I was reminded today of the very weird, very dark, uncomfortably intense Flowers of Evil. The manga was a lot better done than the anime, but the anime adaptation was... interesting.
In the original manga, the characters are in middle school, while the anime ages them up to late high school. It feels weird to say, "This dark, sexually charged story needed to be about middle schoolers," but it kiiinda did. The inciting incident is Kasuga stealing the gym clothes of his crush, which is definitely weird and not-ok, but for a middle schooler it's a little more understandable. He doesn't even really know why he does it, it's just a burst of adolescent stupidity that he pretty much immediately regrets. Like he has sexual desires but he doesn't really have any kind of understanding of them yet. Then his classmate Nakamura finds out, and blackmails him into increasingly weirder, sexually charged performances. Nakamura is depressed and probably self-harming, and also abusive towards Kasuga, often with a sexual tinge to her abuse. The manga never comes outright and tells you why she is the way she is, but it's pretty heavily hinted that her father is sexually abusing her, and that she is in turn acting out sexual abuse on Kasuga. Nakamura and Kasuga go into a downward spiral together, culminating in them attempting a public suicide attempt at a festival.
Luckily they're stopped before they can hurt themselves, and then the manga timeskips forwards to Kasuga in his last year of high school, basically still trying to get his life together and to form healthy relationships.
The mangaka also wrote Inside Mari, which is a pretty interesting take on the whole freaky friday body swap scenario, although he pretty blatantly loses interest in it in the final third and the quality plummets.
I wish they had done a second season for this but the Blu-Rays sold abysmally in Japan.
It's an interesting idea, but the execution on the rotoscoping and stuff was pretty dire, tbf.
Like that video mostly picks from better done sequences, and they DO get better at it as the series goes on. And I like that the art style is a little ugly and uncomfortable. But sometimes it was just baaad.
I realize I'm totally in a minority in this, but I thought the rotoscoping was brilliantly done. It gave everything a surreal, uncomfortable vibe, and I felt that it really helped put you in the right headspace for the show.
On my ongoing list of "Favorite anime episodes," another one high on the list has got to be episode 5 of Flip Flappers. Flip Flappers is a sorta kinda magical girl show, about Cocona, a middle school girl getting ready to apply to high school, whose ordinary life is interrupted by the arrival of Papika, a free-spirited girl around her age. Papika is working for... some secret organization or other, and is looking for a partner to go on adventures with. These adventures are dives into a sort of communal dream space, which always end up powered by some sort of macguffin they gotta go get.
Despite the pretty fantastical nature of the story, the real core of it is that Cocona is a young, closeted gay girl, with strong self-loathing, guilt and disgust towards her own sexuality and attractions. She immediately has a crush on Papika, and is then angry and resentful at Papika for making her feel things she doesn't want to. So this all gets developed over the first few episodes, but the first time it really comes to the forefront is episode 5, best known online as "The Gang Goes to Yuri Hell."
So the girls travel to this new dreamscape, and it's a weird mashup of horror and Class S. "Class S" stories are stuff like Maria-Sama ga Miteru, those stories about intense, vaguely romantic friendships between adolescent girls where it always seems like they're about to smooch, but in the end nothing ever quite undeniably gay happens, and then they graduate and go off to live lives of normal heterosexuality. Class S is kind of the forerunner of modern yuri (though that depends a lot on how exactly you define yuri itself), and the school is filled with the various genre markings of Class S and yuri:
an all-girls school, white lilies, tea parties, greek busts, modest old fashioned school uniforms, it's a yuri bonanza. Even though the girls are initially creeped out, the world lures them in, and they begin to forget about their mission to go grab that Macguffin. Every day they go have tea, hold hands, and engage in all those other "wait, this is gay... right?" Class S tropes
Oh no, I pricked my finger on the needle!
Sleeping together. But of course not, y'know, sleeping together.
And then at the 11th hour every night, the world is reset, and they will go and do all those same things again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after. It's a comfortable sort of limbo, a safe romance that's never judged or attacked, but also which never progresses or changes. And if they try to escape the school together they'll be killed, and then wake back up at the school for another round of subtext. A creepy doll keeps showing up in their bedroom to keep an eye on them, a literal outside observer policing their relationship from becoming too transgressive. They get their safe little zone to explore their feelings for each other, but if it ever gets actually gay the genre fantasy world will literally kill them and put them back in their heteronormative cages. It's a hellish prison, decorated with flowers.
Of course this is only episode 5, so eventually the girls do escape, taking a big ol' fuckin' hammer to the clock tower bell and ringing in the 12th hour. Time progresses and they leave, still remembering all that relationship play-acting they did, and becoming more comfortable with the idea of taking it beyond that, which Yuri Hell would never allow.
The whole episode is a completely unsubtle satirical attack on Class S / yuri tropes, that they're a comforting, but saccharine prison, that accepts queer narratives only so far as they do not challenge heteronormativity.
Kana on
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
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AtomicTofuShe's a straight-up supervillain, yoRegistered Userregular
you know, I'm no scientist, but I feel like giant robots shouldn't roar or have stretchy limbs or bleed
just one man's take
ok DAD
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
First we have the titular character, Nozaki Umetarou, the male high school student who writes the popular shoujo manga series Let’s Fall in Love. He writes under a female pen name, but both his character design (tall, broad-shouldered, sharp features) and personality (cool-headed, laconic, a bit oblivious) are so traditionally masculine that no one suspects him of his double life.
Nozaki is joined by a group of supporting characters who, in classic comedy fashion, are all eccentrics in one way or another. Shy Mikorin puts on a cool front but is secretly awkward and easily embarrassed around the opposite sex; Seo is loud-mouthed, cheerfully aggressive, and tactless; Kashima is a “prince” (think Tamaki from Ouran High) in the drama club who flirts with every girl in school; and Hori is the responsible director who must keep the prince in check.
And man, it was really hard to avoid pronouns in that last sentence, but I managed it, because I wanted to highlight how the actual sex of each of those characters is the opposite of what we’d normally expect in a shoujo (or really, any genre) series. Yes, awkward Mikorin is male, loudmouth Seo is female, as is our princely Kashima, and her beleaguered director is a boy.
Japanese is a largely pronoun-free language, so before we meet each character in the series we’re treated to a genderless description of them. The rest of the characters on the show then use this description to create a mental image of the character (the “refreshing” girl Mikorin, the suave boy prince)—an image which is, of course, immediately shattered once they actually meet the person in question.
(It’s worth noting that while the series acknowledges that its characters don’t behave the way their sex is expected to behave, it does not punish them for being that way. For example, everyone gives Kashima grief for being an irresponsible flirt, but that’s because Kashima is an irresponsible flirt—it has nothing to do with the fact that Kashima is a girl who identifies as a prince.)
Perhaps the only character in the cast who doesn’t explicitly subvert gender expectations is the protagonist, Sakura Chiyo. She’s not exactly a stereotype but she does fit the role of the “shoujo heroine” fairly well, as her defining characteristics are her interest in art and her massive crush on Nozaki. Instead, most of Sakura’s humor comes from the fact that she wants to be in a shoujo romance and keeps realizing that she’s not. As such, she often acts as the POV character for the audience, reacting with surprise and sweatdrops to the antics of the cast around her as they continue to subvert her idea about how this world should behave.
Of course, neither Sakura nor the audience would have these expectations about genre and gender if they hadn’t lived in a culture where these ideas were so prevalent. Sakura and her friends have zero real-life experience with actual romance or even with a lot of different kinds of people; instead (and like so many of us), they rely on the stories and characters they encounter in fiction to give them an idea of what the world is “really” like. And when the real world inevitably proves to be very different from the world of fiction, none of them knows what to do about it.
[...]
All of which brings us to the show’s final reversal, and the one that I think elevates it above good comedy and into the realm of metafictional genius: Nozaki-kun’s own writing. In both Let’s Fall in Love and the plays he writes for Hori, Nozaki takes the real people around him and transforms them into characters. But instead of writing them as they are, he takes his friends’ personalities and maps them to the “expected” sex/gender. So Mikorin becomes the manga’s heroine, Seo becomes the boorish male rival, and Kashima is cast as a male prince. Despite knowing full well that his fictitious “reality” is nothing like the actual reality, Nozaki conforms his writing to both genre and gender expectations, maintaining the status quo.
Even more surprising, he keeps buying into his own myth, as time and again he uses shoujo manga as the basis for his understanding of real-world situations.
[...]
What we end up with is a kind of perpetual motion machine, an endless cycle where fiction (shoujo manga) shapes expectations (the characters’ beliefs) which then shape future fiction (Nozaki’s manga), and on and on, leaving the nuances of reality (the characters themselves) stuck in the middle, left out and ignored.
However, by spending so much time with its expectations-defying characters—i.e., in “reality”—Nozaki-kun itself manages to break free from this cycle. Sex and gender are not as uniform and conventional as much of our fiction would have us believe, the series cheerfully tells us, and here are a bunch of awesome characters to prove it. Like all great satire, Nozaki-kun isn’t just showing us a busted system: It’s providing us with an alternative and encouraging us to follow in its footsteps.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
Mineta has a supporting role and Froppy really doesn't. This is already an insane crime, but it gets worse. What is Mineta's big moment to help out? There's a vent high up on the ceiling that's fairly small. So we need a person small of stature who can climb things... yup that hardly sounds.... exactly like a frog at all. Guuuuuhhhh
Mineta has a supporting role and Froppy really doesn't. This is already an insane crime, but it gets worse. What is Mineta's big moment to help out? There's a vent high up on the ceiling that's fairly small. So we need a person small of stature who can climb things... yup that hardly sounds.... exactly like a frog at all. Guuuuuhhhh
Mineta has a supporting role and Froppy really doesn't. This is already an insane crime, but it gets worse. What is Mineta's big moment to help out? There's a vent high up on the ceiling that's fairly small. So we need a person small of stature who can climb things... yup that hardly sounds.... exactly like a frog at all. Guuuuuhhhh
What if we consider tree frogs?
???
You get that I'm saying the moment was BIZARRELY perfect for Froppy's powers, right? Even though she was a cameo while Mineta had a supporting role. But I understand why they chose Mineta. See, if he didn't come then... there wouldn't be a character being openly, verbally gross about all the girls in formal wear. And it would be just a REAL TRAGEDY if instead we had another person with an interesting and non-gross personality in the group instead...
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
So I've picked up Hinomaru Sumo on Crunchyroll... and it's entertaining so far. I'm getting flashes of Kuroko's Basketball here and there (which just may be tropes of the genre), but this looks very fun. Also, like Kuroko's Basketball, very sweaty. Anyone else watching it?
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HeatwaveCome, now, and walk the path of explosions with me!Registered Userregular
In all seriousness for Magical Girl Anime I'd recommend starting with something like the Nanoha series.
It's both a gateway to cutesy magical power series, and high action shonen type series (or at least by the time you get to Nanoha A's and StikerS it is)
In all seriousness for Magical Girl Anime I'd recommend starting with something like the Nanoha series.
It's both a gateway to cutesy magical power series, and high action shonen type series (or at least by the time you get to Nanoha A's and StikerS it is)
How about Sailor Moon Crystal? I would figure you would go with the OG Magical Princess? (Actually, Minky Momo kind of birthed the genre but that's getting a little obscure)
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HeatwaveCome, now, and walk the path of explosions with me!Registered Userregular
In all seriousness for Magical Girl Anime I'd recommend starting with something like the Nanoha series.
It's both a gateway to cutesy magical power series, and high action shonen type series (or at least by the time you get to Nanoha A's and StikerS it is)
How about Sailor Moon Crystal? I would figure you would go with the OG Magical Princess? (Actually, Minky Momo kind of birthed the genre but that's getting a little obscure)
When typing that post, I was going to suggest "Sailor Moon, Nanoha, and only THEN Madoka", but decided with just Nanoha as it kind of caters to a wider audience by the second and third series. This is from memory though as I haven't watched the series is a long while (hoping for a blu ray release in my country)
EDIT: Sailor Moon was great BTW, and I proudly have the OG 5 scouts in S.h. figuarts form
The only criticism I have about it is that like most single-season anime it ends without resolving any of the dramatic tension its built over its run. Have you read the manga? Does it progress the narrative and/or themes?
The only criticism I have about it is that like most single-season anime it ends without resolving any of the dramatic tension its built over its run. Have you read the manga? Does it progress the narrative and/or themes?
It's a 4-koma slice of life gag series with abundant tsukomi. There's been no plot progression whatsoever. It's basically spinning its wheels in that regard.
You go back to this particular well for the characters and humor, not for any kind of dramatic tension or evolving storyline.
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Kevin CristI make the devil hit his kneesand say the 'our father'Registered Userregular
Posts
I realize I'm totally in a minority in this, but I thought the rotoscoping was brilliantly done. It gave everything a surreal, uncomfortable vibe, and I felt that it really helped put you in the right headspace for the show.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Despite the pretty fantastical nature of the story, the real core of it is that Cocona is a young, closeted gay girl, with strong self-loathing, guilt and disgust towards her own sexuality and attractions. She immediately has a crush on Papika, and is then angry and resentful at Papika for making her feel things she doesn't want to. So this all gets developed over the first few episodes, but the first time it really comes to the forefront is episode 5, best known online as "The Gang Goes to Yuri Hell."
So the girls travel to this new dreamscape, and it's a weird mashup of horror and Class S. "Class S" stories are stuff like Maria-Sama ga Miteru, those stories about intense, vaguely romantic friendships between adolescent girls where it always seems like they're about to smooch, but in the end nothing ever quite undeniably gay happens, and then they graduate and go off to live lives of normal heterosexuality. Class S is kind of the forerunner of modern yuri (though that depends a lot on how exactly you define yuri itself), and the school is filled with the various genre markings of Class S and yuri:
an all-girls school, white lilies, tea parties, greek busts, modest old fashioned school uniforms, it's a yuri bonanza. Even though the girls are initially creeped out, the world lures them in, and they begin to forget about their mission to go grab that Macguffin. Every day they go have tea, hold hands, and engage in all those other "wait, this is gay... right?" Class S tropes
Oh no, I pricked my finger on the needle!
Sleeping together. But of course not, y'know, sleeping together.
And then at the 11th hour every night, the world is reset, and they will go and do all those same things again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after. It's a comfortable sort of limbo, a safe romance that's never judged or attacked, but also which never progresses or changes. And if they try to escape the school together they'll be killed, and then wake back up at the school for another round of subtext. A creepy doll keeps showing up in their bedroom to keep an eye on them, a literal outside observer policing their relationship from becoming too transgressive. They get their safe little zone to explore their feelings for each other, but if it ever gets actually gay the genre fantasy world will literally kill them and put them back in their heteronormative cages. It's a hellish prison, decorated with flowers.
Of course this is only episode 5, so eventually the girls do escape, taking a big ol' fuckin' hammer to the clock tower bell and ringing in the 12th hour. Time progresses and they leave, still remembering all that relationship play-acting they did, and becoming more comfortable with the idea of taking it beyond that, which Yuri Hell would never allow.
The whole episode is a completely unsubtle satirical attack on Class S / yuri tropes, that they're a comforting, but saccharine prison, that accepts queer narratives only so far as they do not challenge heteronormativity.
Steam
ok DAD
upon further evidence (Eva episode 19)
https://www.themarysue.com/gekkan-shoujo-nozaki-kun-anime/
Miyuki Sawashiro is a good VA
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
So in the MHA movie:
pfft what no it's fine, it's fiiiine, all robots do that
that right there, that's my favorite episode
por que no los both
(nu gundam and sazabi as reimagined by the evangelion designer)
What if we consider tree frogs?
Nope, you can't buy any of Evangelion digitally. Japanese media in general is very adverse to digital copies.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
???
Fun fact you can in fact get the first two rebuild movies in google play (at least in Canada)
Lame.
"Misato is the first true Millennial icon" -- Austin Walker
This is good anime for beginners in the same way that Shinji was given an appropriate amount of time and practice for his first Angel battle.
In all seriousness for Magical Girl Anime I'd recommend starting with something like the Nanoha series.
It's both a gateway to cutesy magical power series, and high action shonen type series (or at least by the time you get to Nanoha A's and StikerS it is)
Steam / Origin & Wii U: Heatwave111 / FC: 4227-1965-3206 / Battle.net: Heatwave#11356
this amuses me
Very curious if there's been any major animation improvement, because the TV version has the worst CGI since Berserk
Steam / Origin & Wii U: Heatwave111 / FC: 4227-1965-3206 / Battle.net: Heatwave#11356
How about Sailor Moon Crystal? I would figure you would go with the OG Magical Princess? (Actually, Minky Momo kind of birthed the genre but that's getting a little obscure)
When typing that post, I was going to suggest "Sailor Moon, Nanoha, and only THEN Madoka", but decided with just Nanoha as it kind of caters to a wider audience by the second and third series. This is from memory though as I haven't watched the series is a long while (hoping for a blu ray release in my country)
EDIT: Sailor Moon was great BTW, and I proudly have the OG 5 scouts in S.h. figuarts form
Steam / Origin & Wii U: Heatwave111 / FC: 4227-1965-3206 / Battle.net: Heatwave#11356
The only criticism I have about it is that like most single-season anime it ends without resolving any of the dramatic tension its built over its run. Have you read the manga? Does it progress the narrative and/or themes?
Get that depression started early so they're all set for when they comprehend the current state of the world and its bleak future
It's a 4-koma slice of life gag series with abundant tsukomi. There's been no plot progression whatsoever. It's basically spinning its wheels in that regard.
You go back to this particular well for the characters and humor, not for any kind of dramatic tension or evolving storyline.
Steam: YOU FACE JARAXXUS| Twitch.tv: CainLoveless
Movie『Weathering with You』(English Title) Special Preview(?)
Duration: 5:15
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully