What anime are you watching right now? Summer 2016 to now

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Re: What anime are you watching right now? Summer 2016 to now

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Postby pwhodges » Mon Jul 29, 2019 6:52 am

I wanted to back off from becoming a slave to running series as I had somewhat last season. I started by only continuing with series I was already watching (Fruits Basket, Carole & Tuesday, Black Clover). I've now added just one to that list, which is Given.

Given is to some extent a story about a band getting together, and in this regard it has something in common with Beck - a newbie guitarist who is discovered to be a highly talented singer, driven by their experiences of love (new-gained in Beck, sadly lost in Given). But whereas in Beck, the band is the focus of the story, and remains so to the end, in Given it is a prop for multiple BL relationships, past (ended by suicide in one case) and present. Actually, this is clear when you see that the manga's cover has the word Yaoi prominently displayed. The manga is short (though on-going), and hasn't really even completed the first real arc of the band's story, so I can't see much of a conclusion being reached in what will have to be a short first season of the anime; and then there may be a long wait for a continuation. Still, the story is being well told so far (actually, it's a lot easier to follow on the screen than on the page, I'm finding), and the ED (not the version in the first episode) is one of the best I've heard for some time.
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Re: What anime are you watching right now? Summer 2016 to now

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Postby kuribo-04 » Tue Jul 30, 2019 6:59 pm

I'm continuing with my watchthrough of all of Monogatari. When I have time I'll go deeper on each entry.

What I need to say now is I watched Kizumonogatari Part 1 yesterday and it has instantly become one of my favourite animated movies ever.

Absolutely amazing example of storytelling through visuals.
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Re: What anime are you watching right now? Summer 2016 to now

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Postby pwhodges » Wed Jul 31, 2019 6:23 am

Strongly agreed!

Meanwhile, the twist at the end of this week's episode of Black Clover was quite stunning, while still turning out to be completely logical.
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Re: What anime are you watching right now? Summer 2016 to now

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Postby robersora » Wed Jul 31, 2019 10:43 am

It kinda amazes me, that for how well executed Kizumonogatari is, how little it seemed to have escaped into the mainstream discourse. It's being less talked about than Utena and Redline. Maybe I'm just on the wrong corners of the Internet, lol
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Re: What anime are you watching right now? Summer 2016 to now

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Postby Blockio » Thu Aug 01, 2019 4:29 pm

Just finished Kikumeiki Valvrave - it's an extremely pretty show with a very catchy soundtrack, but that's about all that stands out about it.
The story and characters are a bit of a mess from the start, and fall apart completely at about the halfway point of the second season, with some of the most pointless and forced feeling drama that could be resolved in no time if any of the characters were to spit it out already. The last two Eps surprisingly manage to pull their stuff back together, but that can really only do so much to mitigate the damage done by the eps before.
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Re: What anime are you watching right now? Summer 2016 to now

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Postby snow344 » Sun Aug 04, 2019 11:12 am

I have been watching Enen no Shouboutai, it's quite fun and I'm enjoying it.

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Postby MuscleRobo » Mon Aug 05, 2019 7:18 am

Has anyone been watching "How Heavy are the Dumbbells you lift?" I've been really enjoying it and even listening to the Opening and Ending when I'm at the gym! I wish it wasn't so ecchi sometimes though so I could share it with more people!

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Re: What anime are you watching right now? Summer 2016 to now

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Postby Mr. Tines » Mon Aug 05, 2019 9:37 am

View Original PostMuscleRobo wrote:I wish it wasn't so ecchi sometimes though so I could share it with more people!
As I remarked above, the thing I noticed about the TV adaptation was how much it had been toned down from the manga, fanservice-wise.

Fun fact -- the Russian girl who appears in this week's episode is named as a reference to a pair of Russian porn stars (Gina Gerson and Krystal Boyd); this became apparent when later another Russian girl was introduced called Kristal Gerson.
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Postby MuscleRobo » Mon Aug 05, 2019 10:34 am

I'll have to check out the manga since I really like it! I had a final coming up and skipped the gym to study one day then watched it and felt so gross and guilty. I really love the show though and even talked to my personal trainer about it since he likes anime too. A silly example was a time we were doing jump squats and I joked about Hsien-Ko / Lei-Lei from Darkstalkers probably being totally ripped hopping around all the time and he made a group work out class at Halloween with silly names and did Chinese Hopping Zombie Squats, lol.

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Postby Alaska Slim » Wed Aug 14, 2019 2:30 am

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba

This show is hitting its stride right now; the movement and impact of the fights are just fantastic to watch. DanMachi sometimes surprised me with moments of true visceral gravitas; this series manages the same feat almost every episode and its story doesn't suck.

Mind, It's not a very complicated story, this is just a well-oiled shounen. The MC has a conflicting need vs want, he has clearly defined goal, and the side characters (minus Zenitsu most of time) enhance the presentation.
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Re: What anime are you watching right now? Summer 2016 to now

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Postby Dr. Nick » Wed Aug 14, 2019 3:26 am

Future Robo Daltanious:
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Tadao Nagahama's Robot Romance Trilogy, of which Daltanious is the fourth unofficial part, is known for being somewhat proto real robot in tone, in that it combines classic meat-and-potatoes super robot action with surprisingly hefty sociopolitical themes. Combattler V was the wobbly dry run and a pretty terrible show in many respects, but the themes of revolution and ethnic conflict it only paid lip service to were very much foregrounded in the following Nagahama shows, Voltes V and Daimos, and I'm willing to say they do bolder things with their plots than many lesser Gundam shows. In comparison, Daltanious is to some extent a return to a more personally focused super robot story format that goes heavier on family melodrama than real-world issues.

Our protagonist Kento Tate is a classic hot-headed teenager who's recently lost his parents when the first wave of an alien invasion bombed Japan's urban centers. Wandering outside of the ruined city with a group of other orphaned kids, Kento stumbles into a hidden super robot base and hears from its wizened caretaker that he is in fact the heir to a galaxy-spanning empire who was lost somewhere on Earth as an infant. When given the chance, Kento is happy to jump into the cockpit of his titular royal robot and take revenge on any aliens in the immediate vicinity, but beyond that, he shrugs off this revelation about his ancestry and for the longest time holds no interest in using his newfound power to overthrow the villain faction that has conquered most of his family's empire. It's not until the larger space war starts properly spilling on Earth that Kento and co. have to leave their home base in picturesque Japanese countryside and venture into outer space, and it is here where the show starts flirting with a potentially massive plot twist. As more and more allies start rallying around Kento and Daltanious, it becomes apparent that these "loyal retainers" are hardcore monarchists to the point of blind zealotry, and when Kento's claim to the throne is legitimately challenged, a brutal if short civil war immediately breaks out.

However, after Kento has dealt with the back-stabbers, the follow-through is not quite as radical as in Voltes V for example, which went all Rose of Versailles in space, and the heroes don't take it upon themselves to demolish the entire rotten monarchy. Even though the big villain of the story originally had an extremely justified reason for his uprising (that's the second big twist of the story, the details of which I'm not going to spoil), his revolutionary government has been so brutal and expansionist that Kento essentially chooses to lead a counterrevolutionary assault against him as a lesser evil option. At the very end, when the tyrant is defeated, it is implied that there is going to be a peaceful transition from absolute monarchy to some sort of distributed union of republics with no single massively powerful leader at the top, but the question of how the aforementioned hardcore monarchists are going to react to such an anathema is entirely sidestepped.

But as always with old super robot shows, their plots play second fiddle to pandering to the child audience's wants. Even though the Nagahama shows are the cream of the genre crop and feature big real-world ideas and actual story arcs, the episodic plots still feature an obligatory monster fight at the end and blend together into a colorful mush. The result of this structural rigidity is that what remains in the mind are the repeating details - the outlandish designs of the robots and the outfits; the launch, transformation and combination sequences and finishing moves; and the sturdy, futuristic home base - and this is all well and proper for something that's meant to push toys above all else. These shows also almost invariably feature an audience surrogate child character, the usefulness of whom can vary wildly depending on the series, but instead of placing a single child amongst the teenagers and young adults who do the actual fighting, Daltanious ingeniously features an all-orphan child cast. The older teenagers of the group, including Kento, aren't much younger than your usual super robot pilots of the era, but since they're all orphans who live unsupervised along with a group of younger kids, there's a focus on robinsonesque fantasy freedom of endless play. Granted, it's later revealed that Kento in fact does have a surviving parent, which kicks the family melodrama part of the story into high gear, but before that moment the kids are very much on their own. Early on, when their group reaches the secret base that houses the robot Daltanious, the show makes a big point of how the old caretaker guy is essentially a hermit, looking after the largely automated base all alone. He's loyal and well-meaning and provides the children with some security (he's the person who pushes the button that activates the obligatory base force field), but he is at the same time an out-of-touch old dude, and despite all of its luxuries, the base is an offputting windowless metal box. So instead of living there, the kids haul a gutted RV to the side lawn to serve as their clubhouse-cum-actual-house. What an absolutely brilliant setting to get the children's imaginations whirring. Grab your Daltanious toys, climb to your treehouse, imagine that a super robot hangar looms next door, and get ready to beat Brian's face in.

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Re: What anime are you watching right now? Summer 2016 to now

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Postby Blockio » Sun Aug 18, 2019 9:16 pm

I have just finished Martian Successor Nadesico - very much enjoyed both the initial light-hearted comedy as well as the war drama in the second half, and the change between the two was really smooth. Has some very interesting twists to it, a memorable cast and especially the last third is very well executed.
definitely recommend watching it, overall 7/10, last third 8/10
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Re: What anime are you watching right now? Summer 2016 to now

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Postby El Squibbonator » Mon Aug 19, 2019 5:16 pm

I'm actually in a bit of an anime rut right now. I'm still waiting on the official dub of the next seasons of The Promised Neverland and Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, and in the meantime there haven't really been any current series that have caught my interest.
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Postby Rei IV » Wed Aug 21, 2019 9:09 pm

The last two weeks I've watched the 1990s Sailor Moon movies, Sailor Moon Crystal, Digimon tri., Pretear, Free! (all the current seasons, shorts, OVAs and the prequel movie, and the Take Your Marks movie), and the first eight episodes of the original 1992 Sailor Moon anime but I'm calling it quits because I'd rather have the Blu-ray set to watch in its entirety.

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Postby Lavinius » Mon Aug 26, 2019 6:15 am

Gasaraki
It was bad.
I ship Mizusu with the JSDF thot by the way.
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Postby Mr. Tines » Mon Aug 26, 2019 6:20 pm

View Original PostLavinius wrote:It was bad.
Searching through the archives, the keywords are "boring", "slow" and "sterile".

Turning to the merely bland, I dropped Granbelm after episode 5, as a failure by the usual criterion -- the beam-spam was pretty enough, but for all that it was full of sound and fury, it seemed a tale told by an idiot. As a fight to the last one standing, in episodes, it didn't even reach the levels of likeable or love-to-hate amongst the combatants that Magical Girl Raising Project managed.

Wishy-washy doormat-like pinkies who aren't in the know are becoming a cliché for lead character in magical girl like the average blank slate black haired schoolboy in pretty much everything else; and so are their mysterious companions with long black hair.

In its stead, I've picked up to catch up last year's Symphogear AXZ, which at the 3/4 mark is managing to avoid the lows that GX plumbed, perhaps for lack of quite such a degree of front-loading, too.
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Postby Gus Hanson » Mon Aug 26, 2019 6:35 pm

View Original PostLavinius wrote:Gasaraki
It was bad.
I ship Mizusu with the JSDF thot by the way.

Watched part 1 of Gasaraki's flashback arc in order to better understand the premise. Apparently, Yushiro's act of mercy towards Miharu is perceived as weakness in the face of Tsuna desiring to take on the government with their Kugai. It took two decades for me to comprehend that much :facepalm:
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Re: What anime are you watching right now? Summer 2016 to now

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Postby Lavinius » Tue Aug 27, 2019 12:32 am

View Original PostMr. Tines wrote:Searching through the archives, the keywords are "boring", "slow" and "sterile".
For me it didn't feel that way, but rather intriguing, merely because I assumed, with increasing doubts, that I was looking at an intricate or at least competent & coherent plot that was leading towards a revelatory and satisfying ending. I wasn't.
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Re: What anime are you watching right now? Summer 2016 to now

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Postby Mr. Tines » Mon Oct 07, 2019 1:07 pm

So, end of the season. Symphogear AXZ carried on OK to the end, and XV managed a decent ending to the franchise before the power creep rotted it entirely away. Neither reached the level of G's ending, nor GX's first episode, even if the final form transformations in XV looked good. As expected, Accelerator was just the title character being an entertaining villain and kerb-stomping various nuisances around Academy City, so also entirely harmless.

While remaining a fun adaptation Danberu started skipping material from the halfway point, after Zina was introduced -- originally it had looked like the season would end at the Hamnold Classic, but that came at the 2/3 mark, and more later out-of-gym material got fitted in instead (though not the girls' American road trip), coming to an end just past the appearance of Kristal Gerson, and the false ending as Jason and Director-san drift off into the Pacific. That pretty much means no S2 for some time now, if ever.

While waiting to see what emerges from the new season, I also watched the Youjo Senki movie, which is just more of Tanya being her loveable self in the desert and on the Eastern front -- if you liked the series,...
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Postby MuscleRobo » Tue Oct 08, 2019 9:31 am

I finished How Heavy are the Dumbbells You Lift and it was great! The anime was super funny and super cute from top to bottom. I'm really hoping we get a season 2 since I'd find it hard to believe we've covered all the manga, plus it's still ongoing.


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