I’ve been really enjoying Sousou no Frieren and by enjoying I mean feeling like I want to cry.
I’ll need to find something more upbeat next.
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Just started Link Click this evening, really digging it. Also hooked on Freiren, Apothecary Diaries, Dungeon Meshi, and Hazbin Hotel. Basically binged all these and got caught up on them in the past week. 😅
Also been watching Tis Time for Torture, Princess and still finding it quite cute 4 eps in.
Hazbin Hotel
comrade
I just realized I’m not caught up on that. It appeals to my inner child that was raised on Disney movies tho.
With a pretty stacked Broadway cast too. The last two episodes of the first season come out this Friday.
That’s why I stopped where I did, figured I’d binge the whole last half this weekend.
Great finale!
Just finished here and totally agree! Looking forward to seeing when S2 happens along with more Helluva Boss.
I guess I’ll have to check that out now. Hadn’t heard of it until someone here posted about Hazbin a few days ago.
They’re both good, but I like Helluva more than Hazbin, personally. IMO, the pacing in Helluva is better and it doesn’t have an external motivator pushing the plot along like the execution in Hazbin. It’s a more character-focused story (so far), exploring the relationships between a bunch of characters who all have their own issues. The first few episodes are fine, but the animation quality improves significantly as the series goes on.
Word. Is Helluva a musical too?
I believe every episode has at least one song, but I wouldn’t call it a musical at the beginning. It becomes more of one as the show progresses to the point where the most recent episode has 4 great songs in about 30 minutes.
dungeon meshi is a very good adaptation of a very good manga
im watching gundam 00 and rose of versailles, but i rewatched season 1 of ibo in between episodes of 00 and that’s not a comparison that puts 00 season 2 in a good light. ibo is about things! like, real things! workers rebellions and colonialism and the ways hegemony perpetuates itself! and it’s got lots of great characters! 00 season 1 was about real things, but season 2 on the other hand is about quantum brainwaves and the purpose of the innovades, and wants me to enjoy spending time with allelujah haptism
Even though it was very lib, I enjoyed the premise of Gundam 00 and Celestial Being. It’s a very cathartic concept, if not totally ignorant of how the world works. On brand for Gundam tho. IBO was 🔥.
i liked season 1 a lot. celestial being going into not!venezuela and bombing the city because them trying to exit the united states’ control counts as starting war is good stuff, it’s juicy and fucked up and interesting to think about. in season 2 they say “we’re antifa but not in an ideological sense” and only really seem interested in the innovades who are so boring. you wouldn’t think that a group where all the members were named shit like bring stabbity or healing care could be boring, but this show finds a way
also i just hate allelujah so much, he sucks so bad. doesn’t even have the decency to be a FUN bad stereotype of plurality, he’s just miserable to be around and makes the show worse every time he’s on screen. “ohhhh marie… i can’t accept that maybe you aren’t exactly like you were when i knew you when we were 5 and i’m going to make it everyone else’s problem”
celestial being going into not!venezuela and bombing the city because them trying to exit the united states’ control counts as starting war is good stuff, it’s juicy and fucked up and interesting to think about.
I thought so at the time too, but seeing libs response to Palestine’s uprising, I feel like there probably wasn’t a lot of people that thought about it too much. Especially nowadays when it seems like every other MCU content is successfully framing revolutionaries as terrorists. The western
yearn for that negative peace and anyone who disrupts it must be the bad guy.also i just hate allelujah so much
lmao, it’s been many years since I saw it when it first came out, but yeah he totally got way too much screen time.
00 Raiser was cool though. Honestly, the plot of 00 and SEED are kinda blended in my head.yeah it might just be that this was always what the show was, but it used to feel like it had space to be read in interesting ways. i was never expecting it to start advocating for revolution or anything, but season one felt like it at the very least was willing to explore stuff like that, and season two just isn’t
also yeah a lot of this stuff is very seed coded
Unfortunately, Gundam kinda does that a lot where they’ll toe the line and then not really go anywhere with it. As per someone around here talking about it, I recently watched Dallos and found it pretty interesting. It’s full on about class struggle from the POV of space colonies. If you haven’t seen it, I’d recommend it. It’s older, but holds up.
i’m like 90% certain the one talking about dallos was me lmao. it’s good!
and yeah, gundam has a problem with this in general. i mentioned that i had a bigger problem with it here because i watched iron blooded orphans (which does not have this problem*) but i also think in general 00 is worse about it than say, any of the tomino uc stuff for example. it helps that the newtype stuff is connected to the politics in a way that the innovators just aren’t. it’s also that season 1 seemed really clear eyed about the political landscape and just drops all of it, which is worse than if it was a more gradual shift from politics to arguing about scifi concepts
*ibo never advocates for revolution or anything, but it never loses sight of the actual things happening that matter. it doesn’t introduce the illuminati at the end of season 1 and then stop caring about gjallerhorn beyond how the illuminati is controlling gjallerhorn
lmao, my apologies, it totally was you.
That all sounds like fair criticism, I’d say. Sadly, as I’ve given away, my memory is shit. And I watched all these series at much different places in my life, politically. I think I watched IBO as per someone recommending it on r/cth when it first came out. So at the time all these shows seemed radical, and now 7-20 years down the line I’m like, those fucking
s.
Honestly, the plot of 00 and SEED are kinda blended in my head.
Em from Great Gundam Project has been describing a lot of the mid-season 2 00 stuff as “SEED-coded” lmao
Lmao, that makes me feel a bit less senile, I guess.
Yeah, that’s why 00 is one of my least favourite Gundams. Like, it was fine as a show when I was a kid but now as my politics have grown, I kinda realized that it came at the question “Was the American response to 9/11 justified in any way?” from the most contrarian and least dialectically materialistic direction possible, and then leaves no conclusions by just blaming everything on the Illuminati pulling the strings, and I dunno that just rubs me the wrong way rn
Seed at least had boring “racism bad why can’t we all just get along” liberal politics, G and Wing were camp and entertaining if kinda politically incoherent, and IBO and WfM had more or less decent things to say about the state of the world.
00 just has 9/11
the size of the sandworms from DuneEdit: the only thing that I still like from 00 is Op 1, “My wishes over their airspace” is one of the hardest lines in a Gundam op ever. (Only “Raise your Flag” and Turn A’s op is better imo)
yeah for sure. i think 00 touches on a lot of interesting stuff but i’m bummed by how it’s going here. though once i accepted that it’s just in anime nonsense land now i’m back to having a mostly good time (i just watched the episode where they introduce the 00 raiser and that’s good enough bullshit to keep me happy)
but imo wfm goes down the same route of just not resolving anything, just in a less egregious way. i am not opposed to space magic, but you gotta also address the material concerns of the setting some. like, suletta just works together with kenanji in the last bit and the show totally forgets that he kills her dad. and guel goes through all that shit and just becomes the nice ceo, and i never got the feeling the show was really interrogating any of that stuff at all
basically ibo is the only really good non-tomino gundam i’ve seen
I think I’d have liked 00 more if it was more thoughtful about the stuff it does. Unicorn and Hathaway kiiiinda cover similar thematic ground in that they are both very heavily post-9/11 shows (albeit with UC canon baggage) and succeed a lot better (but that’s probably because they are Tomino influenced and leverage the UC’s history into their themes)
WfM
Yeah, I think that’s fair criticism: for me “we need to use lesbian space magic to literally destroy the military industrial complex” is just doing so much heavy lifting that I definitely am willing to be more forgiving and overlook the show’s flaws even if it fails to justify it’s ending, whereas 00’s Illuminati and… other stuff just left me cold
Edit: wait I just realised that 00’s contemporary to Macross Frontier, which is lib as fuck and can be summarized as “Ariana Grande hires Blackwater to try and stop the Iraq War” but that show absolutely had better politics lmao
that’s fair, i like lesbian spave magic. but i wish it was actually about fighting the mic and not evil milf space magic
Truuuuuue
also i think giving me 25 episodes to adjust to the fact that this isn’t going to really address the politics might end up making me feel better about it than wfm just shoving it all in at the last minute. i can just get into the groove of scifi anime bullshit that doesn’t mean anything, as opposed to expecting a resolution to any of the politics and not getting one. i’d still infinitely prefer something like ibo that actually just deals with the setting as presented, or even better an unjust depths where it does that, AND the scifi bullshit, AND is explicitly about communist revolutionaries who are unambiguously good
but i can deal with scifi anime bullshit that has no meaning
See it’s the opposite for me, I really can’t deal with meaningless sci-fi anime bullshit nowadays. WfM for most of its runtime was about something, even if it didn’t stick the landing, which I’d prefer to 00’s kinda blah jumble of technobabble.
Of course IBO’s the best tho
Someone here recommended Armored Trooper VOTOMS, and it’s been really fun! Lots of dead cops and mercenaries!
it rules! how far in are you?
Into the 3rd arc, on the abandoned spaceship after the Totally-Not-Vietnam arc. Episode 32 or 33!
hell yeah that’s my favorite bit of the show. i wasn’t expecting it to turn into the prisoner for a bit, and it’s such a wild swing after space vietnam drags on for so long
make sure you watch the ova’s once you’re done, brilliant shining heresy is really good
Watch the OVAs (minus VOTOMS Finder, it kinda sucks and is a weird AU) and don’t forget the spin-off Armor Hunter Mellowlink - it’s a guy on a revenge quest fighting mechs while on foot!
Giving re:zero another chance because it was one of the first few anime i watched and genuinely couldn’t stand it. Surprisingly i don’t find it nearly as bad as i did which means anime has given me turbo
Recently watched Blue Eye Samurai and it fuckin rules. Trans masc coded biracial samurai hunting down every colonizer in Japan during the sengoku periosd.
I started watching it with really low hopes because it has a collection of things I don’t usually like, but I was hungry for a samurai series that was realistic but not boring.
I dislike the animation and noticed it is really obvious about its inspiration and uses a lot of tropes but I’m starting to look past it because it has a kernel of its own thing going and its really good. I still keep seeing other shows/movies in it but the main character gets more development than I thought she would.
frieren rips. i’ve got one piece ongoing, but just watched Mashle to its current episode recently. would highly recommend mashle. if you liked harry potter’s aesthetics at all as a child, it makes fun use of those at a surface level while doing something completely and utterly different with the story, world, and characters. main character is a delight, and it’s very funny.
Slowly watching Golden Kamuy. It’s good!
I’ll need to find something more upbeat next.
its got its dark parts (and bizzare shit) but Ranking of Kings is super wonderful imo, that show had me smiling a big ol smile many times
Freiren, Apothecary Diaries, Dungeon Meshi weekly and Oddtaxi movie on my next day off of work
Legend of the Seeker. It’s a Xena warrior princess clone from Australia with insanely bad gender politics and bad writing throughout. I’m continuously impressed by how dumb the story writing is. Never once has a plot line been set up at the beginning of an episode and not been resolved by the end, they’d probably forget about it if they tried. Also there’s these leather clad bondage removed who have magic dildos that inflict pain when they touch your skin, they rock
I did not notice this was the anime comm
I looked it up and discovered it’s based on the sword of truth series; if you don’t know anything about the book series, it’s basically written by a hateful libertarian and has a scene where he justifies the slaughter of pacifists. Also lots of war crimes, terrorism and torture, by the good guys.
Oh yeah the good guys are so so clearly the villains. Good to know it’s evil storytelling and not just dumb storytelling
Also there’s these leather clad bondage removed who have magic dildos that inflict pain when they touch your skin, they rock
I did not notice this was the anime comm
Sounds anime enough
if you think the show is bad you should suffer through a review of the books it’s based on
terry goodkind is just the fucking worst
Legend of the Seeker
Terry is neither good nor kind (kind of an insane, pouty little dummy too; apparently his wife vets the people who talk to him because he can’t handle criticism)
Never been that in on anime outside of ghibli stuff and akira, but recently started watching neon genesis evangelion. I’m around midway through it and enjoying it quite a bit. The series is a good length for me and has short episodes so it’s pretty easy to get through. I know there are a couple of movies and maybe other series, but I may just skip out on thoughts unless there’s more to be desired after the of. May watch cowboy bebop after
The TV show is a pretty complete experience and a valid stopping point. You’re right, though, there’s a 90s movie recapping the TV show, a 90s sequel movie, a comic adaptation, and then the 4 new reboot/sequel movies.
May watch cowboy bebop after
Good choice! That’s a really fun show
Like Cromalin, I’m watching Gundam 00 and BeruBara with GGP. Season 2 of 00 is alright, BeruBara is great 70s anime!
I’m also slowly working my way through Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It’s such a long series that I’m just watching an episode or two of it a week, which feels like an appropriate pace. I’m pretty sure I would get sick of this if I was binging through it.
Record of Lodoss War is alright. It’s very ADnD era by-the-books fantasy, but the animation is pretty great.
I blasted through Brain Powerd when I was sick with COVID earlier this month. Great show - it’s extremely Tomino brained and the story has some wild twists. The only major downside is standard pre-Turn A bad gender takes from Tomino. I would probably put it behind Be Invoked in my favorite non-Gundam Tomino stuff.
honestly rov is also in kind of a slump for me rn. gorgeous show but i kinda dread watching it every week
The end of this Black Knight arc was kinda shit (assuming it concludes with e28). I’m getting increasingly antsy to see if shit pops off and Robespierre rolls out ol’ chipy-chopy.
At this rate, it feels like there’s not enough show for it to happen outside of the last few episodes.I think I can
with 70s anime aesthetics enough to enjoy rolling through to each episode, though.i think i am just not a 70s anime sicko in the way the pod or a lot of its listeners are, though obviously i still appreciate just how good this looks
You love 0079 enough so you get a pass lol
i like 70s anime! i think complaints that it looks too old are ridiculous, i just don’t think it’s the best anime has ever looked (which is the stated opinion of the podcast)
i think the best anime has ever looked is late 90s cel animation
also my specific thing with rose of versailles is that it’s spent a while dancing around the
and i think i’ll be back on board once it’s back in that mode. andre sucks and once the show is back to politics i think it’ll be much better
Gunna’ watch Run=Dim because I’m a freak. First episode was not good. The next 11 will not be good either. And yet, I must watch.
Maybe I’ll play the Dreamcast game afterwards. That got translated.
Tsukimichi Moonlit Fantasy randomly got a second season after 3 years so I’ve been loading up on my year’s worth of generic isekai slop with that.
Hazel’s video on Elfen Lied has psy-oped me into watching it again for the first time since high school
I know neither of these are anime (both are cartoons) Scavengers Reign (scifi) and Hazbin Hotel. Enjoying both for different reasons. 6 Episodes into both of them. Gonna finish them this week and then start BUSTAFELLOWS an otome noir mystery visual novel.
That Loser Baby song from hazbin has been in head for weeks
