any and all momentum the main narrative has generated up until that point. They walk and talk and – whatever! None of it matters. To the very end, nothing that happens in that world matters in the slightest. It is the source of the fantasy elements in the story, but the viewer never sees its influence. It exists to give off a pretentious magical, ethereal air, an aesthetic of something profound, for something as hollow as bird-bones.
And as usual for Maeda, things take too long to get going anywhere. There is an exorbitant amount of time spent with Tomoya at his new job for instance, ad the first episode takes its entire runtime to reintroduce characters who aren’t even important to the main plot, and the two story arcs preceding the main story are entirely irrelevant to the main story. All this superfluous detail dilutes the quality and impact of the important story moments.
I’m not going to say some shit like ‘I wanted to like Clannad Afterstory’ as if it was Maeda’s job for me to like what he’s written, but it’s true that I liked the idea of liking Clannad Afterstory. I’m not going to say ‘admirable’ either, because that’s just patronizing, but I like the idea of a story like Clannad Afterstory. For people don’t like the ending of Afterstory for another reason: there are no consequences for any of its characters. Tomoya gets to live happily, with his beautifully kind wife, and his adorably loving daughter. Somehow, there’s a feeling that this isn’t fair, a feeling that Tomoya is a criminal who has hoodwinked the detective called Realism. There’s almost a sense of jealousy. ‘I don’t want this to exist, because I don’t want to acknowledge that such a thing could be real.’ Because if miracles were to exist, if magic really was real, then what value does your suffering hold? If all your pain could be reversed in the flick of a wrist, then what was the point of the pain to begin with? I think such thoughts are besides the point. Pain and suffering has meaning because a choice is made to imbue these moments with relevance. The meaning itself is not real, yet there is a choice made to believe that the meaning is real. The belief leads to a change in the real world. Through the belief in something un-real, something real occurs. That, in a way, is a kind of miracle, which is what the ending tries to capture, though obviously, the miracles that occur in real life are not as miraculous as Jun Maeda’s success.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Jan 4, 2024
Though there’s little to like, there’s plenty to admire in this particular Ikuhara series, usually in the aesthetics, occasionally in the writing too. Everything’s set at angles in Yurikuma, which tie in with the dividing lines made quickly apparent between the bears and the humans outlined in the opening narration. Despite carrying around a reputation for being obtuse, Ikuhara is as subtle as a sledgehammer here with his themes – pretty clear pretty early on what’s being implied with the divide between human and bears, and the devouring and so on, and in case it isn’t clear Ikuhara will make the character repeat the same
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thing about six or seven times, just to make sure that you understand, just in case you didn’t hear it the first, or fourth, or fiftieth time.
Ikuhara’s characterization here though is terrible, but he’s always been very weak at that in all his shows. He eschews realism in favour of having his characters represent some sort of idea, and he will twist time and space to make sure that they act in such a way that adheres to this idea, using whatever justification necessary for having a character act in a certain fashion regardless of whether or not the justification itself makes any common sense. Results in a lack of relatability, and a lack of personal connection to any of his characters beyond the idea they represent. Putting it another way, you like Ikuhara’s characters not for who they are but rather what they represent. By extension the same logic applies to his works as a whole. There’s very little, in my opinion, for the viewer to latch onto as something relatable, some situation that’s grounded in reality.
Take the main girl, an orphan who lives alone, is ostracized by her peers, is bullied – can’t care. No attention is drawn to her plight beyond what is necessary to the core message of the show, so none of it seems real, there’s no chance for any sympathy to form between you and the character, because Ikuhara doesn’t allow her to have a life outside of the story. Broadly this applies to everyone in the show. The resulting lack of an emotional attachment to the characters naturally leads to the adoption of a very indifferent attitude to the majority of the events which unfold in Yurikuma’s story.
Like the characters, the story is a farce. There are bears who want to eat humans, bears disguised as humans, bears who want to kill other bears disguised as humans, all very grizzly. The bears are lesbians, the humans don’t like lesbians, but some humans do like lesbians, but those humans are excluded, by the other humans, because they don’t like lesbians, because they think lesbians don’t like them, because they’re lesbians. Something like that. Ikuhara uses this circular irrational line of thinking as a baseline for circling around the various reasons for the irrational hatred of lesbians and draws some pretty obvious though nevertheless valid conclusions which the show explains in obvious fashion.
Personally not a fan of these open-and-shut social/moral questions with obvious right answers in fiction because it makes the story very predictable and also very rigid, with very little to interpret beyond what Ikuhara wants you to interpret. Granted, there is more to Yurikuma than that theme of loving what/who you love regardless of what other people think, but its nothing that Penguindrum hadn’t covered already from another angle. It’s all very agreeable but merely being agreeable isn’t really anything noteworthy.
With Ikuhara, you never really get the feeling you’re getting what’s been promised. He’s someone whose works I admire but never personally like. His shows never really seem to come together when they should, they’re always aesthetically pleasing but uneventful, always lacking in concrete action. Things seem to happen in Yuri Kuma Arashi, and they do happen, but it never really sets in and leaves an impression in the mind. Watching it is like witnessing a dream, but a really bland dream, where you just sit in a room, on a chair, and stare into space, and then wake up. And then you go about your day as usual. And then maybe in a few days time you think about it again in a vague sort of way. Not hard to believe that it happened, it’s just hard to really care. But in the end, I suppose it’s bearable.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Dec 29, 2023
A story about a boy named after a car who randomly is transported to another world where magic, beast-men, and CGI background characters infest, decay and murder their surroundings. Toyota stumbles upon the power to respawn after dying. The series structures itself on this reset mechanic. Ferrari sort of plays the role of detective, trying to piece together missing pieces of the puzzle of his death so he can get out of his current predicament alive and make it to the next self-styled save point.
Opening first few episodes set up a good groundwork for the story to build off, explaining the world and the characters
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without getting too bogged down in extraneous detail. Nissan having to deal with different circumstances in the same time-frame and having to grapple with not being as strong he’d like adds a sense of internal conflict to what’s an otherwise straightforward introduction to the world’s light fantasy setting. Mansion arc afterwards is the first real complex mystery the story throws at its viewer, with various moving parts that all interact in a fairly satisfying manner. Being able to work around the limitations imposed by the time-loop and provide character development by revealing markedly different sides to each character depending on the circumstances is writing of a kind that isn’t completely terrible. Delivering on this consistently would’ve been nice.
Examining Re:Zero’s latter half is like performing an autopsy. Kick your feet up. Relax. Sit through some utterly contrived stupidity from Aston Martin, whose IQ has been sub-divided so many times over between now and the last time we’ve seen him that there’s essentially no critical thinking capability left in him whatsoever. Treat yourself to second-hand embarrassment by watching Volkswagen flail around like an idiot, for one episode, and then two episodes, and then three episodes, and then four. Experience masochistic pleasure in seeing the merchant loli explain in clear, explicit detail to Fiat, and by extension, the audience, that if he wants help, he needs to give something equal to the help that will be provided, told clearly, with no other room for interpretation. Savour the moment where Lada completely ignores this salient piece of advice and unnecessary act of charity and continues with no plan for several more episodes.
Needless to mention, there’s no point in torturing Renault for a few more rounds when you’ve already shown the audience the key to the door. There’s nothing of importance in these extra scenes. Already had an adequate amount of worldbuilding, already seen an adequate amount of mental deterioration by Alfa Romeo to sell the ‘I Love Emilia’ scene, no need to hear anything anymore from anyone. Dragging the story on in this fashion was a poor decision. The show suffers for it. Even when Chevrolet finally does get his act together by that point you’ll be so exhausted by all the screaming and yelling and death and blood and violence that you’ll just want the big climax to be over and done with without too much effort expended on your end. Miraculously however, the author learns from his mistakes and delivers a satisfying conclusion that saves the show from mediocrity.
If you actually believed that such a miracle could occur you are as hopeless as a child enrolled in the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Treat yourself to a completely unnecessary, totally gratuitous, and utterly inconsequential back-story about the old sword guy. Captain Ahab. Sit through his entire life story. From the cradle to the grave.
After all this malarky its still not over. A big clean-up section battle between the man who screams ‘DES’ at the end of every sentence (Beetlejuice) and the man who miraculously manages to form a complete sentence despite his severe mental disabilities (Dacia Sandero(mentally delayed)). This fight just goes on and on and on, padding out its length for seemingly ages. There were already signs of this during the mansion section where there’s this unnecessary epilogue near the end where Rem fights the dogs, but at least that had some energy in its conclusion. There’s no payoff when Honda finally reunites with Emilia, just sigh of relief from the audience – thank christ its over– even though really, he has much more of a reason to feel indebted towards Rem, who has done far more for Skoda and put her life on the line multiple times – but let’s not get into the semantics, let’s just enjoy the fact that you made it, you’re out, you can begin again, you can do something new.
Then optimism starts to creep in once more. Maybe this overly long drawn-out narrative was just an anomaly. Surely [C] the second season [L] will get things [U] back on track [E] with neat, concise [L] mystery boxes [E] that are well [S] thought-out and [S] entertaining to watch.
Re:Zero is a story for children, a shonen manga story dressed up as a light novel and re-sold for the latest generation of eager consumers who couldn’t care less about what’s on their plate so long as its labelled isekai. Not deep, not insightful. At times, entertaining. The good parts are good while they last. There’s a couple good scenes scattered here and there. Definitely an uneven experience that leaves a lot to be desired in the latter half of its story. If the author edited and trimmed away a lot of the extra fat and baggage holding that part of the story back, I could recommend it. Watch up to the end of the mansion arc and pretend the series ends there.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Dec 29, 2023
Though hyped as a massive trainwreck, Darling in the Franxx is more like a gradual derailment, culminating in the train falling on its side with a bang, the wheels spinning in space. Plot is a sterile soap opera. Magical vampire alien girl Zero Two and childhood friend blue girl compete for the heart of some carbon copy clone they fished out from your office’s Xerox machine, and in that conflict, there’s only ever going to be one winner. There’s some other schmucks. They all don’t know what sex is. They fight in Diebuster robots. They fight against aliens.
Core issue is a lack of inspiration.
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Franxx has this vague goal to be like Eva, and be a mecha show like Eva, and that’s as far as it got in the minds of their creators. Trigger tried their best, I guess, in the animation department. Probably told them a good lesson to not to attach their name to a bad script and partner with a studio incapable of producing anything worthwhile to watch.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Dec 29, 2023
The issue with Rumihiko Takahashi’s works is that it’s only going to be a matter of time before the latest entry resembles what has come before and in Ranma 1/2’s case a good fight is fought which lasts around fifteen episodes before it devolves into another version of Urusei Yatsura. From there, it’s the standard episodic fare featuring slapstick as the main form of humour and bickering as its main source of dialogue. I’d suggest you’d watch the first eighteen or so episodes since they’re pretty consistently good, and then look up some episode guide somewhere if you’re still interested. There’s no pull to the
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narrative after Akane cuts her hair and no conclusive ending, so if you’re thinking about soldiering through 161 episodes, I’d advise against it. The last two episodes are worth watching on their own, the last episode in particular has a very beautiful scene near the end that makes no sense but is still very beautiful regardless.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Dec 29, 2023
Ping Pong is about ping pong. Sets up three ping pong players to follow through the show: Peco, Smile and China. Peco is ass; his friend Smile is way better, catching the eye of the school’s ping pong coach Butterfly Joe, who sees something of himself in Smile, and wants to bring out the best in him. Various intersecting character motivations run into one another as a result, all culminating in essentially one question: “Why do I play ping pong?” China plays ping pong to get back to China, Dragon plays ping pong to not lose. Smile isn’t sure. The story’s journey is essentially everyone
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realizing that at the end of the day, they play for fun, something that the seemingly stupidest character in the show, Peco, does already, which is why he’s the hero. Yuasa’s best animated work for sure. Manga’s better.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Dec 29, 2023
Golden Time is set in college. A big deal. Tada Banri’s the main idiot. He’s fairly stupid. Don’t like him because his character design is poor. You’ll like him because there’s no reason to dislike him, but you’ll dislike him eventually because the story involves him in some altogether stupid arrangements. He’s had a mysterious accident. He meets Kaga Koko and she’s a representation of a sort of ideal woman that forms inside the minds of the deluded. She’s beautiful, fashionable, attractive, rich, sociable, and yet at the same time has no close friends.
To balance out this unnatural combination an equally unnatural explanation
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has to be invented on the author’s part. The justification in this case is that Kaga Koko is head over heels for this guy who later dyes his hair blonde and so she has no time for anything else. Some other flimsily constructed pretences sort of justify how she is. But not really. She falls in love with Tada Banri early on. Generally the show is enjoyable up until that point. I would even say things were promising.
I consent says Tada Banri. I consent says Kaga Koko. I don’t, says the manifestation of Tada Banri’s amnesia. Wondering as to what this source of stupidity could possibly be, my guess is that the story was looking an awful lot too similar to Toradora, so the supernatural had to be thrown in because I suppose making something originally terrible is better than making something unoriginally good. The story nosedives with Banri’s amnesia ghost, leads to some of the most contrived nonsense melodrama of the 21st century. Quality resurfaces at the very end to say that, hey, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. I’m halfway inclined to agree. Dialogue is still pretty good. Pretty fun to watch the cast interact with each other, on the rare occasions when the story steps away from the love triangle. One of the shows of all time.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Dec 18, 2023
While it’s common knowledge that all K-On lovers are Satan-worshipping shoplifters who steal spare change from the homeless, I am not without sympathy. Being an evil person myself who enjoys mugging charity workers working for St. Vincent de Paul in my spare time, I can’t help but see myself in their shoes. If you like K-On, I understand. I will not question the hole in your Mio body-pillow, nor will I question the lipstick on her face, nor the seven kilograms of cocaine hidden in the walls of your home. I am a very accepting person. We live in a very accepting society. The internet
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is a very accepting place. We only tell you to kill yourself once a month. We’re very nice people. And K-On is a very nice show. It has a great number of very nice made-up people in its made-up world.
Yui Hirasawa is as dumb as bricks, and the main character. Yui is joined by Mio, a responsible, well-meaning, pretty Japanese girl whose innocence is gradually eroded and work ethic ground to dust by the three stooges surrounding her. Mio’s childhood friend Ritsu is the band’s drummer, and she’s energetic and lively and so on. And there’s also Mugi, who is rich. And! Also! She has a lot of money. These cookie-cupcake Christmas characters comprise the main cast of the show, and for the first couple episodes they do various normal things in a supposedly cute way, and then they play a tooth-decaying, ear-castrating melody. Then they’re joined midway through by Azusa, and then they do the same thing again, only this time Azusa is with them, and Yui says ‘Azunyan!’ every few minutes like the 47-chromosome wonderful human being that she is. From time to time, through the revolving door of their Mickey Mouse club-house, their club supervisor does her very best to corrupt their innocence with her cosplaying fetishistic desire to dress up Mio in as many marketable costumes as possible. Moe, apparently.
I liked watching K-On. It’s a very comfortable experience to view these girls, animated lovingly by Kyoto Animation, sit and talk and walk around, and buy guitars and eat cake, and live a kind of life that is out of reach of reality. It’s a very nice story about how picking up a new hobby can help you meet new people and transform your life in a way that you’d never imagined.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Dec 15, 2023
Violence, threats of violence, various very bad things happening for no good reason, a hard focus on everything bad in the world, a hard focus on how everything good in the world is a scam, and that happiness is a lie, and so on and so forth. Basically, Inio Asano.
Oyasumi Punpun’s excessive fatalism isn’t very believable, doesn’t do the story or the people in the story any favours and it makes them hard to like. Punpun’s the protagonist, the reader will be sitting in his head for the majority of the manga. He’s not a good person, (no such thing in Asano’s world) but
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he’s understandable in his actions through the story and extorts a good deal of sympathy from the reader. Story follows him through his life as a grade schooler up to his early twenties. Nothing of much substance occurs throughout his life, which has led people to categorize Punpun as a ‘slice-of-life’ manga, a generous act of charity that attempts to excuse the vast, dead spaces of boredom present everywhere in the story. First signs of life only start to emerge around twenty chapters in, when Punpun’s uncle delves into his past with a girl he meets.
Punpun has multiple digressions of this nature that pad out that pad sad bad nad cad dad chad jihad out what would otherwise be a straightforward narrative. They’re a welcome change of pace because the main narrative is so aimless and boring and goes nowhere forever, but these side stories have little connection to the plot, so in the case of the Pegasus cult for instance, where the story being told is more boring than the main narrative (hard, but not impossible), enjoyment grinds to a halt, and you get the feeling that Asano is just messing around and around and around and around and riverrun past eve and adam from michael bay to verve of snore.
When Asano actually tries to convey something of substance because he doesn’t try most of the time let’s be real, it results in memorable that I can’t really remember displays of talent, an example would be the big, imposing, photorealistic pages of Punpun walking through the city here’s what it looks like:
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The pictures look impressive, they support the melancholy atmosphere of the story in an effective manner. Looking at Punpun in these drawings (center right), you can clearly get a sense of his isolation and alienation. Delving deeper into the visuals, Punpun’s unconventional character design allows for further innovative storytelling by being able to morph his shape, something Asano does to heighten the dramatic tension of certain scenes and/or express Punpun’s current emotional state, to good effect
Example:
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For some reason along the way every so often Saint Asano decides to stand at his pulpit and deliver some sermons and I do not like this because he says things that I think are wrong. Whenever Asano does so, whenever he expresses an opinion through one of his characters, he preaches in such an assertive and self-righteous manner that I’m automatically inclined to disagree with him, even if what is being said is, to a certain extent, correct. It’s exasperating to read much like my hunger strike reports sent to the Taliban, because it’s exasperating to see something simple be blown up needlessly into something complicated, and it’s exasperating to listen to a question that is being asked not out of personal concern but out of a sense of obligation, which is what Asano’s societal musings end up feeling like.
Main issue I had with Punpun was boredom. There’s not much of anything in its story or characters to latch onto emotionally. The characters are unlikeable, and the story is largely uneventful. I’m not a fan of the attempts at surrealism, because they aren’t rooted in reality, and I view them as sort of a cop-out. I’m even less of a fan at the attempts at realism, because it presents a distorted view of reality that’s impossible to buy into. Naturally, I know, it’s a story, a manga story at that, so I know there’s always this pressure on the author to make something big and something shocking happen and present the world as a darker place than it actually is – and I actually liked these parts of Punpun, they’re the only parts that left any lasting impression. The two parts I have in mind – the storylines involving Punpun’s uncle and the pottery class, and the concluding section of the manga, starting from Punpun meeting a certain someone’s mother – are gripping to read okay they’re not really gripping but I feel bad criticising him all the time. There is some real audacity in the scenes that transpire during these segments. At the same time though, the showcases of sharp violence are at odds with the thought-provoking atmosphere that Asano seems to want to cultivate.
Don’t know why Asano tries to portray himself as someone who creates manga that are different from the rest of the escapist, juvenile shonen fantasies. If he really believes it, he should just let his work speak for itself, in my opinion. Especially no need for him to go out of his way to de-rail his own plot by using the Pegasus cult to criticise escapism. A needless detour in a story already filled to the brim with needless detours. Take a step back and examine the content in Punpun: most of what’s he’s created is as juvenile and as lowbrow as the manga he criticises and without the redeeming, life-affirming messages that these manga export. There is no way Asano should feel as if he’s in the position to act as judge jury executioner on the entire shonen manga population when half the time his manga doesn’t even meet his own standards, but that’s probably why he feels the need to assert that his manga is better, it comes out of insecurity, because he knows that the gap between him and the rest is not as big as he would like it be.
I understand how Asano can provide solace to his readers (not really) and why this work of his is beloved (again, not really), because by expressing the effects of a life of isolation and unhappiness through the violent and sad actions of his characters, Asano shows the reader that they’re not alone, he feels the same pain they do, though I don’t think this is the right way of going about things as its pretty shallow, as in it doesn’t get at the source of the character’s, of Punpun, and of Asano’s unhappiness, and consequently does not get at the source of the reader’s unhappiness, which makes the whole affair pointless to sit through. If there was more honesty and sensitivity in Asano’s writing here, or if there was more of a solid resolution to the story’s many plot points and struggles, it could’ve justified the long and hard slog to read it all and get to the finish, but there is not. All the way along it is filled with self-loathing and bitterness and resentment with the usual contradictory spurts of narcissism that endear you even less to the story and its characters. Not that its badly made, its just not enjoyable.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Dec 15, 2023
Tengoku Daimakyou adapts a manga made by the same author of Soredemo something-or-other (And Yet the Town still Moves). That show, adapted by Shaft, had a very good last episode that rips off ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, or pays homage, depending on your point of view. Being one of the few anime episodes that made me feel something other than indifference, I thought very highly of And Yet the Town Still Moves. On closer inspection its not very good, not very bad, not really much of anything, which goes to show how a good last impression can work wonders for your perception of something’s quality.
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His latest work to adapted, Heavenly Delusion, concerns itself with two people. One’s named Maru (silver-haired boy-man) and Kimiko (ginger-haired girl-boy). They’re looking for a place called ‘Heaven’ – that’s the ‘Heavenly’ part of the title. The ‘Delusion’ refers to you, the viewer, and your belief that you’ll find something to enjoy here.
Alongside this excuse for a plot that the manga industry employs on an endless basis is another story concerning children who live in a nursery and don’t initially know the difference between men and women. They also have superpowers, because, I guess, maybe, probably, it could be said, perhaps. No, there is not a point to this particular story, because the show doesn’t last long enough to connect the two stories together. I’m sure in the inevitable season two it’ll all come together, but knowing this is adapts a manga, a conclusive and satisfying ending is unlikely to ever happen anytime soon. You could read the manga to see it out, much in the same way that you could ingest a bottle of nails. Something you could do.
Half of the story is sitting around waiting for the other half of the story to pick up where it left off. The latter, better half is the half you start out with, with Maru and Kimiko searching for Heaven. Maru has a vaccine that can help a sick person there and wants to deliver it. They live in a world that has gone off the rails a little bit, an alternate timeline where Liz Truss managed to last a little longer than forty-four days as Prime Minister. They fight monsters every couple episodes known as Hiruko/Man-eaters, they’re the main threat, but obviously the people are the real threats, the real monsters, real deep, for real.
People commit suicide and rape others in the show, not necessarily in that order. Despite this, the show is not very dark, and is generally unserious. More like a comedy, with various dark happenings occurring whenever excitement levels drop too far. A couple fake-outs, some big reveals, the usual tricks of the trade employed with manga narratives, the same smoke and mirrors used to distract the viewer from the fact that the story is going nowhere and never will go anywhere, the never-ending nowhere journey to the middle of nowhere, to Heaven supposedly, but it could be the centre of the Earth for all you or I know. If I were an arbiter of good taste and a protector of moral sanctity, I would rain down many criticisms upon Heavenly Delusion for its flagrant abuse of shock-value as a means of holding attention, but as the entire point of watching seasonal anime is to inflict as much mental pain upon yourself as possible, I will instead praise the show for driving the knife in just that bit deeper, for dropping my standards ever closer to the ocean floor.
If I cared about production values, and animation quality beyond a certain point, and sound quality beyond a certain fidelity, and all the various boring professional work that I shouldn’t take for granted yet take for granted anyway, I would point out to you that Heavenly Delusional is on the better end of the seasonal scale, that its general animation quality surpasses the television standard, but really, I doubt this will affect your enjoyment all too much considering how little there is to the story.
Enjoying Heavenly Delusion requires you to be in a certain frame of mind. Being under the influence of prescription drugs and/or alcohol will help you get there. Soberly examining its many minutes is not a tedious task, nor is it tiring, nor does it require much mental strain, or effort. Nevertheless I never found it to really enjoyable, which, on a sub-conscious level, was exactly what I was looking for. I knew what I was getting into here, so I can’t really complain about the par-for-the-course quality. It’s a very average, very inoffensively decent effort that executes its many clichés in an entirely acceptable manner. I was just hoping that there would be a strain of originality somewhere in its mass of cobbled-together ideas.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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