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What Anime are you watching now?


Ryoji

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I started watching Gurren Lagann (finally). I tried it once, years ago, but I think the fanservice put me off at the time; I've since been hardened to that (heh), so now I just find it to be another draw of the show. The show itself is looking pretty good, two episodes in. I can't even fathom where it's going, or perhaps more accurately I can't fathom how it's going to get where the brief cuts to space opera scenes indicate it's going, but I'm happily along for the ride right now. The setting is interesting, the characters are fun, and even the fight scenes (normally kind of boring for me, TBH) are entertaining.

Also, since apparently I can't restrain myself from judging the writing quality of JP translations these days: the subs are lovely, to the extent that they're making me fully grasp just how wildly uneven anime subtitle quality is (and that, to my surprise, newer stuff seems to often fare worse than stuff from a few years ago). I expect it's a combination of: 1) there simply being more of this material getting translated, thus meaning there's more demand than talented people capable of supplying it; 2) the fact that nonetheless a supply of translators has arisen to fill that gap, some obviously less qualified than others; 3) tighter timelines on translations, thanks to the prevalence of simulcasts; and 4) likely a race to the bottom on pay, as it turns out that less-qualified people can do the work with minimal repercussions on a show's sales and popularity, thus justifying a lower price point for translation than the qualified people would demand. That's all pure conjecture, of course; it's not like I have any data or knowledge of the industry, or for that matter even enough data points (I honestly don't watch nearly enough anime, old or new) to be willing to claim that quality is getting worse recently. Still... the Dragon Maid subs kinda sucked, and that made me sad since the show was otherwise great.

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@Fred the Barber Gurenn Lagann was awesome. I'm not sure I'd say it was awesome all the way to the end but the first series definitely was. As for translators, I'd say you're spot on. There is also the very obvious change in style as number of weaboos increased, the demand for less localised versions increased. Honorifics in professional/official translations are actually a relatively new phenomenon in response to the industry defining the demographic of people that actually watch anime, and the progression of fans into translators as the bar for translation keeps getting lowered. It wasn't always pretty, mind you, when the stakes were very low. I once took my kids to see a pokemon movie about a decade ago (after enough beers to tolerate it) and the translation was woeful. No doubt they struggled to find a professional translator to take on the role. The average quality of modern translated anime is only what I'd rate "fair" and often dips well below that and rarely rises much above it - Rakudai Kishi no Cavalry and Gabriel Dropout being two standout examples of shows I loved with examples of both low and high points.

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9 hours ago, Fred the Barber said:

I started watching Gurren Lagann (finally). I tried it once, years ago, but I think the fanservice put me off at the time; I've since been hardened to that (heh), so now I just find it to be another draw of the show. The show itself is looking pretty good, two episodes in. I can't even fathom where it's going, or perhaps more accurately I can't fathom how it's going to get where the brief cuts to space opera scenes indicate it's going, but I'm happily along for the ride right now. The setting is interesting, the characters are fun, and even the fight scenes (normally kind of boring for me, TBH) are entertaining.

Gurren Lagann!? Dude, nice!

It's an okay watch when you're first starting out, but it grows massively in scale the further you go. And the end of the series is so mind-blowingly epic in proportion that nothing comes even remotely close to reaching its level of absurdity. It's like the creators decided to break all the laws of physics a thousand times over and go all out in writing a completely outrageous story. Gurren Lagann does a phenomenal job of not taking itself seriously.

Also, don't be surprised if you come out of this with more hair on your chest. It just kinda happens.

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Well I made my way through Da Capo II SS. It wasn't as sleep inducing as season 1 was, but overall was about what I'd have expected. It was a little better than all the other seasons before it but was 100% predictable to the end and mostly provided good sedation for my sleep requirements. Onto DCIII for more sleep therapy!

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Finished S1 Bakemonogatari. I still have the same opinion of it from 4 years ago, too lengthy monologuey dialoguey trying-to-be-witty bantery mehness. The episodic nature of it doesn't help either, 2 episodes of 70% banter dialogue, 20% setting the conflict dialogue, and then 10% resolving that conflict; rinse repeat with new girl

TL;DR it's super hard to binge this stuff, but I'm still gonna keep going. Despite my complainings it's still a mildly entertaining watch. 7/10 so far

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2 hours ago, Eclipsed said:

Finished S1 Bakemonogatari. I still have the same opinion of it from 4 years ago, too lengthy monologuey dialoguey trying-to-be-witty bantery mehness. The episodic nature of it doesn't help either, 2 episodes of 70% banter dialogue, 20% setting the conflict dialogue, and then 10% resolving that conflict; rinse repeat with new girl

TL;DR it's super hard to binge this stuff, but I'm still gonna keep going. Despite my complainings it's still a mildly entertaining watch. 7/10 so far

Don't worry Bakemonogatari is the weakest of all seasons. The later ones improve a lot in terms of animation quality, writing and comedy (and even worst girl Hitagi becomes somewhat bearable). The next one Nisemonogatari for example changed my opinion a lot of the series after I was kinda disappointed in Bake.

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On 8/30/2017 at 2:46 PM, Seth said:

Don't worry Bakemonogatari is the weakest of all seasons. The later ones improve a lot in terms of animation quality, writing and comedy (and even worst girl Hitagi becomes somewhat bearable). The next one Nisemonogatari for example changed my opinion a lot of the series after I was kinda disappointed in Bake.

Yeah, you are 100% right lol. Nisemonogatari was pretty fun, I think I warmed up to the characters and banter by this point. Having more focus on the adorable Fire Sisters and Shinobu helped alot too. Though, I can't believe Karen actually just cut off her- like WTF man.

I'm onto Monogatari 2nd Season now, just passed Tsubasa Tiger arc. It's good stuff.

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Our city currently has a Ghibli festival going on and I took the family to go see Kiki's Delivery Service (again) on the big screen. What a brilliant film, like many of Miyazaki's films. Great characters, sparse but meaningful dialogue, beautiful scenery, heart warming story, excellent use of plot devices that all fit in as the story progresses. This isn't just great anime, it's great filmmaking. One needs to watch something like this every so often to reset their barometer and remind themselves of what regular low cost fast market for-TV anime really is.

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Going through my n-th shonen phase currently. Right now I am watching Inuyasha (watched Fairy Tail 2014 before that). While Inuyasha himself is quite boring as MC, the other main cast characters are okay and the supporting characters are great. I am still not sure whether I like or hate Kikyou, but she's interesting. Sesshoumaru's sidekick Jaken is hilarious and I find Sesshoumaru himself to be a much more interesting character than his brother at the moment.

On 2017-08-30 at 10:15 PM, Eclipsed said:

Finished S1 Bakemonogatari. I still have the same opinion of it from 4 years ago, too lengthy monologuey dialoguey trying-to-be-witty bantery mehness. The episodic nature of it doesn't help either, 2 episodes of 70% banter dialogue, 20% setting the conflict dialogue, and then 10% resolving that conflict; rinse repeat with new girl

TL;DR it's super hard to binge this stuff, but I'm still gonna keep going. Despite my complainings it's still a mildly entertaining watch. 7/10 so far

Few years ago I watched all that there was to watch of Monogatari. I keep thinking about watching all the new stuff that came out since, but I don't know where to start because I am not even sure which ones exactly I've seen already. Starting everything from scratch could be an option, but I've tried rewatching Bakemonogatari and was quite bored.

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Yikes, Owarimonogatari is so painful to watch after the funzies of Monogatari 2nd Season.

They brought back in full force the drawn out, meandering, "witty" dialogues that stall out the plot to the point of snorefest but the real offender is that it's led by the EXTREMELY lackluster why-the-hell-do-you-even-exist Ougi Oshino. I get she's supposed to be this enigmatic, intriguing character that keeps you interested and guessing of what her true motives are, but nope just she didn't click for me at all and as soon as you see her pitiful attempt to belittle Hanekawa and make Araragi choose Ougi to be his mystery-buster-partner-in-crime over Hanekawa it's like OH HELLL NAWW CAN THIS GAL JUST GTFO ALREADY!?@#  

Doesn't help that Araragi himself is embarrassingly plot-no-justsu'd to be extremely lax around Ougi and that he currently has a really nasty case of unreliable narrator syndrome going on conveniently forgetting ALL of the 'plot revelations' of this arc involving Sodachi. It's a mess. ~Up to Ep. 6

~~
Owarimonogatari S2: Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

They really made good use of Ougi's character overall. Still salty that she annoyed the hell outta me in S1 but everything makes sense and is justified in S2, satisfies the lore and was very powerful thematically and character wise and yada yada yada FK Ougi >.>

And with that, an anime adaptation that some people spent 7+ years following was binged over one weekend by a pleb like myself, so I kinda had less impact on finally getting to hear the names Koyomi and Hitagi being said >.> but yeah this series had it's ups and downs but at the end of the day you can say that this was one good story :wafuu:.


misc. scorings because y not:

Spoiler

Bakemonogatari - 6/10 srry, it tries to hook you in with its plethora of dialogues but it does so while also having to establish characters so it leads to a huge meandering turnoff
Nisemonogatari - 8/10 characters are established now so its a bit easier to warm up to the dialogues, and the focus on Fire Sisters and Shinobu wins over any moe lover
Monogatari 2nd Season - 9/10 it achieved a great balance b/w the dialogues and having some pretty interesting arcs. This was really the pinnacle of the series. Tsubasa Tiger, Mayoi Jiangshi, Nadeko Medusa, Hitagi End...fun stuff.
Owarimonogatari 1st- 6/10 ugh, reverted back to Bakemonogatari status- we're stuck in the introduction phase where you're given a character (Ougi) you don't know or give a damn about and they just ramble for 5+ episodes and it's justzzzZZZZZZZ coupled with a really ehhh plot/arc and you got a recipe for death by boredom 
Owarimonogatari 2nd- 8/10 wraps everything up quite nicely, gives some justice/explanation to the dreaded Ougi, Koyomi x Hitagi 


Now it's time to watch the movies... I LOVE epic prequel stuff that is only briefly mentioned in main stories so I'm looking forward to it,,,, the origins of Shinobu and Araragi's relationship. Also why Araragi felt so indebted to Hanekawa

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Finished the Kizumonogatari movies

Y'know, that's what the anime was missing, epic battles. All Koyomi does for the rest of the series after this is bleed and tank everything, no more kicking ass 

Gore was a little much, I mean jesus that scene vs Episode is scarring

It was nice to see Koyomi's pre-vamp mentality, if I watched this stuff first I would've appreciated the character-growth-thematics from the Sodachi arc much better instead of qqing about how much Ougi sucks. Was also great to see more Hanekawa, dammit I'm usually fine with canon pairings but for once I actually would've preferred AraragixHanekawa 

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4 hours ago, Eclipsed said:

Finished the Kizumonogatari movies

Y'know, that's what the anime was missing, epic battles. All Koyomi does for the rest of the series after this is bleed and tank everything, no more kicking ass 

Gore was a little much, I mean jesus that scene vs Episode is scarring

It was nice to see Koyomi's pre-vamp mentality, if I watched this stuff first I would've appreciated the character-growth-thematics from the Sodachi arc much better instead of qqing about how much Ougi sucks. Was also great to see more Hanekawa, dammit I'm usually fine with canon pairings but for once I actually would've preferred AraragixHanekawa 

Not hard to prefer AraragixHanekawa especially after the latter had huge developement in Tsubasa Tiger. Also did you watch all the small series inbetween (Nekomonogatari Black, Hanamonogatari, Tsukimonogatari, Koyomimonogatari)?

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9 hours ago, Seth said:

Not hard to prefer AraragixHanekawa especially after the latter had huge developement in Tsubasa Tiger. Also did you watch all the small series inbetween (Nekomonogatari Black, Hanamonogatari, Tsukimonogatari, Koyomimonogatari)?

Oh ya thanks for the reminder i watched neko and tsuki already, but not hana and koyomi

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 29/08/2017 at 11:52 PM, ittaku said:

Well I made my way through Da Capo II SS. It wasn't as sleep inducing as season 1 was, but overall was about what I'd have expected. It was a little better than all the other seasons before it but was 100% predictable to the end and mostly provided good sedation for my sleep requirements. Onto DCIII for more sleep therapy!

I finished Da Capo III. What a steaming pile of shit. At least the fan service was okay. Of all the seasons, the least worst was Da Capo II season 2. Well I guess I watched them simply because I felt obliged and thought there might be some redeeming features but alas there really weren't. It provided some nice somnolence at the end of every night and that was about it.

For my next long series somnolence I have chosen to resuscitate the ancient series Ranma 1/2. I remember starting it 15 years ago and gave up after getting bored because there were so many other things I hadn't watched yet. Now that I don't have much older stuff that I really want to catch up on any more, I will be trying to use Ranma for that sleep inducing effect. Fingers crossed.

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On 17/09/2017 at 10:35 PM, ittaku said:

For my next long series somnolence I have chosen to resuscitate the ancient series Ranma 1/2. I remember starting it 15 years ago and gave up after getting bored because there were so many other things I hadn't watched yet. Now that I don't have much older stuff that I really want to catch up on any more, I will be trying to use Ranma for that sleep inducing effect. Fingers crossed.

Well this was totally unexpected. I started watching Ranma 1/2 and... I love it! Instead of being sleep inducing I'm laughing regularly which is a miracle. It's actually a lot funnier and better paced than Maison Ikkoku was which is also considered a classic and from a similar era. I don't even need to speed it up to watch it. Perhaps it's because it's from a time when I was a kid and appeals to something in me. To add to the intrigue, it's from a time before they started nannying their TV shows and it has fan service right from the first episode, including nipples, despite being a prime time TV kids show. Compare that to today's stuff where nipples seem to be regarded about as offensive as a spreadshot - see the hype surrounding Asuna's nipple slip in the bluray of Sword Art Online Ordinal Scale D:

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I watched Kara no Kyoukai / The Garden of Sinners. Pretty enjoyable. Episode 5 was far and away the most interesting episode: best plot, most developed cast, and an utterly confusing way of telling the story that, while occasionally frustrating, mostly just served to get me to watch more carefully.

I actually liked episode 6 quite a lot, despite it being on the weak side on plot, largely because it introduced a fun, cute character who nonetheless kicked ass; "cute" was in terminally short supply throughout this show, so that was a breath of fresh air.

2 was also an outstanding episode, although I almost wish they hadn't gone back to resolve the threads it left open which were closed off in the show's finale, episode 7. 1, 3, 4, and 7 all were weaker episodes (hard to blame 1, though, since it had to serve as an intro; but there's less excuse for the rest), especially 7, which was also on the long side for honestly not having all that much to say. The "extra" episode, 8, was simultaneously somewhat interesting, in how it explained a lot of the mechanics of things, and mind-numbingly boring, since literally nothing happened. Would've rather I simply hadn't watched it and had ended the series at episode 7. Oh well.

In summary, it had some boring episodes and some truly excellent ones, and it was quite a departure from my usual fare, so no regrets from watching Kara no Kyoukai.

I'm now watching Watashi ga Motete Dousunda / Kiss Him Not Me, because I thought the title was funny and because I like watching the occasional lighthearted comedy + reverse harem. I don't watch them often, but normally I find reverse harem shows to be a little less shallow than normal harem shows; this one, unfortunately, isn't, at least so far. That said, things are looking up a little bit as of episode 5, so I'm hoping it gets a little more enjoyable for me soon. Episode 5 had a couple of nice features: 1) it introduced a little yuri slant, which I do not mind at all, and 2) it took a step towards overturning the extremely shallow premise of the show... before going right back to the start. I don't see quite how they'd fix the bigger thematic problems I have with the show, but episode 5 gives me a little hope that they just might do so.

Edited by Fred the Barber
typo
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2 hours ago, Fred the Barber said:

I'm now watching Watasha ga Motete Dousunda / Kiss Him Not Me, because I thought the title was funny and because I like watching the occasional lighthearted comedy + reverse harem. I don't watch them often, but normally I find reverse harem shows to be a little less shallow than normal harem shows; this one, unfortunately, isn't, at least so far. That said, things are looking up a little bit as of episode 5, so I'm hoping it gets a little more enjoyable for me soon. Episode 5 had a couple of nice features: 1) it introduced a little yuri slant, which I do not mind at all, and 2) it took a step towards overturning the extremely shallow premise of the show... before going right back to the start. I don't see quite how they'd fix the bigger thematic problems I have with the show, but episode 5 gives me a little hope that they just might do so.

When I first started watching that series I thought it was hilarious. Unfortunately by about half way through it got mundane and repetitive without much forward movement and stopped being amusing. I did finish it and it was still okay but did not live up to the promise of the start (now that's never happened before has it?)

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15 hours ago, Kenshin_sama said:

For a second I thought you were watching WataMote. :marie: But considering the strong cringe factor in that series, it's probably better that you didn't.

Haven't heard of the other series until now. The premise seems really cute. :wub:

I watched WataMote a year ago or so and loathed it. Only ragrets. It was kind of like Welcome to the NHK, but less funny and without any of the redeeming qualities.

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In my quest to find multi-season anime to watch because a single cour never leaves me satisfied, I'm picking up Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai / The World God Only Knows

... wait a minute, is the MC the guy that sanahtlig's been using as his avatar? HORY SHI- it's been like 3 years and now life makes sense!

https://imgur.com/a/4geCe
edit: wait why don't images auto-embed anymore, dammit :ipb:
lYvr1qEg.jpg
there we go just copy-pasta the actual image instead of copy pastaing the link, cuz :ipb:

 

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1 hour ago, Eclipsed said:

In my quest to find multi-season anime to watch because a single cour never leaves me satisfied, I'm picking up Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai / The World God Only Knows

I really enjoyed this series, especially from the goddesses season. It's a shame it had an "end" that was before the manga's ending and left me wanting, but I'll say no more lest it turn into a spoiler.

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4 hours ago, ittaku said:

I really enjoyed this series, especially from the goddesses season. It's a shame it had an "end" that was before the manga's ending and left me wanting, but I'll say no more lest it turn into a spoiler.

Oh man, I haven't even watched the anime yet. The manga's still fresh in my head, so I'm kinda holding off on that.

On that note: Go read the manga already! Granted, it does kinda fall flat in the later chapters, but still a good read overall. Also, not gonna spoil who, but Keima does pick a girl at the end.

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