anime time anime time

[watermoon]

get in loser, we're talking anime: what have you watched recently? what are you watching?
subs? dubs? waifus? husbandos? girugamesh?

right now my fiancee and i have been watching haruhi because i'd never watched it and knew very little about it, except that it's culturally important.
i think i totally get why it was so popular though, and i've been charmed too!
the premise is kinda brilliant once you get what's going on here.
the love triangle that's basically the i consent i consent i don't meme is fun to watch, i think… i think.
and haruhi… i can't help but feel like haruhi's existence led a lot of irl men into making some very, very unwise dating decisions.

but we've also been watching the show in chronological order instead of broadcast order so i might be missing out on the intended experience.
(i'm so hyped for the endless eight)

[rakuen02]

havent watched anything recently but its my obligation to recommend <a href='https://myanimelist.net/anime/48849/Sonny_Boy' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Sonny Boy(2021)</a>. No fanservice, all quality!! Featuring real actual Character Development, trippy sci-fi setting, rumination, and great animation thanks to madhouse. At the very least I'd recommend watching for the doggy.

[maru]

I just finished "How (Not) to Summon a Demon Lord" and it was the first series I watched in full in like, a year. I think the last one was the first half of "Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!" which we watched when we moved in last September? But I didn't really fuck with it very much and we just didn't finish it.

Demon Lord was fun, though. I expected it to be bad, and really horny, and hopefully entertaining -- we were just optimising for that kind of show with the audience we had. And it was still surprisingly good at times, even though it's a boob show. Lots of boob groping. So much boobs. I felt like the emotional impact was still there.

Not sure what else I'd watch next ... my watch list is huge, though. Maybe Konosuba s3 when it wraps up the season?

[watermoon]

I think the last one was the first half of "Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!" which we watched when we moved in last September? But I didn't really fuck with it very much and we just didn't finish it.

i watched eizouken earlier this year and enjoyed it – i think gremlin girls deserve more representation, and the fact that they all have some special interest that they can and will infodump about at a moment's notice is… relatable? but i also feel like the second half of the show isn't substantially different from the first half… which is a bit weird for a series so short. they're just back on the grindset again with a different project, so you didn't miss much by skipping it.

---

but oh yeah, boobs reminded me that i got really into the yu-no series this spring and i'm still not sure how i feel about it. i feel like yu-no the eroge is a kind of poster child for "it's not hentai it's art," and maybe that's true, but it's also definitely hentai. though once you scrape off the layer of cheesecake that's plastered over everything, i found all of the non-mio heroines to be quite charming and witty and interesting as people. hell, even the protagonist grows on you, with him being the sort of sleazeball who talks big game but can't back it up once someone wants to actually do something with him. and that's fun!
and i do think the game intertwines the character stories with the story of the town and all the metaphysical stuff about the nature of time quite fluidly. i'm not sure if i really buy that last one – i can't tell if it's too smart for me or not as smart as it acts like it is – but it's a neat way of justifying the in-game mechanics' use of branching paths. i also switched to a guide early on because i'm not a fan of pixel hunting nor obtuse progression decisions, and the game has more than a few of both. yet despite those, there was something about this game that gripped me enough to want to chase down both anime adaptions to see how they treated the series, and how they flattened the multiple timelines into one linear story.

the 2019 anime adaptation is remarkably chaste and takes a unique approach to foreshadowing known as "spoiling," but their decision to adapt this adventure game into a high school buddy anime honestly worked better than i was expecting. it also diverged significantly for one of the character arcs (kanna) in a way that i really liked, turning what i felt was the weakest arc in the game into one of the most touching arcs in the whole series. i'm not sure if i'd recommend it, nor do i think it'd stand on its own very well for someone who'd never played the game, but it's a pleasant enough watch.
the anime is also weird because it was made years after the original designer and composer had passed. maybe that explains the prudishness, but it also leads to this fascinating divide in the anime's soundtrack between the handful of melodically-complex songs it adapts from ryu umemoto's original score and the generic anime bgm that plays the rest of the time. and maybe that reflects how i'd describe the show as a whole honestly: like it carved off a fraction of something living and unique and passionate and didn't have the talent to interpolate that fraction back into a whole that retained the same virile spark.

the 1998 actually-hentai ova made me feel weird and bad inside. it felt like they put the game in a blender and strung together a story from what got spat out. almost all the sex scenes were rapes (none of which were in the original game!), the only scene that isn't is the exact one i didn't want to see, and they're all just jackasses to each other…

[watermoon]

right now my fiancee and i have been watching haruhi because i'd never watched it and knew very little about it, except that it's culturally important.
[…]
but we've also been watching the show in chronological order instead of broadcast order so i might be missing out on the intended experience.

oh, right, we finished this and got around to watching the movie this weekend.

(instructions for watching this one in chronological order too: start with 1:39:35 – 1:59:42, then go back to the start and watch until 0:13:36, then 1:59:42 – 2:16:18, then 0:13:36 – 1:39:35, then 2:16:18 to the end. there is no sensible reason to do this and it will make your viewing experience worse)

i don't know what it means that the biggest thing i got from the movie is that its version of nagato yuki is so adorable and i want to take her in my arms and make sure she never gets hurt again. she hits some moe-moe core in my heart far stronger than anyone in this show has yet… i'm tempted to say that i have a thing for danderes, but it might be more that i am one, so i know how it feels and it makes it easier for me to empathize with how she feels.
i mentioned this to my roommates and one of them suggested that, if i like this take on nagato, then i should watch the disappearance of nagato yuki-chan. so i decided to take her up on that.

when i was looking up the show, i saw that it was polarizing because it throws out a lot of what made haruhi specifically interesting in favor of just making a slice of life romance anime, though i'm also not the sort to insist that other entries in a series hold faithful to the original material, so i don't mind that on its own.
the show does come off as fanficcy at times, though, admittedly, but that's also not a big deal to me. it takes itself a good amount less seriously too. they seem to be having fun with it, and i appreciate that!
nagato is also changed somewhat from her characterization in the movie, but it feels like that's done more in service of fleshing out the dandere type that's sketched out in the movie. and as a result they turned her into, uh, me.
food-motivated, visibly neurodivergent, abnormally shy, prone to fantasy, has extreme difficulty confessing her feelings to those she's attracted to… some of those were me at that age, some of those are still me now. it hurts just a little to watch, but it's a good hurt – a hurt that dredges up similar moments in my own life and makes me feel less alone. i remember the feeling of seeing the one i'd fallen for being a little too friendly with someone else, misinterpreting it as being more than it actually was, and having my heart drop through the floor. i remember waiting just a touch too long to just get the words out! and losing my chance – wondering if i'll ever get another. i remember being shanghaied into someone's unhinged schemes and being too nonconfrontational to leave, but everyone goes through that one, right?

a lot of the comedy here seems to be driven by the shy girls (nagato, mikuru, koizumi) being paired up with boisterous, overbearing counterparts (asakura, tsuruya, haruhi) who run the gamut between defending the targets of their attachment and exploiting them. and now that the whole gang is here, i'm curious to see how much they play with these dynamics, or for how long the show remains bearable…
still, i'm liking it so far.

[maru]

I've been watching Texnolyze a bit with a friend. It's quite early (ep 5?) but man it's slow. I keep passing out after two episodes as people make noises with minutes-long takes of their anguish or whatever. I can't tell if it's the kind of show where I'll finish it and feel like "what a masterpiece" or what. It sort of reminds me of the back half of Lain — just every time it became extremely hard to follow and obtuse. But the entire time. It took us like three or four eps to get people's names. Even then it's not clear if I learned it correctly.

[maru]

So, Texhnolyze! I actually really liked it after all that. I mean, it spends 15 episodes being a real slog and taking its time and I wasn't aware who anyone was or where they came from ... but the last quarter of the series, where it starts to show its hand, I came to really *get*.

I was asked to watch it because I like shows with a creeping sense of inevitable dread -- like, "it's going to end badly. And it just gets worse." the more and more it zooms out. At the risk of not spoiling too much, I think Texhnolyze isn't doing exactly what I was thinking in this regard. It's not cosmic horror where everyone is fucked and they don't know it, it's sort of like a sense of hopelessness, like that the problem is just ineffably losing willpower, of being so poisoned spiritually that there's nothing even to redeem left.

The two guys in Texhnolyze who are the coolest are existential heroes, being like, "wow all of this makes no sense! But fuck rationality! I'm gonna try anyway!" I think that's the idea. It's that struggle and absurdity are the source of vitality...

Anyway, friends came over last night and we cleared "How (Not) to Summon a Demon Lord" s2, which was, you know, a Gaiden story. It's not really about continuing character development so much as all these characters got their arcs and now they're helping someone else. Bonus round kinda story. I really like how much the emphasis of it is on what it means to play your role, like, in person. I feel like I expose my interiority too much. In the show he questions himself constantly, but it's him putting on a mask and seeming certain that makes everything work, and makes everyone love him. I think there's a merit to that. I ended up starting to cull my more internal thoughts from my real-name spaces.