Evangelion Rebuilds

I have a pretty long history with evangelion. I watched it when I was around 13 and it impacted (hehe) me in many ways. It's true what they say, baby's first deep anime. I spent a lot of time back then reading about the lore and the symbolism, I even wrote an essay about evangelion for my ethics class when I started high school. The teacher asked me if I really wrote it on my own, and it's true that I kind of didn't, since my interpretation of evas representing jobs and responsibilities was a pretty common interpretation online. Suffice to say, NGE had a pretty strong grip over me in my early weeb days. I rewatched nge recently, in preparation for the last rebuild and along with my bf that never watched nge before. I noticed a lot of things I didn't pay much attention to before, specifically when it comes to the adult characters. One of my favourite episodes now would be episode 13, where we find out more info about the Magi System and how it was built. The whole plot surrounding Ritsuko, her mother and Gendo was something I just ignored when I was a teen. Another thing I really love about the show were the eva designs, they look so slick compared to your standard mecha designs. Unit 01's screams? Perfect. And yeah yeah I know evas aren't mechas technically.

Now that I'm done reminiscing about the show let me start rambling about the rebuild movies. I never saw the rebuilds as a remake, but more of a continuation. This is why I kind of see characters in the rebuilds as detached from the originals. We don't really know their backstories, some of their proper motivations, a lot of things are missing. Is the rebuild universe something shinji willed into existence after EoE? Idk I'm too lazy to theorize about it. Anyway, the first movie is kind of the same as the start of the original show, with not too many differences in the story. There's one scene in it that stood out to me that was a bit changed from the show, the scene where Misato is yelling at Shinji after he disobeyed her order. In the Rebuild she gets a lot more angry and physical even. The main reason why I like it so much because it's so visible here how Shinji really is just a child still. He's damn tiny.

Now the second rebuild is where things start getting wacky and different. Rei is on her way to become a moeblob but it's not as extreme as the 4th movie. Shinji is getting his own harem, but also I'd say his rebuild self is a bit more charming compared to the the show. The emphasis on him being a good cook is much bigger here I feel. Asuka is just a random angry girl now, and she's going to stay angry for reasons that are unknown to us, as she won't get a backstory until the last 10 minutes of the last movie. Mari appears and I'm already exhausted by her presence. We had a little battle shonen moment at the end with Shinji saving Rei. Misato is telling him to go for it even though she's aware he's causing the Third Impact. Hmm Okay.

The third movie made me the most angry. It starts with Shinji being told to never pilot again and that basically he's a piece of shit but nothing is being explained to him, so he feels confused. Understandable. Why is nobody explaining anything? Also the jarring change in art style only became obvious to me now, even though I watched 3.0 back when it came out. Dorito chins. One thing I didn't mention before but it was already present in the first movie, was the larger focus on machinery, various robots and ships. 3rd and 4th movie take it to the next level. Both movies start in the same exact way, with Mari's singing and a barrage of boring looking cgi machinery. It seems to me the rebuilds have a large focus on scale as opposed to interesting 1 on 1 fights which makes it less enjoyable imo. Anyway, Shinji is confused and angry, so he rejoins daddy and most importantly Rei whom he thought he saved but Misato and co didn't want to elaborate on. Gendo refuses to elaborate on anything but this at least is consistent with his character and his motives so it's fine. Kaworu instead serves us the exposition dump and it turns out he wants to revert things back. So now finally we have the final scene, where Kaworu realizes he was tricked by Gendo. Instead of explaining it to Shinji who is now having a full on breakdown because nobody is bothering to explain him anything, he just sits there covering his head. This movie had way too many moments like this that it became frustrating. In an attempt to make things right due to feelings of severe guilt, Shinji manages to fuck everything up and he uses the two spears only to fuck things up again.

The fourth movie was uhhhhhh "alright". As a movie unrelated to nge I'd say it was pretty okay. It was 2 and a half hours long but I was able to watch it without losing attention so I'd say it did a good job at being a movie. First thing that I disliked was Rei's childification. This Rei is very uwu and child-like. She's learning words for the first time, her purpose in life is to be Shinji's waifu and she doesn't even have the drive to give herself a new name. I thought at the very least she's going to mature into her own person on her own terms as the movie suggested with the cute village life scenes, but she didn't. Shinji is suffering from ptsd big time at the start. I liked the scene where Asuka stuffed food in his face.

Twelve Kingdoms

A little while ago, I decided I really want to clear out my backlog so I planned to start with all the mid 90's/early 00's fantasy/isekai anime that I've been meaning to watch for ages. The first one I began with was Twelve Kingdoms. I really, really loved it. The worldbuilding was so interesting, most characters were amazing, the main heroine experienced a lot of growth, her love interest was adorable and generally all of the characters had pretty understandable motivations and reactions to situations besides a couple of kooky ones. Frankly I was stunned with how comfy that anime was because I only heard about it once online and that one sincere recommendation made me save it to my backlog. Sadly as was the fate for a lot of anime at that time, its funding was cut short and the anime was never finished. Despite that it made it to my favourites list, because it was that enjoyable to watch. The last arc aside, which was the start of an arc that was basically never finished, the show ended on a decent note, and we got to see our main heroine grow into a competent queen. Pretty satisfying.

Now, I finished watching this anime around 2 months ago hence the less detailed review. But I feel like it's important for me to put this review out here because of the one that follows...

The Vision of Escaflowne

As mentioned in the Twelve Kingdoms review, my quest to watch the most popular fantasy/isekai from 20-ish years ago continues, and the next one on my list was Escaflowne. Now, I've heard about this anime time and time again and I mostly heard words of praise. It was compared to Evangelion before Evangelion, best fantasy anime ever made, best isekai etc. etc. After watching it however... I can definitely say I liked Twelve Kingdoms a lot more.

On the first glance, both of these shows share the same flaws. Both had their funding cut short, although while Twelve Kingdoms was more interrupted and didn't finish, Escaflowne was condensed but finished. Both seemed to have a lot of unfinished plot threads. Another flaw they share is an annoying main character, but Twelve Kingdoms fixes that around episode 12 (out of 45, so pretty early on all in all!) while... Escaflowne never fixed it. In fact, all of Escaflownes characters are so bizarre to me that I can't wrap my head around them. This show had the most ridiculous and forced (quite literally, plot forced!) love triangle I've ever seen. Love triangles and love misunderstandings are a big reason why I tend to skip over romance shows and shojo anime, despite me preferring female protagonists. Anyway, let me start hating the characters. First we have Hitomi, the main character. She falls in love with like 4 different dudes throughout the show and despite having a future telling ability, or more like a faith altering ability, she's never able to utilise it properly once throughout the show (on a second thought I actually find this sort of cool because she's not in the show to fight or to be an amazing protagonist, but it's still a bit frustrating). Despite being told how to do it somewhere around the middle of it. She keeps changing her mind regarding her love interest, and one of her love interests is Allan that's around 30?? years old. Allan is probably my most hated character. He's a full blown misogynist, constantly belittling Hitomi and saying how he literally wants to keep her in a cage. The dude knocked up a queen (that had a husband) and never took part in raising the child or taking responsibility, even after the king died. Then he went on to fall in love with the queen's sister. And then Hitomi. He was full on ready to be with the princess but Hitomi cucked him with her fate altering powers. That's actually the only time she consciously used her powers lol. And the most disgusting part is, he had feelings for Hitomi (even before being forcefully manipulated to kiss her) but at the end of the show he says Hitomi reminds him of his little sister. What the fuck!!! His horrible treatment of women could be explained by the fact that maybe the world he was raised in is also like that but then it makes no sense for Hitomi to accept his weird comments since she comes from the modern day world. Van is a character I actually liked, he's your typical action focused male fantasy protagonist that doesn't have time for romance. Endearing in a way, but his lack of ability to express feelings made the show ending so... limp. Despite their amazing true real love being the thing that saves the whole world, the two of them decide not to stay with each other? Insted Hitomi went back to her world. Left me feeling more on the edge than Twelve Kingdom's ending even though that show literally never had a real ending to it.

The way both shows deal with having female heroines are vastly different. However, a part of that is because of the worlds the main characters found themselves in, they're vastly different too. But I still think it's worth a mention. In Escaflowne, Hitomi is constantly baragged with "you're a woman you should stay away" comments but there's never any rebutals to them. She does stay away. She never proves anyone wrong. Yoko in Twelve Kingdoms is pretty amazing though, as she goes from this timid, boring perfect girl to an actual Queen that needs to fight her way to the top. Just the way in which her development happened was so well done, I rarely see it being done in anime with female characters. The way Hitomi and other characters have this ability to constantly fall in and out of love is impressive. It just makes for such lukewarm romance that I wasn't rooting for anyone at all, I just got super pissed.

One thing I can say I liked about Escaflowne was the music and the animation. The soundtrack was scored by none other than Yoko Kanno so of course it's going to be great, and the animation was impressive for an episodic tv anime at the time. I'm not really going to complain much about the never resolved plot points because it's whatever to me. I might watch the movie somewhere down the line because I heard it had a darker tone that the show. A lot of people seemed to complain about the art style and the noses but I really had no problems with it.

Despite me shitting on this anime so much, I had fun watching it because it was pretty nonsensical. If someone watched this anime as a kid or a teen I can totally see why they'd like it and have fond memories of it. In that sense, it's not that bad and the problems it suffers from can be seen in a lot of anime with similar themes, so it's not really outstandingly horrible. I guess I just had my standards set high by an anime seemingly more obscure from this one that follows the same premise, hence my disillusionment.

I Want To Be Killed by a Highschool Girl

I Want To Be Killed by a Highschool Girl is yet another Usamaru Furuya's manga that I've read in the past month. I think I read most of his stuff by now. I find his work really interesting because he never planned to be a mangaka until he was 26. He still has a background as an artist, he majored in oil painting but being a mangaka never interested him until he actually did it, and you can see it in his earlier works. His earlier works are what I love the most because they're so strange compared to the rest of the stuff you'd see around. I love the humor mixed with ero-guro stuff, never thought I'd have such taste before. The first manga of his that I read was 51 Ways to Save Her and I actually didn't know he was behind it when I read it. That manga had a cohesive linear plot and one set of characters, rather than just being a gag manga like his earlier works. Sometime after that I read his earlier works Short Cuts and Palepoli which became my favourites, and I still didn't know that he was behind 51 Ways to Save Her! Just shows how different the subject matter and the vibe was. Even though, looking back, the art style is pretty recogniseable.

I Want To Be Killed by a Highschool Girl is one of Furuya's newer stuff and I have to say the premise was really interesting, I read it under an hour. The manga is about a dude called Haruto, that has Autoassassinophilia which is basically a fetish for being killed by somebody. He of course, wants to be killed by a pretty high school girl. And there's one girl he set his sights on, so much so that he swapped his major in university to become that girl's high school teacher, and he also left his gf for this reason (or so we think). Oh and his gf is on her way to become a psychologist. I'm spoiling shit big time from this point on so if you're interested in reading, I recommend you don't read from here on! The girl Haruto is into is called Maho and she has dissociative identity disorder due to a traumatic childhood. Her best friend Aoi has autism, but she's also the only person that's aware of Maho's split personality who she's actually friends with. Maho helps Aoi with understanding social cues, but Aoi is also the only person she can feel safe around because she knows about her DID. They have a cute dynamic going on. Yukio is a boy that has a crush on Maho, he likes her so much he got into the same prestigious high school despite being kind of a dumbass. The story starts when Haruto's ex-gf Satsuki shows up at the high school as a counselor. She slowly starts to unravel that Maho is in love with Haruto, that Aoi doesn't feel safe around Haruto and she thinks he's trouble, that Maho has DID and that Yukio is in love with Maho and wants to help her. In the meantime Haruto is orchestrating his big plan of his murder-day that will happen on his 35th birthday, he quits his job, gets rid of all of his belongings, and plans on how to get Maho alone in order to have her split personality murder him. Anyway, it turns out Satsuki knew about all of this and she came to that high school in order to put an end to it. Basically all of them help Maho get over her DID and "merge" the personalities and they also get a tracking app on Maho's phone in case Haruto gets to her. Which he does of course, and she accepts his invitiation to go to the woods as she still has a crush on him (and doesn't know he's a degen, only Satsuki and Yukio do). Anyway in the end they manage to prevent Haruto from getting himself killed, Yukio and Maho end up together, and Satsuki ends up with Haruto while trying to undo that fetish of his. He is, however, still a degen and now he's looking into hypnotisation in order to bring back Maho's old split personality.

So what's the point of the story? That degenereates will always be degenerates? Hehe.. Well either way the main thing I wanted to talk about was Satsuki. She is such an ironic and tragic character, and I'm not sure if she was purposefully written that way or not but this hit hard. She embodies the "I can change him" mindset a lot of women tend to have and suffer for it. And the last big irony is how she is able to perceive things well and read people masterfully yet she cannot see this fatal flaw in herself. She wasn't able to help Haruto in the end, because it turns out he's just a plain old sociopath. One super weird thing I have to point out was the monologue Satsuki had when she was confronting Haruto during the climax, she tells him how Maho had a crush on him and how if he wasn't such a crazy person, they could've ended up together. It took me by surprise but also not really because I noticed before Japan (or maybe just anime/manga, idk) has this weird obsession with teacher/student relationships, not in a taboo way, but in a "this is totally normal and respectful" way. God I can't remember which anime it was that just glossed over such an event. In DeDeDe at least it was treated as someting weird and unusual, and also as a gag. Anyway, Haruto literally spent a portion of his life stalking Maho and planning his life around her in order to get killed by her at a certain age, how could you tell this man that he could've been her husband??? It should be the last thing to say in such a situation, Jesus.

All in all I enjoyed the manga, especially for the Satsuki/Maho/Aoi interactions which I thought were endearing. I don't think it's perfect and the end felt like it came all of a sudden with a large timeskip but it's worth giving it a read, it's quite suspensful at parts. Also here's a pic of Haruto playing Shadow of the Colossus, my favourite game.

River's Edge

Let me preface this by saying that I love coming of age and edgy teen stories. I'm kind of a sucker for them. It's the reason that initially drew me in to Asano Inio's work when I was 14, and I still have a tendency to read similar works many years later. This manga perfectly fits into this theme I like, and it was an enjoyable read. It's not too deep or anything, but it was an enjoyable vignette into a teen girl's life.

To briefly summarize the plot and character relationships; Haruna is the main character who befriends a gay guy called Yamada. She has a boyfriend called Kannonzaki that cheats on her with her best friend Rumi. Rumi whores herself out to sugardaddies and she has a fat NEET sister. Kannonzaki is jealous of Haruna and Yamada's friendship and he thinks she's cheating on him. Yamada has a girlfriend whom he doesn't like at all, called Kanna. He also has another friend, a bulimic model called Kozue. Pretty iconic and simple setup for such stories. Kozue may or may not be gay or bi, but this trope of "gay model" is something that's pretty prevalent, and I'm not sure if she was just yet another extension of that trope. Someting that made me relate hard is Haruna's feelings towards Kannonzaki, she lost her virginity to him but she doesn't care about him at all. Despite that she still says stuff like "I love you" and "we'll be together forever" when she doesn't mean it and regrets it immediately. I had a very similar experience with a relationship like that in high school. I did that because I was weak and wanted the easy way out by being in a relationship with someone that was my best friend. I definitely saw that part of myself in her during those moments, with the exact feeling of self-doubt and immediate regret. I think it's just good proof teens aren't that mentally mature and ready for serious relationships. It seems this manga is loosely based on a movie with the same name that came out in '86 that I never watched. Unlike that movie though, the characters in this manga never kill somebody except for Kanna killing herself at the end. Anyway, Yamada discovered a random dead body at the river bed and he just stares at it from time to time. He shows this body to Kozue and ultimately Haruna. The body is a pretty clear metaphor for the problems they deal with, skeletons in your closet kind of thing. There's not much of a real plot to this, it really does seem like an episode of a pretty turbulent time in their life, and when it's time to turn over a new leaf the story ends. I love that format honestly, but it might not be for everyone as people love to have closure or read longer stories. Everyone here is an asshole to some degree, some more some less. Nobody is perfect. Problems get resolved by not handling them head on, but instead it's done passively by letting time pass and things change naturally. I think that's pretty realistic, and something all of us are familiar with.

All in all this was a pretty easy read, and fits into the "junkfood for my soul" genre that I love to read. Nice.

The Shut-In Newlywed

Fuck. This manga hit way too close to home and now I'm a bit anxious. This "review" is more of a blogpost about my life than anything so brace yourself if you want to read it!

To sum up, this is a short 11 chapter autobigraphical manga about a woman who just got married. She was in a relationship for 6 years with her boyfriend, 3 of those were long distance, before they got married. She essentially had to quit her job, leave her family and friends, and abandon everything familiar to her in order to be with her future husband whom she feels she doesn't deserve. The manga talks about that whole process, as well as her depression, her hating the role of a housewife and her realizing her boyfriend accepts her for what she is. I spent the last few chapters slowly crying as I got reminded of the fact that I'll essentially be doing the same. It's not like I wasn't aware of this before, in fact I'd say my communication with my boyfriend is a lot better so we're both prepared for what awaits us once I move away, but the thought of me not integrating well enough into his world is ever present in my life. At least I spent a few months living with him. Either way, this situation is so scarily close to mine that I feel a bit of relief. I'm not the only woman doing this and feeling worried about it.

Prepare for a barrage of contradictory statements. Being a housewife is something I'd feel embarassed about in today's age. But in fact, that's a whole job of its own. And it's not easy work. There's a certain level of fear and immense trust that comes with it, as you'd be solely reliant on your husbands earnings, effectively stripping yourself of financial independence. I think in today's society (and especially modern work driven Japan where nobody wants to be a nuisance to anybody) that role carries some negative connotations to it. Easy way out, too useless to do anything else, freeloader, man's property etc. Yet despite me feeling shame about the possibility of being a housewife, it's something a lot of women, including me, secretely dream of at some point in our lives. And why is that? Well if you ever plan to have kids, or if you ever look at your friends that just got kids, you'd notice how the role of a parent is still pushed onto the mother. Fathers are hardly as present in the caretaking role. Women end up having two jobs, three jobs if the husbands don't bother with chores which is still a thing. Thinking of yourself in such a future can't help but evoke feelings of "I don't want to have kids" or "I don't want to have a job" in order to release yourself from one stress or the other. It's a sad fate many women end up with, with their husbands playing goofy useless oafs to avoid responsibility or just them being plainly patriarchal in a society that doesn't function that way anymore. Our society treats women as if we're equal, but our home life often tells another story. Anyway where was I going with this? I don't really know, but what I do know is that the main character probably had the same thoughts brewing inside her head. She's afraid of being a burden on somebody, and ironically she feels even more useless when her husband helps with the chores, stripping her off the only role she would unwillingly put herself into, the "housewife".

Another topic this manga deals with is long distance relationships. As someone who is unfortunately still in one (the long distance part is the unfotunate one) and is feeling frustrated due to the pandemic I think the experience of being in an ldr is very well portrayed. The curious questions from friends, the anxiety of being "that one crazy girl in an ldr" etc. were all things I went through and still experience. The whole dynamic of ldrs is so well explained as something that truly isn't for everyone, and something you really have to be mentally strong for to make the relationship survive. I really loved that part.

Anyway despite me thinking about this plenty already, this manga maybe soothed some feelings I had about being a housewife, or rather it just provided another perspective. I still think that being a housewife is as much of a curse as it is a privilege if you're decently safe money wise but it was a realistic portrayal of someone going bonkers after their life situation changed drastically, even if the change wasn't necessarily negative. I hope the same doesn't happen to me honestly...

To Your Eternity

I am an anime-only fag so I apologize if you were expecting a manga review. I kind of have mixed opinions on this anime even though the ending of this first season was so amazing. I'm a pretty big crybaby but not many shows had me crying so hard that my nose was all runny but the ending on this one was.. phew. The show started off pretty strong but somewhere along the middle I kind of lost interest. And then the prison island arc was just so trash. All of the characters were annoying, the group's deaths were so pointless and easily preventable that all I could do was roll my eyes. It felt like there was a lot of plot armor going around in that arc, until of course it was turned off so as to kill a few characters off for a little emotional moment.

Due to the nature of this anime it's bound to have a lot of "meaningful" deaths. It's an interesting thing for sure, but I think that this plot device brings a lot of flaws with itself. It's hard to get attached to some characters when you know they're definitely dying soon, so I think the mangaka has to think of many different ways to have the mc interact with other characters and their lives to keep it interesting. At some point it's bound to get boring. Or maybe not? But this is why Pioran's death was so good. She wasn't killed during some self sacrificing heroic moment like many characters prior were, her death was so relatable to me as a normal human being that it really hit me hard. But that's the thing, now that she died of old age, the mangaka can't use it again to make the same point without it being repetitive. There's only so many ways in which people can die which is why I think that the show is a bit gimmicky. I still enjoy it though and I will watch more once it comes out.

I'm definitely a fan of shows where the main character wanders through the world and meets different people a la Mushishi and Kino's Journey which is what my first impression of this anime was. This one has a totally different vibe though. Lastly, I love seeing fun elderly characters in anime. Especially old ladies. I love Pioran. That's it, I'm really tired and this whole review makes no sense I'll probably rewrite it.

Sonny Boy

I honestly couldn't wait to talk about this anime somewhere. I started watching it when it was already on episode 7 or 8 so I didn't want to spoil myself on /a/ or anywhere else. This anime has a lot of things which I love, coming of age themes, weird atmosphere, meaningless wandering, weird monologues, things left open ended and up to interpretation etc. The animation stood out, especially the colour palette. The undrawn faces in far away shots, the ost... A lot of nice things basically. I had a big fear that it would turn out to be Wonder Egg 2.0 but I think Wonder Egg was a lot more style over substance than this, even though it had a lot of potential.

Nothing will change how much I like this anime, even though I've been reading a lot of lukewarm opinions about it. I think over time I've been getting better and better at deciding what I truly like (even if it's not really that good) and not being influenced by online strangers opinions. A lot of people seem to find this anime too uncertain in its ending, or thinking that the characters did a 180 in the last episode. I've also seen people absolutely obsess over the romance and shipping wars, and cucking and ntr. It really makes me feel like the collective iq of anime watchers dropped down drastically, but it's probably just me growing up. These topics will be what I'll mainly cover in this review.

First let's talk about romance. A lot of people were PISSED that Nagara got LITERALLY CUCKED!!!! by the turbo Chad Asakaze, probably because they self-inserted a little bit too much. While I don't think the main theme of this anime was purely escapism, I think that wanting Nagara to end up with Nozomi would be a pure escapist wish fullfilment fantasy. Nozomi had a bit of a manic pixie dream girl role through the most of the show, the quirky, extroverted qt to the boring, uninterested and introverted boy with a shitty life. She lifted him up like she did with the sick bird, and she nursed him back to health. Her role was that of a saviour, and I think even the show highlighted the fact that she didn't go through any catharsis like the other main characters did with her being dead in the real world, or so we thought. She was there for Nagara to help him realize who he is and to help him use his power to save others. In one discussion someone mentioned to me that Nagara returned the favour and helped Nozomi with deciding something but for the life of me I can't remember when that happened. I still feel like their relationship is more onesided in the victim-saviour way, and that Nozomi isn't that much of a romantic interest. Now, they made a promise to stay friends in the Real World if one were not to remember the events of the Other World, but now I bring to you episode 11. Rajdhani stated how you have to make a sacrifice in order to go back to the Real World. He was talking about Mizuho's cats whom she had to let go off in order to go back. He didn't mention Nagara, but that's because Nagara already made the sacrifice so to speak, he lost Nozomi. Which is why I think he didn't rush to her immediately in the Real World. But that's open to interpretation as well, since now that he knows she's alive, he can make that choice. But also I think, Nagara doesn't need Nozomi anymore. She helped him and their chapter in life is over. Maybe now that he's not broken anymore, she wouldn't have any interest in him. Maybe now, they wouldn't be compatible anymore? Much to think about! Mizuho is very similar to Nagara in that way, as she was saved by her cats. They gave her a purpose to live and grow and she was really attached to them. Therefore she let go off them. Do I ship Mizuho and Nagara? Not really, I don't mind it either way and I find it ridiculous that people are so focused on romance in this anime. Their relationship would make more sense to me as they have more things in common but they could also be good friends and anchors for the rest of their lives sharing that one crazy experience. Both outcomes seem fine and natural to me.

Now I'll move on to the "why did both Mizuho and Nagara become pussies in the Real World". I feel like this opinion is just an outcome from people being used to media that always has the characters progress in some way, and never look back or doubt themselves in significant moments. Doubt and regression are treated as more of an obstacle to overcome in the story than as part of living, if that makes sense. And I feel like this anime treats it as a part of life which I appreciate. One's growth as a person is not linear, and people will always make mistakes and doubt themselves, it's natural. When Nagara came back he saw Asakaze with Nozomi and felt discouraged. That's normal. He saw Mizuho brush him off and he didn't chase after her. That's normal. But he works in order to escape his bad family. He did make progress. Mizuho tried going back to the Other World when she got confronted with her shitty reality. Again, that's normal. But she ended up talking with Nagara and having a nice discussion with him. He even gave her great advice, and so did she. Personally I absolutely love this. We'll never know if their lives will turn out perfect and happy, but that doesn't matter. What matters is they both had the resolve to make this choice of going back, and they're going to try actually living this time.

Rajdhani was my favourite character in this anime, and the 11th episode really solidified it. I am happy with his ending, and I am happy to have him as an example that choosing to stay in the Other World isn't escapism, it supports my theory that this show isn't about hurr escapism bad wagie life good a la rebuild 4.0. He happened to wander for a very long time and he even sought after death for a while. His existence (as with many others) proves the Other World isn't an escapist fantasy we had hoped it would be but instead it is just Another Type of an Existence. Maybe after helping his friends he decided to die in his own way by becoming a forest, or maybe he just entered another stage of life of his ideal existence. Who knows but I really liked him.

Lastly I'll talk about one character I disliked which was the big breasted teacher whose name I forgot and refuse to look up. I was surprised how the show had no fan service but she had to show up. The fact that all students have normal bodies (and the fact that she's also a middle school student) made me hate her. But I think I fell for the trap, because she was made to be a hated character that causes strife. What made me hate her even more though was the abundance of positive comments from people watching the anime. She was just so annoying lol. Since she's kind of a student larping as a grown person, maybe she really just willed that ridiculous physical appearance into existence and used it to make people go crazy. Oh well, I still don't like her. Also her design stood out from the rest and she looked like she came straight out of Devilman Crybaby which I absolutely disliked. I know a similar bunch of people were behind these anime and Tatami Galaxy which is one of my favourites but it was such a horrible anime and I still hate it. Or maybe it's just the animators? I'm too lazy to research it I apologize. Adding to that, Japan Sinks also sucked.

I could talk about many other themes in this anime but I'm getting pretty tired now. All in all a really great anime original.

Bokurano

Boy of boy... This anime was a trip. I finished it like 3 weeks ago but I've been putting the review off for a bit because of life so the details will get murky. The main plot of the anime has been done before, a group of kids sign up for a "game" but oh! It's actually real life and they're all going to die one by one. However a lot of these kids lead really troubled and complicated lives. To sum it up better, a group of 15 troubled kids aged 14ish from all walks of life are in a summer camp together, and while bored they venture off into a cave where a mystery computer man resides. He offers them a chance to register for some kind of a mecha game and they all of course decide to play, aside from one kid that's 10. They have to defeat 15 monsters, and each time they fight the mecha is piloted by one kid while the others are spectating inside the mecha. After each fight the pilot kid dies and then a new one gets selected and so on. I heard the manga is a lot more bleak, especially the ending, and that some character arcs are totally different so it seems like the two differ a lot. The kids have no choice but to fight otherwise the earth gets destroyed. Deaths aren't really presented to us as surprising as the episode always begins with the kid that's about to get chosen, so you know what's about to happen. You get the enjoyable experience of watching the last few days or hours of the chosen kid's life, which is usually messed up with a few exceptions. Some politics drama is also woven into the story so the supernatural part of the story is nicely countered with a more realistic way of handling such situations which was a nice surprise. That's all I can say without spoiling things, but if you're interested in watching do read the next paragraph only.

As I mentioned in one of my earlier texts, despite the amount of disturbing manga I've read recently I knew that if I were to see the same stuff shown in anime form I wouldn't feel as indifferent about it. I'll stop beating around the bush, this anime has pedophilia in it. There's one graphical scene that's framed in a more negative light, but also a couple of depictions of pedophilia that are just... there. The latter I don't really mind considering the context but I felt it was worth bringing up. And the worst thing is it just hits you out of nowhere. I'm talking pretty graphic and not even super short scene of a teacher having sex with a 12? 13? year old student. Well technically you can't see any genitals or nipples but yeah. Now, I know teacher-student relationships are particularly common in japanese media (honestly western teen media from the early 00's had a surprising amount of it too though) especially when it concerns coming of age stories about troubled teens in particular. Student teacher relationships, sugardaddies all that. I know that it's almost to be expected for something like that to be a sidestory in an early 00's anime that's basically suffering porn as people like to call it. Yet... to me it really felt that it came out of left field because nothing too graphic happened by then (it was episode 6 or 7 I can't remember), the deaths weren't gruesome etc. But the scene had nudity, moaning, awkward facial expressions, it really felt out of place. And this was the one and only sex scene in the whole anime! Not sure about the manga. They could've just implied it but they really went at it. Anyway this is really the worst scene in the anime but it does have some other weird scenes that stuck out to me so I'll mention them later. If you're fine with watching the show knowing this shit exists in it, don't read the rest so you don't get everything spoiled. I'm not really the type to do content warnings but man, this was so unexpected I had to mention it lol.

Other pedoish scenes are as follows: a 14 yr old girl trying to prostitute herself but in the end it gets played for laughs as her dad is the one to "buy" her to protect her or whatever (she never met her dad before so she didnt know it was him), a 16 yr old girl marrying a yakuza boss while everyone in the show says how she's a brave, strong, mature woman which like?? Okay she's a child, and lastly a quick remark from a father being concerned about his daughter receiving a scar because she wouldn't be a "suitable" bride. The last scene in particular I found very interesting honestly because I read that scars were thought to ruin a womans worth as a bride and I didn't even know that was a thing in Japan, but I'm basing this off a comment on an anime streaming site so it might be bullshit, I'm too lazy to fact check at the moment. So yeah if that's the case I do think it's a really interesting comment, especially because all the other adults in the room skipped past it. Not surprising.

Something I think this anime does a good job at is painting this picture of despair for the young lives that are going to inevitably die, prematurely. I don't mean it in a typical way where you'd be crying each episode for the kid that's about to die. There's a couple of tear jerker episodes but most didn't really affect me much in that way. Instead it does the following: these kids are constantly surrounded by adults, a lot of shitty adults at that, yet we're constantly confronted with the fact the kids are the ones that have to die. All the shitty adults survive. The pedo teacher gets protected by none other but the sister of the girl that got raped by him (the sister was getting raped by the teacher too btw), the "good" father that made the weird bride comment cheated on his wife with a younger woman because hes a horny male etc. Pretty bleak. The kids get to experience this whole chaos unraveling around them, they get involved with politicans and people trying to kidnap them because they're the pilots, they're forced to get closure before their lives even began all because of some parallel world richies that wanted to.. reduce the amount of universes or something. Drain energy actually?

This brings me to the whole plot thing. The stuff that gets thrown at us near the end remains kind of unresolved and there's a lot of it to grasp in a short period of time. The last few episodes have a lot of infodumps and exposition actually. But basically these kids are just one of the many that get thrown in that situation, and the other mechas they have to defeat are also piloted by kids in the same situation. When they get defeated their earth and their whole universe gets destroyed. So the stakes are quite high. The reason why is because some super secret future elite wants something out of it, and they're basically indestrucible as far as the anime shows us. If the kids win, their Earth's energy gets sucked out, or actually maybe only if they try to defeat the future elite using some program that's actually a trap that ends up enslaving their world... So they're fucked either way.

The ending is thought to be disappointing by mangafags as it ends on quite the uplifting note, everyone died except for the little sister character and they managed to save the Earth by killing this little thing that serves as their.. instructor kind of. Speaking of, I haven't even mentioned this yet but each group of kids is assigned a creature that guides them through the whole process and that creature is just the kid that "won" the game in their own parallel world. Just another layer of "you're getting fucked no matter what" in the story. Anyway, I'm not one to be upset by disappointing endings and they usually don't make or break the show for me so this end didn't bother me much. After all their story is over, but it does give off an unfinished vibe. Nothing happened to the main villains and as far as we know this whole ordeal is just continuing on as normal, with parallel worlds getting wiped off and the suffering is neverending. Fits the theme of the show eh? But the last episode is more positive about it as it only focuses on the little sister character. Apparently the manga had a bigger downer ending, so I'm kind of thinking of reading it.

This show was quite the ride. I don't think I was shocked by many anime before, but this one did it ngl. It was realisticaly bleak at some moments, but sometimes it stumbled to tell a story and ended up pretty goofy and weird so it's hard for me to decide how much I liked it. But it definitely was a wild ride that's for sure.

His and Her Circumstances (Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou)

This review has been a long time coming. KareKano (how I'll call it for the rest of the review) came out in 1998, and I don't think many romance shojo managed to get out of their tropes and be as different as this anime was. KareKano is a manga adaptation, and it was directed by Hideaki Anno. Only a year after Evangelion came out so you can definitely pull a lot of parallels. Because the animation budget didn't seem particularly high or sufficient at all, there's a lot of still shots, a lot of manga cutouts, the ending is always filmed with a camera at a random location, a lot of artsy ways to basically say "we don't have the money to animate this shit", there's even a stop motion episode with paper puppets/cutouts lmao. It didn't bother me much, as it's an anime that doesn't need a lot of action to keep you watching. There's a lot of dramatic internal monologues, moments of self-doubt and self-reflection with classical music playing in the background and those specific shots invoking a feeling of isolation, basically you can see Annos influence. Even the episode titles are very Eva like. The ending of the anime is a very controversial topic, and probably the reason why KareKano didn't reach its deserved fame. But on that later.

The characters in KareKano are really something else. First of all you have the two main characters, Yukino and Arima, which on the outside are absolutely perfect students, helpful to everyone etc. Behind closed doors it's a different story, and of course it is! Nobody wears their school face home, you know? It's something I wish anime depicted more often, at least in the manner that it was depicted here. An ocurring theme in this anime is family, or the lack of thereof. Yukino has the best family depicted in anime ever. She has two younger sisters, and a wonderful mom and dad. I truly love how the parents love each other, and love their children. They're all friends and it's something you don't see in anime a lot. They hang out, talk about everything and are really relaxed. One other thing is that the dad is the type of that dad that loves having daughters and you know, even though you'd think we moved from that time, many men still obsess over having sons so it's nice to see. Sometimes it's played up a bit to be almost perverse like, but I'm willing to forgive it because Japan is just retarded like that. He reminds me of one of the more positive sides of my dad, because he truly always seemed thankful for having two daughters, rather, he never seemed remourseful for not having sons. Yukinos parents have their own cute story too, and I mentioned in my blog that they got married really early, but I give them a pass. They were childhood friends, with the dad not having parents and being raised by his grandpa, and the mom not having a mother. After his grandpas death during the last year of high school they start dating and get married some time soon (I don't think it was said exactly when). I think it's bittersweet as they didn't have anyone else, especially the dad, so it was nice that he was able to find family after his grandpas death. I can't imagine having a nice time living alone right at 17/18 and still in high school.
Yukino and Arima are already confessing to each other and dating by the start of the anime (forgot exactly which episode) and basically most of the show is them dating. The "obstacles" you'd expect they meet ahead like love triangles, past loves etc. do not happen even though you're lead to believe they will, instead all the characters representing those obstacles stay their friends and they keep hanging out together. All of their friends have complex family situations too, which I won't go into too much detail about. All of these people help Yukino get to know Arima better as she is vastly different from him, family-wise. He was born into an extremely rich family, however his father was the black sheep. He ran away with money and left Arima to his brother and his wife and they raised him like their own child. However, the rest of this big mega rich family absolutely hates Arima for ??? reason, and also he was abused by one of his aunts. Anyway, Yukino of course can't relate to that shit as her family life is perfect, so she has troubles understanding him. Later on we come to find out Arima is actually extremely posessive and jealous, but ominously so, because as the anime ended, he never got to resolve that issue or bring it up with Yukino.

I love how KareKano portrays their romance as something extremely dramatic and serious to them, because truly when you're a teenager, love is extremely serious and dramatic to you. You're scared to do anything and you always hesitate and second guess yourself, everything is so much more important than it really is. I think this anime captures it well, the grand scale of it all. Despite that, they hug, kiss and get physically close to each other at a decent pace, you don't have to wait for the whole show to just end with a peck on the cheek, thank god. The tension is there regardless, and I think it was done really well. Oh but get this. They have sex, not even at the end of the show. They just... do it lmao. The show doesn't dance around the subject too much, one random episode, at the end of the summer vacation after Arima returns from a sports camp, taller and handsomer than before, he just says to Yukino he wants to have sex with her. The whole episode is spent with them being awkward around each other because saying that aloud IS awkward and even though not too much is said you can see how Yukino is debating what to do in her mind, and deciding whether she wants it or not. Idk, I just think it was portrayed very well and proper for a smart and young high school couple madly in love. The sex scene was not revealing, it was nice and respectful and most importantly I didn't feel like a pervert for watching it. Now I can say with certainty, this was "wholesome". And you know, compared to My Dress-Up Darling I ranted about below, what's the difference? I'm pretty sure the two protags don't have sex there yet it's so much more coomerish and lewd. And the answer is really simple, KareKano doesn't feel the need to titillate their audiences. There's no gratuitious shots, you can't see Arimas raging boner or something (I saw a picture like that from dressup darling, never watched it after ep 1 so don't know the context but it's pretty obvious), when Arima gropes Yukino for the first time they don't do a closeup shot of her breasts being all squished or something cringy like that, there's truly no need for it. The romantic tension is all you need, it doesn't have to be graphic at all. Much appreciated.

Now onto the more controversial parts. First I'll bring up something I don't see others talk about much, and it's the cool-headed, "mature" friend of the group, Maho. Maho fulfils that ice-queen trope many shojo require, but quickly she becomes Yukinos friend. In one episode Yukino applauds Mako for being so smart, mature or whatever and asks her if she has a boyfriend. To that Maho responds her boyfriend is 28, and a dentist. She says he is also very mature and she doesn't want to disappoint him or something along those lines. To which Yukino responds how expected and mature it is of Maho. Yea the word mature got thrown around a lot. I know this is kind of a shojo trope, one KareKano sadly wasn't free of, but it still bugs me. There is nothing mature about a 15 year old girl dating a 28 year old man. However, I don't have issues with such relationships being portrayed in media, or being seen as mature by other kids in that media. Kids are stupid after all. However however, irl, these relationships never, ever end well. Men that date girls are often mentally stunted, as peers their age don't give them their time of day so they pray on children that see themselves as "mature". I would have enjoyed a subplot with some drama on her side, and realizing how she was not so mature after all but it seems that never happens, not even in the manga. And that kind of disappoints me. Different time, I know, but still.
The second issue is the ending. Depending on the source, you might hear Anno dipped around episode 16, 18, 21 and so on. Apparently the mangaka wasn't happy with how comedic the anime was, or something. I don't have any concrete sources to back that up. After episode 19 I'd say is when the show starts lacking. The thing is, it really seems there was no budget, and the ending was just unfinished. You can still read the manga to finish it so I don't see a big problem with that. Most anime is a commercial for the source material anyway. But they chose a random time to end it, is all. After episode 19 a new character gets introduced, and we have a whole school festival plot that never gets finished so you know... It seems like a season 2 soon (tm) kind of ending. It's not as horrible as other people say, I feel like it's a massive overreaction. The last episode was black and white, and animated in the manga style they utilised before. So yeah, it's real bad. The only thing that bugs me, is that they didn't decide to end the show with a scene featuring Yukino and Arima. That's my only gripe with the ending. They're the main characters, yet it ended with Yukino on a picnic with everyone else except Arima, kind of lame.
Despite its flaws, I recommend KareKano to anyone that likes romance shojo, or anyone that wants to like romance shojo but could just never get into it due to how the genre is. Yeah the animation is horrid, but they made the best out of it, it doesn't feel like a constant stream of QUALITY animation like some other low-budget shows are. Maybe I should say read the manga instead but I can't say that for sure yet as I haven't read it. It's still worth the watch, despite the lackluster ending.

My Broken Mariko

My Broken Mariko is a short 4 chapter manga about loss. Well, it's more about a woman whose best and only friend kills herself and she goes on an adventure with her ashes. The facial expressions of the main character and everyone else are highly stylized and exaggarated in a comical way, I thought this was quite obvious, but after reading some MAL reviews I feel like this flew over peoples heads and they really thought the main character was some caricatureish, hysterical person?? With that in mind the manga, which deals with extremely sad and heavy matter, manages to turn into something more light hearted and bittersweet. It still had me teary eyed, but the unusual contrast of the plot and the pace coupled with the facial expressions kept me in check lol. The character of Mariko is, in my opinion, a really great portrayal of an abused woman that struggles BPD due to her rough childhood trauma. The clinginness, posessiveness, self-destructive behaviour, self harm, lack of good relationships in her life... It's very accurate, and sad. The way the main character, Shii, is pissed and angry at Mariko, the way she admits their friendship was not ideal and perfect - I think it's a good portrayal of losing someone you loved but they were extremely flawed and it wasn't their fault. It's bound to make you confused, it's bound to make you want to help them yet be extremely frustrated and annoyed by them. The manga isn't anything crazy deep but the story it wants to show us, is shown well. Everything you need to know about Mariko is presented through short flashbacks which are more than enough to piece the whole puzzle together, to imagine how their friendship was. The ending of Shii's adventure is comedic, yet poetic as she ends up hitting a molester with the box containing Mariko's ashes and as the box opens the ashes are sent into the sea, as Shii intended to do. It's a short read, so I recommend it to anyone that likes to read things with a more serious subject matter hadnled lightly and female friendships.

Ashizuri Suizokukan and Kani ni Sasowarete

Ashizuri Aquarium and Invitation from a Crab are collections of short, bizarre stories. They both share a similar theme which is why I'm lumping them together, but, as of writing this I'm 4 chapters away from finishing Invitation from a Crab. These quickly became one of my favourite manga I've ever read. In their surreality and visual humor they kind of remind me of Short Cuts. Both Ashizuri Aquarium and Invitation from a Crab share core themes like: wandering around and getting lost in places you can't comprehend, dream like situations, nonsensical conclusions, extremely simplistically drawn characters compared to the environment, big focus on fish and sea animals. Somehow all of this together comes to form something that is extremely appealing to me and my tastes. Maybe it's because my dreams could fit right into a chapter of this manga and nobody would notice, but I really love it. Tell me these images don't invoke a familiar feeling in you:

Maybe it's because of my tendency to not be able to perceive places as they are until I get used to seeing them regularly, but boy if this isn't me in every unfamiliar setting lmao. I used to get lost because I couldn't recognise places from a different angle. That lack of spatial awareness got a bit better over the years, luckily. I digress, the extreme dream like quality these manga posess is what made me enjoy it so much. The matter-of-fact way in which issues get resolved and how the main character is always taken on an unwilling journey but also somehow makes it safely back home, all of this makes for a fun little experience that you can't find in many other places. I don't like using this word becuase all the young zoomers will eat it up but you know - liminal spaces are kind of a core theme of these manga. Wandering from one area to the next, never knowing what you'll experience. Getting off at the wrong station on an acicdent. It's all very interesting to me.

No Longer Human

No Longer Human by Usamaru Furuya is a manga adaptation of Osamu Dazai's book with the same name. There is another more popular manga adaptation by Junji Ito, which I've partially read a long time ago, but stopped because I couldn't find it online or something like that. Regardless, I remember it decently well so I'll be mentioning it here too. Furuya's adaptation is set in the early 2000s as opposed to post ww2 Japan but other than that I believe it was adapted very faithfully and modernized in a good, non-jarring way. I love Usamaru Furuya and his type of horror and society commentary so I think this adaptation was right up his alley. One thing that this manga misses, naturally, is Yozo's inner monologues which I believe help portray him as more anxious, confused and vulnerable compared to the manga so he ends up seeming more calculating and a bit sociopathic in Furuya's version.

A Cruel God Reigns

A Cruel God Reigns is an extremely iconic manga about a sexually abused boy, whose life becomes a downward spiral after the abuse. I've heard about this manga many times, and I even started reading it once and then forgot (it was a long train ride). The manga originally started coming out in 1992 and it ended in 2001. It has 17 volumes and 86 chapters. Each chapter is 50+ pages long. The chapters are very long and exhaustive, and it took me a lot of time to finish it. If you looked into any seasoned manga reader's recommended list for disturbing or psychological manga, there's a high possibility this manga would be on it.
For me personally, this manga was torture. And I mean that in both a positive and a negative way.
First I'll start with some spoiler free stuff, like the art. Frankly, I was extremely surprised to see this manga came out in 1992! It looks like it's straight out of the mid 70s to 80s. Not just in the art style, but the stiffness and awkward anatomy in the early volumes, it doesn't have as much screentoning etc. All in all it definitely doesn't feel like it belongs in the 90s, especially when you think how 90s (especially shojo/bl) manga started going into that extremely lanky, sharp and pointy territory aka insert yaoi hands image here. And with how people described this manga as a pioneer in bl manga etc. my expectations definitely expected it to be older, as the first thing that I compared it to in my mind was Kaze to ki no Uta, another well known bl manga except it's from the 70s. This all of course makes sense when you take into consideration who the author is - Moto Hagio, she actually was a pioneer in bl and shojo manga during the 70s and 80s, a member of the Year 24 Group!
Now, let's get into the plot, and everything else. This manga is very clearly split into two parts. In fact, you could probably read the first part and end it at that, if you wished. The second part doesn't have much substance, or rather, it could have been much shorter and more concise. But it wasn't. There was probably a reason for that... As I said earlier, this manga was like torture to me. In a way, it perfectly encapsulates a heavily traumatized person, a teenager who suffered under the hands of severe abuse, someone who can not recover from it. It wasn't hard to read because the subject matter or the plot itself was disturbing, instead it was hard to read as it was extremely repetitive. Again, this is about an extremely unwell person, whose feelings go from 0 to 100 constantly. There is rarely a moment of peace, and if there is, it quickly comes tumbling down. He's also experiencing constant abuse from those who are supposed to be close to him, even after his main abuser is gone. And on it goes, in circles, until finally we reach the last chapter...
From this point on, I'm spoiling the plot!, click here if you want to skip to the spoilerless recommendation.
I will not be covering the plot in the order it happens or gets unravelled in the manga, to make it shorter. The first part of the manga tells us a story about Jeremy, a teenage boy from Boston, and his extremely fragile and mentally unwell mother Sandra who fell in love and is about to marry a rich Englishman, Greg. Greg quickly latches onto Jeremy and begins raping him. Ever since Jeremies real father died when he was a child, he enters a sort of emotionally incestuous relationship with his mother, as a replacement for his father. He goes as far to not even call her "mother" anymore, instead he calls her Sandra, like his father did. As a result of that, he feels obligated to protect her and care for her. We are shown throughout the story that his mother tried to commit suicide multiple times, she was extremely mentally unwell and her sister tried to take care of Jeremy instead (something that was played for laughs?!?) but she is so possesive of him that she can't let go, despite being an unfit parent. Greg is raping Jeremy and he is keeping his mouth shut to protect his mother. If he told her, she would blame herself, and Greg would also leave her. Since Jeremy wants her to be happy and alive, he endures, and loses himself in the process. He moves to England with Greg and Sandra and meets the rest of Greg's family. Greg's former wife killed herself, but her sister, Natasha, still lives with the family from time to time. Greg has two sons, Ian and Matt. Ian is the older and more favored one (despite being a bit of a delinquent and a womanizer), while Matt is the nerdy looking kid whom Greg hates and physically abuses (something known by everyone in the family). There's a lot more characters, especially in part two, but I'll only be focusing on these because I don't want this to turn into a whole book. After having enough, Jeremy decides to kill Greg by tampering with his car, knowing Greg would leave for the airport the next day. Except, his mom decides to join Greg, and they both die. To his luck it seems the car actually malfunctioned so it wasn't really his fault, but nevertheless, he blames himself and so begins the second part of the manga where he deals with all of that trauma.
The second part mostly deals with Jeremy and Gregs older son, Ian, who enters into a relationship (!?!?!?!) with Jeremy. I am sorry, but what the fuck. At first Ian wants to kill Jeremy for killing his father, but as he finds out the truth he begins his own descent into madness and confusion. He forces Jeremy to retell his story in details multiple times, he rapes him a couple of times in the process, he shows him pictures that Greg took of Jeremy when he was whipped and bound, he keeps going hot and cold with him, he cheats on his girlfriend with Jeremy, he puts him into counseling (never thinking he could maybe use some counseling too?), he's fucked up, if not more fucked up than his father. The second part is basically Jeremy continually reliving his trauma due to Ian forcing him to, and somehow everyone is chill with it. This manga is full of completely crazy and slightly absurd characters that do nothing to actually help each other, they all just keep falling into each others arms very darkly and romantically... And also everyone is gay. In a way, I expected melodrama and backstabbing but by the middle of the second part Jeremy has slept with or kissed every single male in the story, every wife/girlfriend of said males seem to not really care about it and things just keep happening and repeating. It felt like I'm reading an insane fever dream at certain points. And I don't think I can just write off these insane characters as "everyone has their own issues", no, it feels like everyone is kind of a rich privileged idiot incapable of any rational thought. And yea, Jeremy gets a pass but a lot of these characters actually led nice and comfy lives (from what we know). Compared to the first part where we have a couple of crazy characters and a cast of mostly normal people that either don't want to get entangled in the craziness or have their reasons for keeping secrets, part two is like wandering into an asylum and not being able to get out. But to me the biggest reason why this part is much worse than the first one is because of the relationship with Ian. It's almost as if... I don't know. Characters know Ian is having sex/raping/hard to tell anymore with Jeremy, they know Jeremy was raped by Greg and yet still... they don't care??? They don't bring it up??? It's all cool and swell because Ian is a cool responsible hot guy??? They're step brothers for god's sake. To top it all off, allegedly, even Sandra knew about Jeremy and Greg, or at the very least had a hunch something was going on. But nobody did anything, through the whole story. Everyone failed Jeremy, in every. possible. way. Because of that, this manga is pure torture. Like yes, sure, the way his sense of self breaks and is shattered is shown quite well artistically, and his own struggles are pretty accurate and I feel the way he navigates through all of this is to be expected and in that way it's great but there is not a single voice of reason that makes a difference. In that way I find this work to be utterly torturous, it's not that I want a happy ending, I just wanted a single level-headed person in the second part. A touch of realism perhaps, because the first part definitely had it. But nope. I also get the feeling that after Greg died, Jeremy had to have consistent gay sex with someone so the author was like "ok, let's go with Ian". Lmao. The story ends with kind of a compromise. Jeremy decides to step away from Ian and live a more fulfilled life, but every year around the time his mother and Greg died, he kind of regresses and relives his trauma, goes back to the place where it all happened, and Ian happily and willingly has sex with him. How tragic and romantic!!
I've gotta be honest, I was expecting to be a bit more impressed with this manga. If Jeremies sexual abuse trauma and ptsd can be portrayed so well, then why couldn't the rest of the characters have the same treatment? Why did Nadia, a kind and emphatetic woman have to end up marrying her literal stalker, and why did the rest of the characters just encourage him meeting up with her in a funny haha way? That felt like such a random insult to her as a character, pluis it makes 0 sense for her to end up with him... Why are rooms 100% soundproof? Why did a therapist, a woman who knows her patient is being abused by his brother, trick the patient into meeting up with his brother - upon the request of said brother? They then proceeded to physically fight and scream in her practice while she was waiting outside, somehow not hearing them, only for her to enter back and say this??

Alien 9

Frequently referred to as a hidden gem, Alien 9 is a coming of age story about a group of girls chosen to fight the aliens that pop up in their school. It lures you in with it's cute moe artstyle that's very distinctive to the era it was made in, but it quickly becomes disturbing. However.. I don't think there was that much to it.
The anime was cute and interesting but it left me with a lot of unanswered questions, although compared to everything else I think the anime has the highest rating. I was really itching to finish the story and so I moved on to the manga. The best way to describe it would be... incoherent. Not sure if my mind was drifting off someplace else while reading it but it seemed as if things were just happening without much sense and reason. The sequel, Alien 9: Emulators, seems to be the same way. Everything feels very mysterious and unsaid until the very end, and nothing really gets resolved or built upon properly. Maybe the panelling isn't really the best but I couldn't make sense of the story, even if I went back and reread some pages to get a better idea of what the fuck I'm reading. The motivations of all characters are left to be a mystery. What's up with the teachers? They were fighters before right? Why do we need to groom little girls to fight aliens? Nevermind it's over... The fight scenes were cool, and I did like the art sometimes.
Next is the allegorical part, which is eh. So the girls get chosen to become alien fighters, and to ultimately become merged/one with the alien. Adulthood, puberty, sexual/romantic partners, give and take, whatever. I think if the focus remained on just that the lore wouldn't have to be explained too deeply, but things kept getting introduced that meddled with the original concept to the point where I feel like the mangaka lost track of the allegorical points he was trying to make.
I recommend the anime if you want a quick slightly disturbing watch with more than a couple of really cool still shots a la evangelion...

HEADS

I'll keep this review short since I read it back in June and the plot is getting a bit hazy. I've seen this manga pop up here and there, usually cited as a good psychological manga that's very thunk provoking. The story is about a nice, kind hearted beta male that gets shot in the head when trying to save a child during a robbery. They end up transplanting a part of an unknown man's brain into him, and he begins to notice his personality changing. Of course the man whose brain he received the transplant from is an eeeevil horny psycho. It's the criminals head, of course... I found it very predictable and there was 0 suspense building up to it. Frankly, I don't think this was a really good psychological manga, it was more like watching a boring and predictable action movie. All of the characters were very shallow, very black and white. This random article I found online does a great job at detailing the whole plot and how stupid it is, along with rightfully shitting on the characters.
There's a part of the manga that really annoyed me. He meets the father of the violent psycho whose brain he has. And the father tells him a sob story over how his dead son only caused him grief by being extremely unhinged and violent, how his wife left because she couldn't stand her sons violence bla bla. He ends it by saying he wishes his son was never born. I mean... You can't blame the poor guy right? His son was a complete monster from the way he described him, right? And then the mc proceeds to attack him and go on your typical "morally right" tirade about how it's actually his fault his son was a psychopath and idk. It just doesn't sit well with me. If someone is trully mentally ill to the point of harming others repeatedly, you can't really blame their family for struggling to love that person? What even gives the mc the right to judge when he doesn't even know the full story AGHHH idk that part really irked me. And this conversation ended up being some random lie anyway?? But then this whole thing is juxtaposed with the mc talking about his unloving father. He's your typical sensitive boy that gets mommied and showered with his mothers love, but not by his dad. As expected of your average uninvolved father his parenting consisted of him telling his son to man up and leaving it at that. Of course the mc never got why his father couldn't accept him the way he was, like his mother did. But then he comes to the brilliant conclusion that that was just his fathers way of showing love... Tough love of course. Unlike that EVIL father who wanted his son DEAD... lmao. I'm sorry my man, but you are a retard for comparing 2 totally uncomparable situations and somehow realizing that your father ackshually loved you. What?? He put 2 and 2 together and got 6.
And then the constant moralizing bullshit with "you shouldn't talk bad about your son after he died.... even if he murdered xyz people and caused constant suffering to those around him..." or the "your mother is a WOMAN... seeing her ashes would be INDECENT..." shit. Just so many random lines that made me go ?_?

And lest we forget, this awfully cringy line

Himizu

Himizu is a psychological seinen manga about a dude who's determined to live a normal and average life, an objective which quickly falls apart right at the start as his life takes a downturned trajectory. This is another one of those "everyone is a piece of shit" type of media that tends to end in a bittersweet/depressing way.
The author of this manga is Minoru Furuya, who, according to the scanlator group that translated the manga, is well known for drawing extremely exaggarated facial expressions. I have to be honest, I didn't really like those. They always remind me of those cheesy korean stickers for whatsapp/facebook or something, but I know it's an east-asian funny haha thing present everywhere. Luckily though, the manga was only overflowing with these at the start, but as the story started moving the comic-relief characters fell off. The rest of the art is totally fine, except for one thing, all of the characters look extremely adult, and they're only finishing middle school so they're 13/14. At moments it was hard to suspend my disbelief that they were kids, or I kept thinking a sudden timeskip happened without me paying attention. In every interaction with adults, the characters don't look smaller/younger at all, which kind of made the whole thing a lot easier to digest lol. I do enjoy the way in which the female characters are drawn, they all come across as really tall and kind of big boned, which I don't think applies to Japanese women in the slightest but hey, it's a welcome change of pace in the sea of tiny and petite characters.

Kakusan

Kakusan, or Diffusion Disease is Hideji Oda's most known manga, according to MAL at least. I've only read one other manga by him, called Coo's World which I had kind of conflicting feelings on, but didn't feel strongly enough about to write a review lol. In short, Coo no Sekai is about a girl that starts living two separate lives, one when she's awake, and one when she is sleeping. The idea of dream worlds and strange creatures is something I like a lot in fiction, but the weird incest around the child mc and her much older brother really threw me off from liking it too much.
But back to Kakusan. No spoilers this time. This is a seinen manga about a guy called Katsuhiko Tobe that has a special ability to diffuse which he can't control. When he diffuses he disappears into particles and roams around the world uncontrollably. Through the course of the 7 long chapters, he meets various people, mostly women who fall in love with him, but he disappears in the most crucial moments. I'd describe him as a weak person with a hard life, as he usually diffuses in moments that would change his life forever, for better or for worse. He claims to be searching for "something", but he doesn't know what. The women that loved him continue longing for him as he made an impactful mark on their lives. In the end, all the women he met end up being somehow connected to each other through him, and the show culminates with him possibly (?) disappearing forever, or not. It's open ended so I don't think I'm really spoiling anything. The "point" of this manga is mostly in the journey, anyway.
The art style is pretty realistic, probably one of the most realistic styles I've seen in recent memory. It's also very sketchy and shadowed so it doesn't look flat. Personally I like his art when it's more animeish but to each their own. I did really like how the character on the left looks like, mostly because she bears a scary resemblance to a girl I've known since childhood. Which made all the sex scenes featuring her hard to look at.
This manga didn't really leave a strong impression on me. Maybe I was slightly annoyed by the mc's subconscious selfishness, and by the women falling in love with him so hard they could never stop thinking about him even when their lives moved on. He certainly didn't leave an impact on me, as a character. Just like Tobe is searching for something he doesn't know, I think this manga is missing something and I'm not really sure what. I didn't particularly enjoy the journey he went through, I caught myself being more interested in the girls/women he left behind lmao. The overall message in one of the last pages seems to be "I was so focused on myself that I didn't notice the people around me", which, alright. Cool I guess.

Kuchu Buranko (Trapeze)

I first heard about Trapeze in 2013, when Aku no Hana came out. Everyone on /a/ was going crazy about the artstyle which used the rotoscoping method - when some anons pointed out how rotoscoping isn't a new thing (in anime), and Trapeze did it just a few years prior. From the screenshots posted, it didn't really catch my eye, and I was still high on the meme train that was Aku No Hana weekly threads. Watching something that was also rotoscoped was certainly not an option at this point. Ever since then I brushed shoulders with the anime, so to speak. A mention there, a screenshot there. I didn't even know Kuchu Buranko and Trapeze were the same thing lmao. Finally, 9 years after I decided to give it a watch.
This time, no spoilers. Trapeze is a psychological seinen that deals with mental illnesses in an episodical format. Each episode a new patient is introduced, with their own symptoms and problems. In some episdoes the patients manage to overcome their issues, in some they learn to deal with their illnesses. Despite the serious subject matter, Trapeze has a comical tone, and that's mostly because of the main character, Dr. Irabu. At the beginning of each episode his nurse administers a shot to the patient (which Irabu seems to have a fetish for) and the patients begin to halucinate Irabu to be with them the whole time after that. The diagnosis has been established and then throughout the episode we witness the treatment, which may or may not be conventional but it always comes with some comedy. Every episode happens in roughly the same timespan, from the 16th to the 25th of December, meaning Irabu has been treating all of these patients simoultenously. During almost each episode we have the patients interacting with each other or just sharing the same space. The plot is thus very intertwined and patients actions from one episode will impact the lives of other patients. It's pretty fun to witness. We're also reminded by a real doctor showing up on screen here and there, that Irabu's methods aren't really an everyday thing, lmao.
I truly liked all of the episodes, but I especially loved the first half of the 9th episode, where the patient suffers from npd (a narcissist). Gave me a good laugh to see how Irabu treated him to bring him down to Earth. It's just nice to see an anime focus on adults a bit, even if it's all just men. The 10th episode probably stands out the most, as the little plot twist is really satisfying and the story around it is fleshed out well.
As mentioned earlier, this anime uses rotoscoping but unlike Aku no Hana, it's not an all time thing. Instead it's mostly used for zoomed in facial expressions, or mostly on the nurse. Next is the world, which uses a psychedelic color palette and everything has weird circular textures slapped on. It's very similar to Mononoke, most likely because both of these anime share the same director (Kenji Nakamura). There's a lot of neat little things that stand out animation wise in this anime.

Finally, the overarching message of this anime is "nobody is perfect". I know some people struggling with severe mental illness hate that concept and equate it with the "everybody is a little mentally ill" and consider it invalidating, but frankly, the way our current society and culture sees mental illness is vastly.. well.. culture bound. In a country different from your own, some mental illnesses could be treated like passing colds. Actually they are somewhere but for the love of god I can't find it in my medical anthro notes so I'll leave it as a hypothetical... Anyway, read about culture-bound syndromes if that topic interests you! But it is a fact that 1 in 4 people will be affected by a mental or neurological issue at some point in their lives (according to WHO, at least), and I think that living with that fact helps relieve some of the stigma, especially in societies where it is important to remain as "normal" as possible. There is no such thing as normal, and most people will struggle to perform within that framework.

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (anime)

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is an adaptation of the manga by the same name, made by Hitoshi Ashinano. Ashinano is pretty well known for making extremely comfy iyashikei manga. I already read Kotonoba Drive and enjoyed it a ton, so I knew this wouldn't disappoint.
Since this is an iyashikei anime, there's not much happening. The plot isn't intricate, there's no action, not even much dialogue. People that don't like this would probably say that it's as entertaining as watching paint dry. Personally I prefer slice of life, calming iyashikei type of media in manga or book format, but before reading the manga for this I wanted to watch the anime, as I heard it was traditionally animated. The color palettes, the shading, the tranquility, the framing, so many good things can be said about this short anime. It's not perfect, and it's not mind-blowingly amazing in a way that would make you think they had an insane budget, but it's just right. Preferably you should watch this on a lazy afternoon before taking your nap. Or after the nap. Or before sleep. Whatever you prefer.
One thing that stands out in YKK is the setting. It's soft science fiction-y, set in kind of a post-disaster world, calling it post-apocalyptic might be too harsh. The sea levels have rose up drastically, you have robots, you have strange towering buildings.. But the mc lives peacefully, despite needing to have a gun near her all the time. Clearly there's some darkness being hinted, yet at the same time we're supposed to enjoy every bit of serene scenery the anime offers us.
Anyway, if you like this kind of stuff then you'd probably enjoy YKK too. If you haven't already, since it's like one of the first things people recommend when somebody wants iyashikei, along with Aria. I'm kind of late on this one...

Enidewi

Enidewi is a manga made by Kamome Shirahama, you may know her as the author of pretty popular Witch Hat Atelier, a really wonderful and sweet manga about witches which I highly recommend. Well, Enidewi is her more adult oriented work, albeit more lighthearted than WHA.
Enidewi is quite short, only 15 chapters. It's about two best friends, an angel and a demon. The setting would be best compared to Terry Pratchet's Good omens or even something like Yuki Kaori's Angel Sanctuary when it comes to the inner workings of the angel/demon system and world building. The plot is episodic, it documents the friendship between the two and the havoc they wreak on Earth when they fight or get into trouble. The two main characters have a great dynamic and they're both very pretty adult women, which is always appreciated. A light read with great art so it's a big recommend from me!

A Lollypop or A Bullet

A Lollypop or A Bullet is a short psychological manga about two middle school girls. The mc, Nagisa, wants to join the military right after middle school because her life kind of sucks. Her dad died, her elder brother is a shut-in and her mom has to work enough to support all three of them. She wants to help her mother, and support her brother, but she is definitely miserable. The mysterious transfer student, Mokuzu, who happens to be the daughter of an ex-famous musician is a girl that loves telling outrageous lies in order to hide the abuse she suffers under the hands of her father.
Mokuzu really wants to be Nagisa's friend, but Nagisa finds her annoying. Slowly she warms up to her because of her "candy bullets" as Nagisa calls them, aka desparate attention-seeking and cries for help.
The ending is tragic and sad and a kind of "we shouldn't have ignored the signs" type of ending. I think the manga was way too short for me to develop any connection to the characters. I usually like short psychological manga but this one was a miss for me. All of the characters kind of annoyed me, and I don't think that was really the intention. The MC, with her bullet monologues (maybe it was the translation, but it sounded like the author was trying to come across as deep and kind of missing the mark with the whole bullets analogy), the teacher who didn't get developed enough so his superman talk came out of nowhere, the mother who let Nagisa hang out with Mokuzu despite knowing her father was abusing her and not doing anything about it (?), the waste of space brother who just lets his sister run away from home. The plot was predictable. A couple extra chapters could have improved this I think.
One good thing about this show is the portrayal of someone in an extremely abusive situation. Nobody wants to help them, despite their frequent and severe cries for help. Really tragic but also quite common.

Boogiepop Phantom (2000)

I remember trying to watch Boogiepop with my younger sister because we heard it was similar to xxxHolic in regards to the psychological episodic format, but the style was too confusing for my then 10 year old sister lmao. So we gave up and didn't bother, especially because I later read you need to be familiar with the novels, or the live action, or god knows what before watching it. Well, I watched it now anyway!
Knowing the backstory definitely helps when it comes to piecing together the main, overarching story. I read a bit of the summary, and thankfully in the episode threads on MAL there was a user doing a little info-dump after the first couple of episodes to explain what's going on (thank you SuperLlama). That aside, I feel like Boogiepop Phantom is pretty self-contained. The main "villain" of the show is dealt with in the second to last episode and the story of the show itself ends with that. The last episode is more of an epilogue. At first there's a lot of nudges to the novel and previous events, but eventually they explain them in decent exposition episodes.
The shows main strength is in the way it presents its story and does the character studies, with many characters being interconnected, different perspectives, frequent jumps to the past (which really fits the state of the city where the past and present are mushed together), non-linear storytelling etc. The sound effects and music are amazing, the spooky atmosphere is top-notch, probably one of the best I've seen in anime. Once the whiplash of the bright, vibrant and cheery last episode hits, you can see just how much of a good job was done on everything in terms of presentation in the previous episodes.
Overall, this is a really good anime, especially in terms of execution. The main "flaw" is that if you haven't read the ln, some of the things that move the plot forwards are unclear and in fact the main catalyst for the things happening isn't explained so it feels like you tuned into a movie that's 30% in but you enjoy the ride anyway. That is of course, not necessarily a flaw if you have read the ln, which I probably will now lmao. So the people that said this anime was like a gift to the fans of the source material were right. Nonetheless, it was good enough for me to binge it, something I haven't done in a while.

Paranoia Agent

Ahh Paranoia Agent. I got filtered by episode 5 a whole decade ago (why does it seem like I watched most anime a decade ago) and stopped watching, even though I love Satoshi Kon and by that point I had watched most of his movies. The time to clear this off my "on-hold" list has come. Let's begin the review!
Paranoia agent is a fun one. I'll try to avoid core spoilers because if you want to watch it, they'll ruin the vibe. I'll still go over the main plot points, and mention the ending in as a non-spoilerish way as possible. Because of that I won't be able to say much at all, now that I think about it. The basic gist of the plot is this - people are being attacked by a myterious boy on inline skates, armed with a golden bat. Two detectives are trying to figure the mystery out. Despite what people say about this anime being an insane mindfuck where you'll barely make something of the plot and things are happening non-linearily - it's not true. The plot happens in a clear linear order, however there are some surreal elements, namely in episode 5 where a lot of people including me quit watching because they got confused with the sudden shift from reality to "magic" (but actually it's straightforward, I'll get on that later), and the last few episodes. The plot suddenly loses traction after episode 5 and moves away from the main characters and victims, onto how people deal with this phenomena. Everything you need to know about this show when going in is in the japanese title. Mousou (妄想, translated as paranoia) Dairin (agent). 妄想's actual meaning is delusion, from what I can find online and from what I heard on the show itself. I'm not sure paranoia was a great choice because paranoia is a type of delusion, but not the type this show is dealing with. To put it simply, this show is dealing with social contagions and mass hysteria. If you're interested in those topics do give it a watch! Episode 5 is just the cops playing into the suspects delusions except it's portrayed in a silly way through the wonders of animation, although I still think that episode is a bit boring compared to everything else lmao.
One thing I'm miffed about is the ending, which is done in a typical Satoshi Kon style where everything goes off the rails, the magic (delusions here I guess) and reality start mixing a bit too much. Personally, I don't think there was a need for that. You can still perceive it as just a metaphor I suppose, but I would've preferred if it was more down to earth. Also, leave it to Satoshi Kon to showcase the most vile examples of male depravity, in episode 6 specifically. I cried for that girl for about 10 minutes straight after the episode ended, and it was her dad's disgustingly innocent face that got me. It hurts because it's too real. Also, episode 8 was amazing.
Lastly, reading about this anime online once again reminded me of the sad state of anime watchers. Why are they all such brainlets!! I won't blame them too much, maybe they're literal kids, but reading all of the "all of this over such a small thing??" comments about the conclusion and main message of the anime really had me stunned.

Termina

If you've read my about me page, you would have noticed I said I like trams. During a particularly low point of my life, when I was failing my first degree and experiencing depression, I found solace in my countries biggest train/tram forum, specifically the tram section. I learned everything about the models, their nicknames, their official names, their production dates, where they were made, if they were domestic or imported, where they operated, what lines, where those lines were located. I would go on random tram rides through the city just to sit on a tram, I'd photograph my favourite lines, I lurked the forums so hard I knew all of the regulars, and I even knew which lines some of them operated on. In retrospect, this was a great way for someone that was as lonely as I was during that time to learn about the city where my dorm was. You could definitely say I was a big tram nerd. Still am, but not to that degree. A tram line is being built where I currently live, so I hope I'll get to see it. I actually went on a special viewing of one of the underground stations a couple months ago, and I got to see the tram in function. The reason why I never talked about this interest in detail with pictures attached was because it would fully dox me, but I digress. Because of this interest, this manga was really appealing to me. It combines two of my favourite things - learning about public rail transport, and travelling/getting lost in dream-like places that don't make much sense.
The manga is about a girl who just randomly became a catgirl one day (doesn't really add anything to the story), and she's really into trains. So in each chapter she goes on a new train line (all of them based on real operating lines), where something weird happens. The landscape is always weird and distorted, fellow passengers are often surreal and strange. The feelings I got from this manga are very similar to the ones I experienced when embarking on my lonely travels, where nobody knew me, and everyone seemed to know more than me. They knew the line and which stop to get off, but I was the inexperienced passenger being taken through their world. It also reminded me of panpanya's works which are a favourite of mine.

Three works by Machiko Kyou

I was searching for interesting looking josei manga, and I came across an author whose stuff I immediately fell in love with.

• U: I'll start off with the weakest one (but still good), in my humble opinion. I remember coming across this manga when searching through the Manga Erotics F magazine, that happens to publish a lot of manga I really like. The premise sounded okay enough; a girl with a twin sister happens to make a clone of herself, but the clone begins to surpass the original, then I saw a "Girls Love" tag and I felt like that would throw it into a direction I don't like (haha self-cest), so I decided against reading it. Turns out, there's 0 GL in this manga, and the genre on MAL is completely incorrect? Unless I missed something crucial lmao. The premise and the message of the manga is interesting, however I felt the storytelling was a bit weaker in this one compared to the other two. I liked the idea of "the copy begins to surpass the original, begins to see herself as superior only to begin feeling inferior to the original's twin sister - who the original always felt inferior to". God that sounds like a lot, and it really is. It's why I usually stay away from manga featuring clones, they make my head hurt. Reminded me a bit of Mikake no Nijuusei, but it was definitely darker.


• Cocoon: This one made me cry, and I don't cry when reading manga that often. The manga is a fictional retelling of a real event, the Himeyuri students. If you don't know what they were, give it a deeper read after finishing the manga. Extremely sad and depressing, it deals with the horrors of war seen through the eyes of young girls, who were basically sent out into the frontlines without them knowing, under a false pretense. They were hopeful and unassuming because of the propaganda they've been fed which makes the fate all the more harrowing. We also get to see some of the "wonders" of war, such as men turning into animals and assaulting girls because they've got nothing to lose. The cute art combined with gore does a great job here at making you feel despair.


• Mitsuami no Kamisama: My favourite of the three, this manga is about a post-disaster society but the intricacies of it I will not get into as I feel like it would spoil too much. I loved the personification of everyday objects (especially because it's a real life habit I have lol), giving them little storylines with meaningful messages that tie into the main theme. It felt like reading a childrens book, and I mean this in a very positive way. The main theme seems to be "if your purpose was to be used - would you fulfill it for the good of others?". The ending felt vague in the sense that nothing happened, but I think it felt very complete because of the MC's decision, therefore we don't need to see the rest. I love endings like these, and I love the type of worldbuilding where we're only given bits and pieces, kind of similar to Haibane Renmei.

86

86 is an anime based on a light novel of the same name. The central focus of the anime is the ongoing war between humans in various countries and AI trying to destroy all of them. There's two sets of main characters, more or less. First being Lena, a starry-eyed commander who comes from a Totally Not Nazi country and the other set of main characters is the unit she was assigned to command long distance, the Spearhead Squadron. The first part of the anime follows the Spearheads and the commanders experience in the war, the former covering the experience of soldiers that are taught of as lesser and inhuman, the latter covering the experience of someone that's comfortably commanding from the back lines in a country brainwashed by propaganda. The second part of the anime I found to be much, much flimsier due to several factors I'll mention later, but one of the main themes is "what can a child soldier do once they don't have to fight anymore" and the answer we're given is "why, fight some more of course!" - this becomes a battle anime disguised as a war anime.

I'll begin with the things I didn't really like, because I think there were a lot so I'll get them out of the way. First, the setting. I have a big pet peeve for these pseudo-european settings, especially when names are done sloppily. Wtf kind of name is "Vladilena Milizé"? It's either a bunch of names with various origins tacked onto each other, or it's a vaguely european sounding name that doesn't actually exist. And yeah the setting is futuristic but there's something so grating when you have a "Richard Altner" and a "Kurena Kukumila" in the same anime lmao. My biggest annoyance with this is that in most cases - the side characters will have names based on real names, and the main characters will have the bastardized unique sounding ones. At least be like logh that has the balls to reference real history to not keep everything vague and give everyone normal sounding names.
My next gripe is with the artstyle. If you fed all post 2010 anime to some ai, and had it spit out an average artstyle - I think this anime would be it. The animation quality was good but no matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it'll always be a pig!! I'm sorry, that's an insult to cute piggies. I just really dislike generic anime artstyles and I think I have been avoiding them succesfully for the most part. I don't like the glossiness.
Next issue usually comes bundled with the last one, and that's Generic Anime Gestures. We have the one hand reaches out to the sky classic, the immaculate "MC's eyes get obscured by a shadow when he gets serious and becomes edgy", and who could forget the Debby Ryan smirk edgy smirk and eye twitch combo?? When I see these used in excess, I can't fully enjoy the anime anymore, I just can't.
This issue is tied to the second part, and it's the "Anime Child" aka loli trope. Now THIS is something I haven't seen in a while, and I'll be vain and recognize is as an indicator of good taste! What's different about Anime Children compared to just Children in Anime is that they don't act like children at all! Nor sound like children for that matter, they sound like screeching goblins whose main purpose is to damage your eardrums. The loli character completely ruined the second part of the anime. She is somehow around 10 years old even though that does not make sense timeline wise at all, she is somehow extremely mature, well spoken and intelligent even though her royalty background and education would have stopped around the age of.. 3? At most which again timeline wise I don't get (maybe I wasn't paying enough attention tbh), despite her vast knowledge and maturity most of the time she acts like an unapologetic retard. While something like that could work in a silly comedy anime, it is completely out of place in a more serious setting that aims for some kind of realism. Of course she had to join the main characters in the army under a horrible lore excuse magically tailored specifically for her which was to be a "mascot" more or less. Despite being a mascot she somehow aids them in battle? Of course she had to physically join the main characters on their final battle even though she wasn't allowed to, she sneaked in teehee. At the very least the main characters being in their late teens made sense as the country they're from was lacking in soldiers due to treating them as dispensable fodder so there were no adults that could be drafted anymore, but her being a loli in battle is just AUGHHHHHH STOPPP. I was hoping for her to die once her purpose story wise finished (some former knight of hers became a part of the AI enemies and she wanted him to get killed), but sadly I wasn't granted that peace. There's absolutely zero reason for her being a small child really, and in fact it would've made much more sense if she was a couple of years older.
The next thing I didn't like about the second part was how much time was given to the edgy male MC's "muh reason for fighting". Wah wah he's so miserable and emotionless, he doesn't care if he lives or dies you guys! He has nobody left to fight for you guys!!! He's reckless and edgy... Meanwhile all 4 of his teammates, friends he's been with the entire time, friends who went through the same shit he did and friends who also have NOBODY left like he does get 0 screentime nor experience the same existential crisis he does. They're empty pillars of strength whose only purpose is to pull him back to reality. It's just too MC-syndrome like for me to enjoy at that point, and it would have been so much better if they worked together to overcome their trauma, purpose, life meaning - whatever. Instead it's just the one brooding guy and it dragged on for way too long. This whole thing just lacks the emotional depth, and I expected more from an anime that deals with hate crimes kek.

Ok I think that about covers the main things that mostly killed my enjoyment. The first half of the anime was promising, despite its flaws. It seemed to focus more on the horrors of war, hypocrisy of the military, that kind of thing. I wish it had expanded on that, and I wish we got to see what happened to the Totally Not Nazi inspired country when they got rekt. Maybe it'll be shown in the future seasons but I don't think I'll watch it lmao. I didn't even like the main conflict that much in the first season (have to avenge my dead brother grrrr) because it seems as if this anime can't portray a serious war situation - in which child soldiers are thrown into the frontlines obviously without wanting to, instead the MC has to have this strong personal reason to fight, which is the battle anime syndrome I referenced earlier. It kind of removes us from all the bad things that actually happen, makes it seem like all the people (literally all soldiers died) before the MC died because they just didn't have a strong enough reason to fight, and the war has been going on for 10 years. And then in the second part we just have the same conflict repeat again, instead of the dead brother's mind occupying the stronk AI machine it's muh dead knight but oh he comes from the super elite clan the main character comes from so idk, he's actually super speshul and Not Like The Other Soldiers. Zzzz. The second part shows us that different countries do exist, and that they treat their soldiers differently blabla, but it's not expanded on enough, instead we just have the main group fight again and the fight drags on until the end and on top of that we're forced to endure the loli as well. Another thing, once the characters got established as Main Characters, nobody dies or gets hurt anymore! Plot armor doing its best here, although I'll argue it makes sense simply because they're the only group to have survived so far, but still.
What prompted me to watch this anime was the lc thread, also my husband watched it and forgot about it on ep 4 so we decided to pick it up. I expected more honestly lmao. Oh and unrelated to my opinion of this anime but I went to check out the wikia just to confirm some plot things, and the character descriptions cracked me up. Male characters get mostly regular appearance descriptions, but then for the female characters you get this:

Frederica is a small girl with slender limbs, a petite frame, and a delicate, doll-like face. She has the blood-red eyes of a Pyrope and the jet-black hair of an Onyx trailed down to her knees.

Although not frequently commented on, Lena is actually rather well-endowed. Amongst the Strike Package's 1st Armored Group, she is only behind Shiden and Kurena in that department.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

I did it!! I fell for the meme!! Jk, an online friend kept pushing us to watch it, so we did it upon his humble persistent request. Now then, I'll keep this review short because there's not much to say really. I'll also keep it spoiler free since it's new. It definitely was not worth the hype. The animation and the style was cool-ish, but it doesn't hold a candle to the most popular anime cyberpunk classics like Akira and GiTS, imo. Now this anime follows a specific type of formula which is not new or original at all, but I believe it can be executed well and it rarely ever fails at being entertaining. A newbie joins a tight-knit crew reluctant to accept him, a la Black Lagoon which I found really fun for example, said crew is made up of a few tropes. However, this anime is so short (10 episodes) that it really gives you no time to form any emotional attachment to the characters, nor does it give any of them any backstories. Hell, I don't think the plot was set up well either. One characters death made me say "aw.", that's about it. I'm saying this because it clearly tries to make you feel things. Especially the last episode. It gives barely any time to establish the crew characters before taking a darker turn. I was very indifferent to the main character, I wish he had more personality. I'm not sure if it was the plot's or the general drop in quality of storytelling fault, but it really fell off after episode 4. I haven't played the game, so the first 4 episodes seemed like a nice introduction into the world. After that it was just kinda... eh.. that's it? That kind of sums up my feelings on this anime. People made a big deal out of the MC and his love interest getting into a real relationship pretty early on which, yay I guess, thing is their relationship doesn't really impress or wow me as it ends up being a game of cat and mouse and save the princess in the end anyway, instead of there being some teamwork or idk, whatever. In fact after they end up together, the gf just ends up moping around for the whole mid section of the anime until running off on her own.. okay. Now the hype around Becca, I kind of get. She was a fun loud character, and not overly annoying. I liked her as the voice of reason, again, shame the anime was so short because fleshing her out could've made me like her more or like care about her as a character. Also, I saw people complaining about the porn/sex toy parts, but I kind of liked it in a "everyone here is a degenerate" way. The same porn scene being shown twice was unecessary though lmao. Lastly, the OST was okay, there were a couple of songs I kind of liked, but the rest had a tryhard vibe to them.

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (manga)

I read this during a pretty turbulent week, and I'm glad I did because this manga was so calm and enjoyable it helped me ground myself and relax a bit. It has around 140 chapters but it's a quick read because there's not a lot of heavy dialogue, and the chapters are always around 16 pages long. Pretty much everything I said when reviewing the short OVA stands here as well. I think the anime is a great introduction into the series, because it sets the scene well. It's adapted perfectly and it helped me visualize things better when reading the manga.
I loved everything about this manga. The character relationships, the inevitable passage of time, the slowly approaching human extinction that everyone has made peace with... So many themes I enjoy in this story, yet they're not at the forefront. The type of life everyone leads in this manga makes me so envious lmao. Insert that deviant art "god I wish that were me" comment, too lazy to pull up the picture. Also I love how the worldbuilding isn't super detailed and deep, instead we're left to guess and wonder and I greatly enjoy stories where we know as much as the MC does. Haibane Renmei does that too and I loved it. I don't need crazy infodumps!!!
While reading this I realized how similar Hitoshi Ashinano's works are to Kenji Tsuruta's. The lonely women doing their own thing, some casual nudity and an interest in some form of machinery, often set in a type of post-disaster/rundown/nature took over setting. So if you're looking for something similar, there you go.

The Girl From the Other Side and Love on the Other Side

This review will cover two works from Nagabe, one pretty well known and beloved - the other more obscure and more infamous. Starting with the first one.

The Girl From the Other Side
I loved the look of this manga from the first time I saw it but knowing it was nearing its end I decided to wait until it got finished and completely translated. I don't like reading manga that's not fully out - I can't keep up with the new chapters and I easily get detached from it. The artstyle fits the dark fairytale-like story and setting.
The premise is really simple - a little child was thrown out of her world for being "cursed" and a cursed monster took her in. Soon after the little girl starts getting chased by knights and monsters and the two try to stick together. There's more to it, but I'll stick to the basics without going into details. In that way we have a dynamic that's really common in fiction imo - a kind hearted giant and a fairy, a monster and a young girl, the beauty and the beast, a grumpy dude stuck with a kid learns how to love and mellow out, hell, Monsters inc has that very dynamic. You get my point. I was surprised to see someone in MyAnimeList reviews say this work tried to ride on the coattails of The Ancient Magus' Bride, when such a trope is extremely common in fiction, for better or for worse... Unlike The Ancient Magus' Bride where that trope is romantic, here it's clearly based on a father-daughter dynamic, and in my opinion, it's executed really well without any creepy undertones. The only similarity I suppose, would be the head of the monster which is goat inspired in both cases, but it's definitely not a feature that didn't exist before.
I think the story flew well and kept me pretty interested until the last two chapters, when it kind of got a bit convoluted. There was a bit too much exposition crammed in the last volume and because of that I think the ending didn't impact me as well as it could've. Still, this was a really sweet and enjoyable creepy story, both the monster and the little girl were loveable characters and their dynamic was neat. There were no silly misunderstandings, and the moments they shared together were endearing. I wish the plot took breaks more often for the slice of life aspect instead, honestly.

Love On the Other Side: A Nagabe Short Story Collection
Remember how I mentioned earlier that the dynamic between the monster and the little girl was executed really well, without creepy undertones? Well... I can't say the same here! MonsterxInnocentBeing is clearly Nagabe's shtick, and that's fine I guess. But sometimes this "love knows no bounds" theme that can be applied to the Beauty and the Beast type of story also starts applying to age... or species... or family relations... and then it gets a bit weird! I want to say I didn't mind the more furry relationship stories, where the animal was more human like. Mayonaka no Waltz, a story about a vampire that looks like a bat but believes is a human and a human girl that loves him was quite sweet, and possibly my favourite, although I don't really support giving into your partners delusions irl lmao. But then there are two stories in particular, one that is basically grooming 101 and the other a PedophiliaxBestiality 2in1 deal that I found quite uncomfortable in comparison to how sweetly they're portrayed! Nagabe enoys exploring power dynamics, clearly. Regardless of the creepy themes, all the stories are sfw and not explicit.
A lot of people mentioned how this collection of short stories soured their opinion on The Girl From the Other Side but I don't really share the same sentiment. Clearly Nagabe is capable of portraying a multitude of different relationships that explore the same dynamic in this short story collection. It doesn't have to mean that the little girl and the monster in his most popular work now have a mandatory creepy undertone to it. And it doesn't really seem like the stories were made for the purpose of sexual gratification or anything. It's true men are usually more depraved when it comes to stuff like this so maybe I'm just being naive! Sometimes you just know but this time I truly don't know. Oh well...

Ergo Proxy

The review will have spoilers in the last paragraph but I'll give a warning. Ergo Proxy is a 2006 anime done by Manglobe studios, known for being behind some banger anime originals like Michiko to Hatchin and Samurai Champloo. The thing about Ergo Proxy is, that if you ever looked at various recommendation lists all over the internet, you'd always find it under a "mature, psychological, symbolism packed, underrated gem, must watch, thonk provoking" description. All the biggest brained anime watchers love it. Maybe because of that I was expecting something incredibly deep and profound, but instead I got... hmm. A good show with a seemingly flawed production with an incredibly cool backstory that didn't get enough chances to shine? I think that would be right.
I think the biggest flaw of this show was the slow/lacking first half, that I believe could have been utilized better. I found the exposition episode 15 (in form of a silly gameshow) fun and creative, but in the grand scheme of things it sucks that the biggest exposition dump we got was in episode 15! and the last episode during the mandatory MC vs the "Villain" talk. I think a lot of the other episodes could have easily served as smaller exposition dumps instead... However, Episode 16, the one where "nothing" happens and the protagonists are physically stuck though is probably my favourite. That episode was a bottle episode done right, it advanced the characters plenty, and it also added to the general meaning of the show. The Disneyland episode was also fine (I see people online dislike it) because it gives us more info about proxies and how they work. And more Pino... But the first half really focused on the Romdeau dome and "grandpa pls give me some answers" while the michelangelo statues with the names of philosophers laugh at Re-l. Now, as I understand, this show gains a lot if you rewatch it, as in a lot of the things that happen in the first half make more sense with the knowledge you have gained in the second half, cool and all (not actually, I'm not a huge fan of that tactic), but I still think the first half is a tad too slow.
Next we have the symbolism. It's pretty decent, as far as psychological/mature anime goes. A lot of the names are utilized well and hint at somebodies function and role in the story like Deadalus, the proxies, cogito virus etc. A lot of things that happen in the anime mirror the real state of things that will only be apparent later so, job well done in that department, the names aren't merely references. Still, I don't think it's anything too mindblowing. And I'm not sure if I'm reading into things too much but Vincents issues with his sense of Self throughout the show remind me of Lacans mirror stage and self-alienation... But my knowledge on Lacan which was hammered into me during my first year of uni is 5 years old by now and I don't remember things as well as I'd want.
Now, the characters. I really loved Re-l, the spoiled bitch!! Jk, but I truly enjoyed her quirks, and how it made her interact with those around her. I love her silly blue eyeshadow and the fact that she's often shown without it too. Isn't it weird how in anime that feature girls with visible make-up on, they never seem to remove that make-up, or change their hairstyles? Well, my queen Re-l actually has hair that gets greasy and needs washing lmfao. Jokes aside, I enjoyed her growth and the fact that she had a no-bullshit attitude till the end, even though "fate" drew her to Vincent, so to speak. Vincent annoyed me a bit in the first half, simply because he had 0 agency and was just constantly confused and catatonic, it made it hard to get through his portions of the story until the two reunited. After that it got a lot better. Pino though, she was amazing. Remember how in my review of 86, I talked about the difference between "children in anime" vs "anime children"? Well, luckily, she is the former, and she's really amazing. Great child character for once, only made better by the fact she also actively participates when some thinking needs to be done instead of being just comedy relief/moe bait.

SPOILERS AHEAD

I really enjoyed the "positive" ending, although it hints at future conflict. At the end, it was cool to find out who the Creator is (maybe I didn't pay enough attention in episode 15 after all lmao), the whole purpose for proxies, domes, autoreivs, cogito virus, abandoned pristine towns being maintained by autoreivs, Monad, Re-l and Real, Proxy One, purpose of Ergo Proxy, Boomerang Star, all the shit leading up to the creation of Proxies... Once all the puzzle pieces fall into place - it makes for a great backstory. As far as dystopian stories go, this one was planned out amazingly but... but...!!!! I feel like the show almost like just glosses over some of these things? I feel like Re-l herself doesn't get a satisfying conclusion or her questions answered, instead only we do. In that way I feel like this more or less "untold" backstory was more interesting than the whole thing with Re-l's grandpa, the silly menacing statues, Deadalus and Raul conflict we had going on, that we spent quite a bit of time on... Because when you learn about domes and proxies being allowed to create those domes in any way they liked - the whole conflict in Romdeau (the conflict between the artifical infertile humans that is) is kind of pointless. Or at least, it's not as important as everything else, because most of those artifical humans were not privy to almost any of that information, the grand plans, nothing. However I still find Raul and Deadalus to be well made characters. Fuck Grandpa Meyer tho that man is useless.
All in all, this anime is pretty "deep" in the sense that it hides most of the information necessary to understand the backstory (and thus the reason for why everything is happening - which is really Not That Deep, but that doesn't make it bad) in one goofy exposition episode you probably won't be 100% attentive for, and the very ending. Some of the philosophical concepts featured, like the Descartes's famous "cogito, ergo sum" serve to explain some things like the virus and ergo proxies existence which is cool, but it's not like they make you think super hard to reach that conclusion haha. There's a lot of concepts and ideas that are less impactful on the overarching story that I'm sure I've missed which is what should be the catalyst for my rewatch but.. I must admit I'm a tad too lazy for that. I still enjoyed the characters and their back and forth journey but the pacing could've been better. Basically I think it could've been improved in some areas but I still liked the overall story... I guess I just didn't enjoy some of the ways in which it was told. My conclusion is - I'm either too smallbrained to Truly Get It, or I'm too bigbrained for most anime watchers. Because I enjoy a healthy dose of self-deprecation I'll go with the former.

Ghost Hound

Ghost Hound is a 2007 psychological/mystery anime made by a pretty skilled team of directors, scriptwriters and sound designers from what I can see. It is kind of surprising then that it went under the radar, and it generally isn't talked about much. I can only guess that might be because of the ending, which I will go into later at the end, and mark the spoilers since I want everyone to be able to read it.
Short summary of the plot:
The plot centers on the small town called Suiten where everyone is somehow connected, very typical (and accurate to real life tbh) for small town mysteries. The main characters are 3 middle schoolers, the protagonist being Taro, a boy who was kidnapped 10 years ago with his older sister who got killed. As he tries to remember his incomplete memories from the time of kidnapping weird shit begins to happen in the town, and the trio try to solve it with the help of adults around them!

Starting with the sound design, because that's the first thing that I noticed stood out in this anime. Straight up, I think this anime might have some of the best spooky/unnerving sound design I've ever witnessed. I wouldn't call this anime horror, but some of the scenes made me feel uneasy and scared mostly thanks to the incredible sound effects and the creepy music. It remains strong throughout most of the show, but then the quality kind of dips at the end, where I haven't noticed the same amount of spooky effects. Still, when it comes to sound design wise this anime will be in the top spot for me along with Boogiepop Phantom.

The animation was alright, although it doesn't stand out too much and that includes the character designs too. As I watched it I came to appreciate how ordinary the whole cast looks like but I think the art style makes people gloss over this anime - at least it did in my case when I first encountered it.

I found the plot to be great, and the way in which the mystery aspect was approached and solved was amazing. Probably one of the best set-ups for mysteries with fun unravellings. In my whole history of watching anime I haven't seen such a good blend of science and the supernatural. At the end of the day, this anime is about the supernatural but you get to see how people that do not believe in such things come to terms with it, explain it and make sense of it in a realistic way. Because of that it makes a pretty good case of supernatural stuff being real - even in our world! Kind of. Basically you don't have to suspend your disbelief to an insane degree, but you also kind of do, depending on where your personal beliefs lie. There was a lot, and I mean a LOT of terminology being thrown around but I think that makes perfect sense in this anime. Everything is explained well though, and most of the terms were very accurate from what I can tell. To name a few topics in psychiatry: psychiatrical methods, types of therapy, disorders, trauma - all portrayed well and accurately. Small town political conspiracies were also another aspect of this anime that I absolutely loved.

Next, the characters. I actually loved all the characters in this anime, more or less. Taro is a really good well-natured selfless protagonist with a truly gentle heart which, when I say it doesn't really make him stand out. I know anime doesn't lack these types of protagonists in any way but Taro's good boy shtick really seemed well done here. Maybe because it isn't hammed up too much, and he isn't obnoxiously selfless and infinitely kind - just a kid who is marked by a really traumatic event in his past. This can be said for most of the characters in this show, they're all pretty low key, regular humans, there's no autistic theatrics and hyper exaggarated emotions and facial expressions that anime tends to do. Most of the characters with "ulterior motives" are also actually portrayed in a very neutral, realistic manner, things aren't so black and white. I actually disliked the other two boys of the group at first, but I warmed up to them quickly, which was kind of the point of the story anyway. I like how the three started hanging out, and included a fourth guy to the group midway through the series which I think is kind of cute. I liked all of the adult characters as well, including the one and only mandatory big boobs character lmao. The way the kids interact with the adults, the way that adults actually do something and help the kids reach their goals, it was all well done imo. One thing I didn't like - and the plot failed to provide any answers to - was how ALL, no exceptions, ALL mothers in this town were crazy in some way. Traumatized, filled to the brim with guilt, catatonic, abandoning their kids etc. Not all female characters, but mothers specifically. I thought a point would be made regarding that - especially considering the theme of life/reproduction/afterlife and I think there could've been a great conclusion to that mystery, but it was never fully explained and it makes me think was that even done on purpose then? Did they just "accidentally" make all of the mothers crazy, forgot about it, and suddenly un-crazied them all at the end? If so then, that's just weird. Especially since one of the aforementioned bad moms said herself "this place doesn't agree with me". Maybe moms are more sensitive to the crazy supernatural shit going on - but it was never fully explained, and the show really made a point of explaining most of the stuff like that, which kind of sucks!! I also found it interesting that NOBODY online has noticed that!

Finally, the ending. Sadly, I think the ending was a bit rushed, at least it felt that way compared to the rest of the show. The overall message - humans should be careful when playing with creating life because we don't truly understand the world around us - got through just fine, but I think more could have been done there. The ending being just a rescue the princess operation was what kind of sucked and brought the whole up until that point well executed plot down. Some things remained relatively unanswered, and maybe I missed one part of the plot but I failed to understand who the guy with the piercings really was and where he went afterwards, he just kind of disappeared. Now, if you read my previous reviews you'd know I don't mind unfinished, vague endings with what feels like incomplete or lacking worldbuilding but this show was kind of a whodunnit mystery first and foremost so it kind of has a duty to explain things, and explain them well otherwise there's no catharsis at the end. Most of the things were answered though, just not in a super clear way. Sadly, the creepy factor went way down in the ending too, I feel like this was done in the favor of the plot wrapping up in a positive, almost comedic manner. Again, this show wasn't a horror show, but it still kind of sucks about that tone shift, when I think the show handled the tone amazingly up until that point.

My overall opinion of the show is overwhelmingly positive, and I'd recommend this anime to anyone that likes a good small town mystery with supernatural stuff thrown in. It's nothing groundbreaking, but I believe it was executed really well. The whole time I was having a lot of fun watching it, and if it weren't for my husband watching it with me I probably would have binged it really quickly. I also enjoyed the lack of coomer shit, boobie lady aside, but her body wasn't her main trait so she gets a pass, even though compared to everyone else she looks ridiculous - but we kind of find out why later! Which is nice I guess.

Chainsaw Man anime+manga

Little disclaimer, this will mostly be a rant, and it's spoiler free. Not exactly a detailed review as much as it's me unloading something that's been on my mind since I first heard about CSM a few years ago. Enjoy!

Once a year or so, I'm down to watch some overhyped garbage with my husband, in 2022 that was the one and only, Chainsaw Man.
I've been reading praise for CSM way before the adaptation was even announced and I never got what the big deal was. Every person that praised it, and had their identity tied to the post praising it or whatever, was a young weeb with a few exceptions. When things become big seemingly out of nowhere, I love observing the fanbase for some reason. The usual fan was someone that didn't read manga a lot, only watched entry level stuff, was in their 16 year old egdelord phase, you get the gist. If they were an adult, they were either a dude into femdom (the hot new thing!), a standard coomer, an nlog, or girls that felt really guilty for enjoying it because of how unoriginal it "seemed", and actually was. Because of that, I had no issues with handwaving the praise and the dick sucking. But as the adaptation got announced and as the anime came out, the fans became more numerous and they came out at full force to shit on the anime for being an awful, disgraceful adaptation that does the magnificent and awe-inspiring manga no justice. To the point they started a petition for a new director to remake it. As a result of that, I felt like it just wouldn't be fair to only review the anime but to read a bit of the manga as well, specifically up until the point the anime ends.

In a world where every dude wants to either be dommed by Makima or rape her, where people praise Denji to be a hilarious and ground breaking protagonist, where every 17 year old self identified "femcel" that just discovered imageboards other than 4chan exist avatarfags with kawaii, anxious, "she's licherally me!" Kobeni is that too specific? maybe, but it happens so often, where suddenly every "self aware", critical anime connoisseur references CSM or uses one of its characters as a profile picture - surely, this manga deserves the hype? It garnered such a huge fanbase, it seems to be the hot new thing, an amazing subversion of the genre, a self aware but poignant story, a deconstruction of the genre, etc, etc....

And with that, I have to say, there's nothing better than the feeling that you've been right all along. Turns out, all it takes to be called "deep" and "different" is for the mangaka to dress all the characters like in Reservoir Dogs (muh western references! the mangaka watches movies!), and all the weebs will worship the ground you walk on. Oh yeah, and instead of making the motivated, stubborn, tragic and vengeful character the protagonist, make the AnyRandomGuy a protagonist, but wait, he also has a tragic past because of course, but remember! this is still somehow subversive and deconstructive, what are words anymore?

I laughed when people unironically said Chainsaw Man is good actually because the women don't get blatantly sexually harassed and groped, nevermind the titty shots in every chapter, and that Denji had amazing character development, because he learns that sex without feelings is not special and he should strive to have sex with someone he *gasp* has feelings for! God! A concept never seen or explored before in media.

Now to give the fans some credit where credit is due, yes, the manga was more expressive and slightly more chaotic and I do think the anime felt more polished and thus not as fitting for the atmosphere and the whole vibe, I do agree with that. It still however doesn't make the characters any less bland and uninteresting, the story any less uninspired and boring etc. Although I had the ending spoiled a long time ago, I still might finish the manga at some point to give it a proper review perhaps, but the anime all the fans are outraged about - it only feels like it's exposing how delusional the fanbase got. When you remove the chaotic scratchy artstyle you're left with a dime a dozen storyline and maybe slightly more nihilistic characters than what is expected for the shonen demographic.

In the end, this manga does what so many manga did before and imo is not something worth praising for when it comes to originality, and it's that typical Japanese take on "society and people suck, everyone sucks and we have to deal with it and survive" or some variation of that. I encounter manga like that so often so I'm wondering, what the hell are csm fans reading if they think that csm is special? It only has a slight contemporary twist to it, but seinen manga is so full of these types of stories.

I'm not going to lie, if I continued reading maybe I'd find the characters more likeable, I have pretty low standards when it comes to that, I get attached to anything if I read it long enough. I already like Power and her antics, and I like Makima as well but.. BUT. I cannot stress this enough, this manga is not worth the praise it gets.

Last Exile

This is a spoiler free review.

Last Exile is an adventure/sci-fi/steampunk anime about two childhood friends who fly their own vanship (picture a chunky monoplane) and get themselves into something much bigger than what they ever planned. The anime came out in 2003 and was made by Gonzo, kind of known for their fumbled endings.

The animation was digital as that became the standard at the time, but it also features some of the earliest CGI during action scenes, mainly for animating the ships. The early CGI is definitely noticeable and jarring at first, but I feel like the amount of it lessened later, or I just got used to it.
Something this anime stands out in, in my opinion, is the good character design, totally fitting for the world the characters are in. The characters were designed by Range Murata who has a very recognizeable artstyle that you must've encountered if you ever frequented any weeby space ever. I don't know how to describe his designs other than all of his characters look very round and soft, and the color palettes are usually warm toned and muted. He draws a lot of machinery, stylish sci-fi or steampunkish uniforms without abusing a million details or making the designs look messy, tacky and not coordinated. His use of color accents etc. always reminded me of Kazuma Kaneko's art in the early 2000s a bit. Just gives me the same vibes. The sci-fi uniforms too.

Texhnolyze

Texhnolyze is a 2003 anime done by Madhouse (you know you're in for a treat!) that, similarily to Ergo Proxy, can be found in all "dark, gritty, psychological, thunk provoking" anime lists. And actually, I feel like this anime deserves the title more.

I was filtered by the first episode at least... 3 times that I can remember. It takes a while for this anime to get going, and the protagonists directionless presence coupled with his extreme passive disdain for everything can be exhausting - watching him feels like you're watching a stray dog wander, he's merely an animal. But you know what.. It really pays off! It does! And I can't really say that for every anime that was sold to me under this premise. I thought of making this review long and complicated but honestly I don't know where to begin exactly. I think this anime really isn't meant to be binged, because of it's pace, it was a lot more enjoyable to watch it slowly, every couple of days I'd watch an episode before sleep and it proved really effective.
I was mostly in love with the surface world that was presented to us in the last 4 episodes, but I'd almost consider that a spoiler if I talked about it here. I loved the references to Edward Hopper's paintings, and to me, the surface world was almost like paradise - perfect and therefore static, not evolving, not decaying but slowly dying. And it's so interesting how Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou does almost the same thing but from a totally different perspective.

I loved all of the characters, each one of them representing a different idea, having a different purpose and realizing it, or failing at it in a different way and with that conveying a different message, but everything was consistent and all of the characters stayed true to themselves. The setting was amazing as well, an underground city, with a big obelisk in the middle that represents the rulers. Ah, if I say any more I'll just spoil everything. If you like media that explores the ideas and theorizing negative/positive impacts of transhumanism, nihilism, religion, evolution, chaos, human naaaaature - I think this anime does a really good job of doing that and conveying it through different characters. I don't think this anime was perfect by any means but I found myself liking it a lot more than I expected. I really loved Doc, her weird incestuous actions and devotion to her craft and Yoshii, a chaotic character whose goals are so unclear at first. Also the opening and the ending? Both are bangers.

BL Metamorphosis

BL Metamorphosis is a manga about the friendship between a 17 year old girl, and a 75 year old lady who bond over a very unusual thing - BL!

I love stories about female friendships, and what I love even more is stories of unlikely female friendships. The age gap makes for a fun dynamic and I absolutely loved the two characters, they were both portrayed so realistically, and so well. Urara, the high school student is what one would expect from a shy girl that loves BL manga - a bit of an unsociable NLOG that is easily embarrassed, she's also someone who is extremely uncertain of her future and is anxious about it. On the other hand, Yuki, an old lady whose husband died years ago, whose daughter lives abroad - someone that is confident and sure of herself, unashamed of who she is, serves as the perfect opposite of Urara. The sort of callousness that comes with age (maybe that word is too strong but I love the image lmao) in Yuki is exactly something Urara needed as her guidance, while Yuki got re-introduced to the world of manga, and got to feel excited again by doing new things. It brought her out from her routine and her comfort zone, and it made her want to take more risks that she felt she should have always taken - but didn't.

I especially loved Urara's slight indifference to the world around her, this brand of "directionless" teen character is something I don't encounter so often.

Soil

No spoilers in this review!

Soil is a manga made by Kaneko Atsushi and this seems to be his most well-known work. Most of his manga is intended for adult audiences, and all of them feature a very distinctive, western looking artstyle. I picked it up upon hearing it falls into a "messed up, weird" manga genre and I'm always up for reading those.

I could compare this manga to quite a few others when it comes to its themes. I was mostly reminded of Ito's Uzumaki, but the way the characters act kind of reminded me of Asano Inio's manga. Some of the story beats, and the way the story progresses also reminds me of Naoki Urasawa and his works. This story has it all, cults, uncanny valley people, alien conspiracies, otherworldly mysteries, crude detectives, the dregs of society... all the boxes are ticked.

I enjoyed the story - for the most part, however the grand mystery and the explanation for why things are the way they are might be a bit lacking if we nitpick it but I don't find that to be a total dealbreaker, I still really enjoyed the supernatural stuff. There are a few plot points which were kind of set aside or forgotten about, and it's a shame because it would've helped flesh out the main cast more. The story starts as a typical detective mystery but very early on it takes a turn into the supernatural. Now - this is where I found some conflicted opinions online. Most people that enjoy more down to earth stories said that the start was amazing, and then it got too weird. People that like mystery, abstract type horror however, enjoyed the second part of the story as well. Personally I found myself a bit exhausted by the beginning of the manga, mostly because of all the crude jokes which got a bit too repetitive, but also because sometimes I just have a hard time getting into something and memorizing all the characters. After I passed the 20 chapter mark I quickly finished the manga, so I can't say the latter half got too confusing or hard to follow - it didn't for me!

Yuureitou

Yuureitou is a mystery adventure seinen manga that I honestly thought was really fun but with a few glaring flaws when it comes to its theming.
First, the art style was pretty nice but a bit sameface-y and the way the main character Taichi looked reminded me so much of the MC from Genkaku Picasso by Usamaru Furuya, it's kind of uncanny. Yes I know they're both short black haired characters with glasses, but it's something about those lips and eyebrows man... While the other MC, Tetsuo, looked exactly like Alois from that anime original second season of Kuroshitsuji lmao. I honestly didn't know what I was getting into when I started reading this manga outside of reading like the first two sentences of one review on MAL, that stated this manga has the best portrayal of "LGBT" characters ever. The moment I saw the LGBT instead of say, gayness or homosexuality I knew I was in for a (sexist) treat and oh boy... But more on that later.

The plot is really fun. It's not mind-blowing or anything, but it sucks you in because it's just a fun, edgy mystery. A lot of twists and turns, and the pace of the story keeps changing so it never gets boring. The art does a really good job of portraying the creepy moments. In that regard I think the story was well executed, it kept me highly entertained. I like how the setting changes multiple times, the characters really go through all kinds of places you wouldn't even think of they'd encounter on their trip to solve a mystery of a creepy clock tower labyrinth and get the treasure that resides within. They get stuck in isolated villages, on an island, the second half of the story turns into a race kind of, the ending of the story goes off the rails and so on. It's wacky, it's fun. The characters are colorful and I liked the fact that the main duo wasn't a pair of ultra moral people that always have to do what's right. They're pretty morally grey, willing to sacrifice others for their own gain and that opens up a lot of different outcomes and opportunities that you otherwise wouldn't expect. Also I have no idea what the age of the main characters is, even though they both look like teenagers the main character is at least... in his mid twenties considering he said the last time he saw his highschool crush was a decade ago, and the other main character was implied to be a 14??? year old yet that would have been improbable body development wise when we're shown flashbacks from 2 years back but maybe I misinterpreted a certain scene.

My main issue of the story was the whole running theme surrounding sexuality, and gender roles. First of all, the main character Tetsuo is actually a woman, not a guy. It's one of the main plot points in the story and we're supposed to "buy" how she actually has a "male soul" or whatever. Why does she have a male soul? Because as a teen she didn't want to wear dresses. She liked to go on adventures. She liked to play with toy ships instead of dolls! She feels inferior compared to males. She doesn't love the way a "woman" would love. I mean... seriously? She appears perfectly androgynous in her suits, but people do point out her beauty often. The way she gets treated in the story is the usual way pretty boys get treated in manga. You know, the youthful bishonens that look 12, vulnerable and rapeable. Despite this when her suit is off she's the simple most curvaceous and sexy woman you could ever imagine. And oh boooooy does the mangaka want you to be aware of that. Every single chapter and new volume cover out has her with her tits out, in extremely sexual poses. She also apparently takes hormones but it's only noticeable in her voice which sounds boyish I suppose - but when she stops taking the hormones her voice goes back to normal. Which we all know is not what actually happens but okay.

Wolf's Rain

I remember being 11 and hearing about this anime everywhere. A lot of older anime fans praised Wolf's Rain and always included it in their favourites list, but then suddenly it fell out of public consciousness and I'd only see it mentioned here or there. Since I am kind of on a 2003 classics streak (no really, I wasn't planning on it but both Texhnolyze and Last Exile are from 2003) I can only assume, as faith would have it, that I should watch Wolf's Rain, which was in the back of my mind since I first started getting into anime.

Funny thing is my idea of what this anime is was completely different from reality. I didn't expect it to be in a modern/futuristic setting so that threw me off guard. I don't know why that is relevant to the review but it is lmao. Another funny thing - this is the first ever anime that I watched that had 4 consecutive recap episodes in A ROW. I can only wonder about what happened during production, but those 4 recap episodes actually cucked the series out of a proper ending, and they came out as an OVA a year later. As such, I'll be talking about the series+OVA as a singular piece because I can only assume that's how it was actually meant to be.

As I said, my expectations were completely different from reality, and I expected a kind of... spiritual, more mature series, but this anime wasn't really that. It's an adventure anime about 4 dude wolves that can turn into humans, and they're searching for "paradise" as that is kind of in their nature. They travel to all sorts of places that are kind of referenced in real life cultures and we slowly find out more about the relationship between humans, wolves and paradise but for some reason I never felt fully into it. I must say this was the first time in anime I ever encountered a young divorced couple, who slowly get back together as the show goes. A lot of firsts in this anime, huh. The story takes a wild turn in the ending though.

MisuMisuou

Ok ok. This is the edgiest revenge story you'll ever read. The art - pure hilarity I couldn't stop chuckling to myself as I read this. The plot is over the top brutal, everyone is EVIL, there's not a single decent person lmao. This is like, the revengiest of revenge horrors you could think of. It's weird to imagine both this and Petshop of Horrors got published in the same magazine, and that on MAL they're the two most prominent manga from that magazine! The plot centers around children inheriting their parents bad behaviour, or adults being affected by bullying from their childhood, and it's very in your face about it, like you really can't miss the point. It was an entertaining read, but imo not worth the praise it seems to have received from horror manga enjoyers...

Edgy BL: Heartless and Color Recipe (nsfw text)

A while back I got back into BL but I wanted to read something edgy, maybe more ero-guro/horror-ish, but like, you know, actually disturbing. Not something that has a disturbing plot but is portrayed in that "oh this is actually romantic" fashion. Which is usually my main gripe with BL lmao. So I went looking around and I found a manga with a very pretty cover, called Heartless.

The premise sounds cool enough, an incubus and his lover get hunted by a bunch of priest type exorcists. Plot wise, I honestly had a bit of trouble understanding what exactly was going on, and what relationship did the relation having priests (heh) actually share at first. Why are these guys having sex? What's going on? Why does this guy want to run away? This story didn't really leave me properly disturbed either, it was more like an action movie with chase and sex scenes, not a whole lot of horror. One good thing about it was the MC, Manuel, who's quiet for the most part of the story. A beat up quiet man? Sign me up! The biggest problem with this manga was the tone, but more about that later.

Undercurrent

This is something I don't mention often when reviewing, but readability is something I find myself struggling with often when reading manga. Sometimes speech bubbles look like they're coming from nowhere and it makes it hard to tell who's speaking if it's a dialogue. Sometimes the unofficial translations are aso bad it's hard to keep up with the plot. Sometimes the panelling is messy or bad and it's hard to tell what's going on. Well, this manga stood out in how perfectly readable it was. The panelling was so crisp and clear, I never felt confused or had to read back a bit, the speech bubbles were always precise and I never had troubles with knowing who's speaking. It seems like such a simple thing so I don't mention it often, but when I think back on it I realize just how often manga tends to be messy and hard to read.

This manga was such a delight. The main characters were adults and their interactions and conversations were just so... chill to read, the story was interesting and the ending was satisfying. The story is about a bath hosue owner, Kanae, whose husband went missing with no traces left a couple months ago. As she's coming to terms with it she decides to reopen her bath house and she gets an assistant to help her with the maintenance. Eventually she tries to find her husband with the help of a private investigator. The story is very character driven and I loved the focus on dealing with a personal tragedy, and how hard it can be to let other people in your life know that such a thing happened to you, and how almost embarrassing it feels. We are also left with the message that it's really hard to truly get to know someone, and how humiliating and suffocating it must be to have your spouse go missing without you having any inkling of their whereabouts, possible reasons for it and so on. Personally, I think people often don't make enough of an effort! And this is also something Kanae begins to think about herself through the story. The humor was sparse but it was well mixed into this relaxing mystery.

The artstyle reminded me a lot of Yuki Urushibara's work, including the overall atmosphere and the way the story is executed. There's no light supernatural themes in Undercurrent but if you enjoyed Mushishi you'll probably like this story too!

Stigmata: Aikon

This was a super enjoyable BL manga. I really loved how the story flowed. Apparently the mangaka wanted to include more BL elements but was advised against doing so and frankly... this turned out so great. There's just the right amount of romance, and the buildup is great. The characters aren't annoying in the slightest and they act like human beings, not like caricatures. No dragged out sex scenes full of flashing rods. When it comes to romance stories, this is the stuff I love the most. It was not frustrating at all and it didn't fall into any of the common tropes.

Besides being a BL story, this is also a mystery with an actual plot. You have 2 detectives, Asako and Kuroiwa working together. Asako has a special power of being able to "live through" someones death if he's standing where that person recently died. He bleeds out and everything. So immediately we have this set-up that allows for dramatic falling and Asako being held by Kuroiwa after going through a traumatic experience... You see where this is going right! It's so simple but so good lmao. I won't spoil the story that follows but I think the little conflict in the second half was perfect, and the ending was A+ as well.

Next, the art. Ohhhh the art. The hair, the suits, the long noses. At times Takahashi's art reminded me of a mix of Leiji Tatsumoto and the Year 24 group which is a super interesting mix in modern manga in general, and especially in BL which I feel like nowadays has a VERY specific aesthetic. I feel like this influence I mentioned earlier is especially apparent with Asako. The early yaoi/shojo influence was definitely there, mostly in the poses.

Tokyo Alien Bros.

Do you ever read a manga and think to yourself "this must have been drawn by a man/woman" and then turn out to be completely wrong? There's certain artstyles I'll always associate with either sex and I can't help it.. This was one of those manga. I even read beforehand that it was made by a man but I had to double check anyway. There's this specific blobbyness/cartoonishness/softness to his art that also reminds me a bit of western female hobby artists which I find kind of endearing. Like I swear I've seen fanart of xyz shows drawn in this style so many times before. Either way, I really enjoyed the art in this manga. It was cute and expressive and it served its purpose well, it added to the overall sillyness of the plot while also making the few nsfw scenes feel kind of sterile which imo fits the alien theme so well lmao.

The plot is about two brothers who are actually aliens coming to Earth and evaluating whether it's worth colonizing the planet or not which includes studying humans up close. One of the brothers is seemingly much better at playing human at first, while the other is unsuccesful in this task but slowly gets the hang of it. As you might expect, at a certain point their roles kind of switch which leads to conflict. Throughout the story they experience the good and bad sides of humanity, pretty standard for this kind a story but I love the light we live in a society aspect of it. Yeah I'm a sucker for those.

The two main characters were pretty well done imo, especially Fuyunosuke. Outwardly he's friendly, flirty, happy, helpful, smart - almost perfect. But inside he's kind of a sociopath, well - he's an alien that's his excuse. Personally I love the "effortless a bit goofy pretty boy is actually devoid of empathy" trope because it seems to be true so often lmao. He basically served as a foil to his brother at first and in the middle, but I feel like he broke out of that role eventually which was nice. Side characters didn't have too much depth to them, because it was a short manga after all, but I liked their variety. Somehow I get this weird feeling from the mangaka - like he enjoys life and people, from the way he portrays the side characters and the environment. Even though you only catch a glimpse of most characters you could imagine what type of people they'd be like irl. I'm being weirdly sappy but that's the impression I got from his other work too.

After a few weeks of not reading anything this manga felt like a little treat, it was short, silly and enjoyable!

My Solo Exchange Diary

This is going to be one of those rambling reviews where I barely talk about the work, I apologize beforehand.

First of all, I accidentally read this before My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, and that is because I'm an idiot and I started reading the first book first but then stopped somewhere mid pandemic on an accident, resumed with the one I'm currently reviewing, stopped again and finally went to pick this one up to finish it lmao. Look the covers just looked too similar. Anyway, the theme of having an exchange diary with yourself hits very close to home because I've been doing the same thing with myself since 2009 or so, through a page called futureme. I haven't done it in a couple of years now, and christ the new page design is horrid, but I used to love doing it so much. Sending myself a letter every 6 months to a year or so, seeing how much I've changed.. I need to go re-read those emails now. I used it the most when I was a 6th grader at the height of my NLOG phase, the e-mails are hilarious now. Ok done going through them, wew.

This manga is mostly about the authors anxieties. Well, it's more about how her life is pro(re)gressing, but it always comes back to the same couple of issues that keep plaguing her. It's pretty repetitive and the chapters keep circling around the same already stated points. It makes sense of course, since this is kind of a stream of consciousness technique in manga form, almost. I mean, can you say your thoughts are much different? I can't. I relate to many of the things the author feels, which is a bit frustrating. I feel a lot of compassion for her, but I also feel enraged by her. Well anyway, that is not the main thing I wanted to write about in here.

Billy Bat

Billy Bat is a manga made through a collaboration between the great Naoki Urasawa and Takahashi Nagasaki. The manga follows Urasawas noticeable formula, a lot of characters, a grand mystery/conspiracy, timeskips galore, main characters switching and an ending that feels less grand than what the story led you to believe (or is it?!?!). It's 165 chapters long and it was serialized in the seinen magazine Morning from 2008 to 2016.

The story spans over several millennia, but is mostly set over a span of multiple decades that have massively impacted the course of history that lead us to today, aka from world war 2 and onwards. The story begins when the main character Kevin Yamagata, a comic book artist behind the popular Billy Bat comic, finds out he unintentionally plagiarized the main character Billy Bat and that a comic of the aforementioned character already exists in Japan. He sets out to Japan to find the original and... hijinks ensue. Ok not really hijinks, more like grand conspiracies and uncovered truths behind the human history and existence.

The plot covers multiple world shaking events that are shrouded in mystery, lies and conspiracy theories to this day (like the JFK assasination and 9/11 for example) and explains them in its own way. That aspect of it really adds to the overall grandness of the story, it's not really everyday you'll read manga about so much knowledge of the modern Western, well American, culture. That said, it does make certain things feel a bit cheesy lmao. Usually Japanese works feel very self-contained to Japan, and even when set outside of it you don't really notice. But this is what Urasawa is known for, after all. Despite that, I feel like later in the story these grand mysteries and real life events almost become redundant and side-lined in favor of The Bat (tm) and his shenanigans, whereas in the first half you felt like the two were more interconnected and there was more meaning behind what was happening. I wanted for the story to be more tied to these events through the Bat dangit!!!

Suspension of disbelief is something I usually have the least problems with when reading stuff. Well, depends on the subject matter but usually I can buy into all kinds of bullshit and get into the story. However with Billy Bat, I struggled a bit. For some reason the design of this totally not Mickey Mouse being a symbol of... everything it was in the manga, and the comic itself being regarded as something mindblowing, loved by people all over the world etc. I just didn't buy it. Since we have an actual real life counterpart in the form of Disney and The Big Mouse, we all know things wouldn't have went the way they did had Mickey Mouse been the sole and biggest property of Disney for all eternity. However the last part that is happening in the future, with the water resources etc? That was believable lmfao.

The characters were alright, although I feel like more could've been done with some of them, but this is the price you pay with such an enormous cast. Jackie and her daughter were the funnest, I love comic relief in the form of an anxious goofy woman, ok? Kurusu's whole arc was really well done too, and his ending was the strongest point of the manga to me. The rest I was pretty eh on. Both Kevins didn't really make an impact on me... Hitler and Einstein stuff was hilarious though and I wish we had more of that.

Lastly, the ending. A lot of people meme on Urasawas endings but I don't remember feeling dissatisfied with Monster or 20th Century Boys... however here? Hmmmm I'm okay with it. Especially because it was directly referenced much earlier in the manga and I feel like this is a nice callback to it. It feels pretty meta but not in an annoying way.

All in all hmmmm. It was an enjoyable ride. It was good, BUT... I liked his other works more! I'm almost done with Pluto so I'll be reviewing that soon too.

SPRING 2023: Vinland Saga Season 2, Dr. Stone: New World, My Home Hero, Tengoku Daimakyou, Oshi no Ko, Kimetsu no Yaiba: Katanakaji no Sato-hen, Jigokuraku, Skip and Loafer, Ousama Ranking: Yuuki no Takarabako

It's been a long, LONG time since I watched so much seasonal stuff. To be fair, around half of this list I wouldn't have watched had it not been for my husband and his sometimes disappointing taste in anime (sorry husband) but I felt like I should give those anime a short review anyway. Since the season isn't over just yet, not all reviews will be present. I'll mark any spoilers with spoiler text. Let's begin...

Vinland Saga Season 2

Dr.Stone: New World

My Home Hero

Tengoku Daimakyou

Oshi no Ko

Kimetsu no Yaiba: Katanakaji no Sato-hen

Jigokuraku

Talk to my Back

I stumbled upon this manga by pure chance, and I was deligthed to see it was serialized in Garo, which is the magazine that published a good number of my favourite manga and hosted (is that a proper term?) artists which I find really interesting. If only more stuff from Garo was translated! That said when reading the afterword of this manga, which included the mangakas biography, I was surprised to learn that women barely participated in the alternative manga scene, with only a quarter of contributors being female. At this point in time (60's to late 70's), women were actually becoming pretty popular in the industry, but as Ryan Holmberg stated (the author of the biography) Garo was mostly made to serve mens angsty, psycho-sexual fantasies. Anyway, in the 80's and 90's this changed and Garo welcomed more than a couple of really great female artists, in fact one of the most popular manga that was published in Garo (in the west at least), Nekojiru Udon, was made by a woman. Anyway, this is where Murasaki Yamada comes into play, the author of Talk to my Back. She's been a part of Garo for a long time, publishing consistently from 1979 to 1986, and she even ended up very involved with the staff, befriending many of them and marrying the editor, yet her work didn't really quite "fit" the Garo style. Her work was mostly tied to feminism, motherhood and family life from the perspective of a woman that is an artist - but also a wife and a mother. Her art lacked the typical shojo style (she was completely aligned age-wise with the Year 24 Group, which should put things into perspective) and because of that it feels like she never got the credit she deserved and she remains overlooked to this day. However, publishing in Garo seems to have given her the total freedom she needed to address the difficulty of living as a housewife in Japan during the 70's.

This manga really made an impression on me. And holy shit, this mangaka was something else. I truly enjoyed reading the whole 30 page biography, and I think I'm going to include it in my articles eventually because I instantly fell in love with Yamada's character and her life's work. Honestly I am stunned that none of it almost made it out of Japan.

Ok ok, enough about the mangaka, what about the manga??? This is a 36 chapter manga, with the chapters being around 10-ish pages long max. The main character is a woman who deals with her life of being a stay at home mom, underappreciated wife, part-time worker with a short expiration date, and someone who decided to make money from her passions. The chapters are full of deep introspection and comical musings, they speak about a woman that loves being a mother but hates being seen as a slave and a volunteer. So many chapters made me think of my mother and how amazing of a job she did, I even shed tears during a number of chapters because of how close they hit. Such a coincidence I recently read Kim Jiyoung, born 1982, because these two works deal with very similar topics. I feel like many women struggle with losing themselves as they become wives and mothers, and this manga might help with such feelings. Yamada herself, while being critical of such women, wished they'd read her manga and shared her pain and anger with them.

I enjoyed the minimalist and simple artstyle a lot, it has a certain evergreen quality to it that makes it indistinguishable from similar art being made today. I mean, even the subject matter is still very relevant, and unlike many feminist inspired? manga I have read, this manga just doesn't shy away from it, the main character complains about issues that are still issues today and nothing is being approached in a touchy, delicate manner. I'm making this sound like some kind of an extremist work full of passion and angry monologues, but it's really not. It's not even preachy, or forced. It just comes across as very raw to me.

Ultra Heaven

I usually hate reading unfinished manga because

• I forget to keep up with it and reading chapter by chapter is too annoying
• You never know when a hiatus might come

After finishing this wild journey of a manga, I went to read a bit about the author, and he really stands out. All of his work is done by himself and him only, no assistants. He's very interested in drugs (very obvious in his work lmao) which is pretty out of place for a Japanese individual, and he recognises this as the reason why his work doesn't really hit as hard in Japan. After all, in his own words, Japan didn't have a hippie revolution in the 60's and the cultural and mindset changes that followed with it. Drugs never really took off in the same way as they did elsewhere. His inspiration lies in foreign artists like Moebius or other fellow Japanese artists inspired by Western art and style, like Katsuhiro Otomo.

Anyway, onto the manga. It's such a shame it was never finished, but I think it's a worthwhile read anyway, and with the way it ended - you could interpret it as a true ending. The art and the panelling is insane. The way the story flows through it is amazing, and I loved it all. The story is basically one big trip, and whether the storytelling is linear or non-linear is up to how you interpret it. I loved the part with the spaghetti and the flowing water merging into one event, the manga is FULL of fun stuff like that, and I mean, just look at it.

While I usually like trippy art and creative storytelling through it, I'm pretty picky with what I like. For example, while I enjoyed Soils trippy sequences, I found myself kind of getting tired of them at some point near the end, but I never got this feeling in Ultra Heaven. So if you're into this kind of stuff as well, you'll definitely enjoy it, I think.

Salaryman Kintarou

Christ man idk where to begin with this one... So me and my husband were looking for a seinen anime to watch, maybe something a bit older you know, because why not. I was scrolling through MAL and there it was... a comedy about a single father, ex biker gang leader and newly turned salaryman! I do love some yakuza related comedies and I don't mind what would probably be some crude humor but man.... MAN...

First of all, I'd like to start with the main character. Kintarou is a single father because his wife died, I can't remember if it was post birth or a little after, oh and also, she was blind (wait now I can't remember whether it was her that was blind or another woman that was charmed by him later OOPS). Really shows how Kintarou is just the ultimate kind soul, which btw anime does its darn best to portray him as such. He's literally perfect and incapable of making a mistake, all women fall for him, young or old, and his luck is insane. A true Gary Stu, to a ridiculous degree.

Remember how I said his wife died and all women fall for him? Well, for the first few episodes we seem to establish the pattern that Kintarou is still mourning for his wife and it's been a few years since she has died. To which I think, damn, that's pretty commendable! Nice! Until like episode 5 or 8, can't remember, when he meets a boss lady of a hostess club (btw - the only woman in the whole anime that has some kind of a legit job that isn't a housewife or a secretary lmao, even though she's essentially just a glorified pimp but ok), who's fairly older than him, and hooks up with her the day they met. She instantly falls for him of course and they begin dating. Well, how does the anime go about this - seeing how he was mourning for his wife and all? He had a dream that night after he had sex with the manager lady that his wife has forgave him, in fact, she's urging him to stop mourning her! What an angel of a wife! So from this point on, the manager lady is his gf. Oh and also she has a 14 year old daughter that absolutely wants to fuck him too and through the rest of the anime the mom and daughter thirst and even compete for him. Yea! Oh and did I mention the 14 year old wants to be an idol and she did a nude gravure shoot with multiple men fawning over how womanly she is? At 14? Yeah!

Next... as I said earlier, Kintarou is a single father. He has a young son and nobody to take care of him while he works... He IS a salaryman after all... Well, his boss's wife took care of his kid! And when he moved to a different location, his female COWORKER took care of his child! I mean these women, they seriously have nothing better to do anyways!

Other than that the anime had a lot of that typical yakuza machismo stuff which I can definitely find funny and silly sometimes - it didn't really hit as hard here. The main character was just too perfect, all the female characters were just there to thirst after him or had a random caretaker role which whatever... But the anime was so ridiculous I was scream laughing a few times. Oh and the animation was awful, truly truly awful at times. Why did I watch it? I honestly wanted to see what kind of bullshit awaits next. I think it had potential because it dealt with corrupt businesses, inner workings of companies, government involvment etc but none of it mattered when the main character will just automatically be super liked by everyone and nothing will go wrong. It was clearly some kind of an insane power fantasy which, eh. Not my thing.

Oh wait, I forgot the best part. So in one episode, a woman gets sexually harassed on the train. She was surrounded by 3 men, one of them being Kintarou, and she blamed him for molesting her. He deduces that it wasn't him, instead it was the third, older guy and the dude runs away. So he chases him across town to beat him up, well, pretty nice of him huh? He even gets the police involved (because they chase after him for stealing a bike or something idr anymore)! Well, the sexual predator manages to run home, when Kintarou and the victim arrive there they see his family! The predator has a wife and a child! Think of what would happen to them if he got the guy arrested! It would ruin his reputation and his family would starve! So in the end, he decides to let the man go :) How kind! Lesson learned - if you want to be a rapist, make sure you have a family that depends on you - it's a get out of jail free card!!!! Of course this man later returned the favor to Kintarou, and he has truly learned his lesson and changed! Wow! Really riveting storytelling. Reminds me of how a guy in my country recently got half of a minimum sentence for rape because he's a war veteran. Truly, we need to punish men less! Think of the children! Thank you Kintarou ♥