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I dived into this short 4-koma manga with extremely low expectations as it was just a 3 minute per ep series. I came out of my binge-watch wholly satisfied and revitalized. That isn’t to say I rated it highly because it is really short and has about as much quality as its runtime- but that is to say, it pretty much used every second of every minute to the fullest.

To finally talk about what makes it so great; I would have to point out how progressive the initial season is. I am mainly talking about how Kaoru and Hajime having legitimate gripes when it came ... to their marriage and hashed things out calmly. It was a good anecdote of how marriage can have small downsides. But it wasn’t just the fact that they talked things out but how they did it. As somewhat of a NEET, Hajime had his own ways of going about things that Kaoru didn’t fully understand but that we could easily relate to.

She’d try to edge him towards more orthodox paths of life. Also, she’d talk to her friends about it who have their own marriages. As such, they talk about their husbands all the time and I feel that’s a large part of adulthood that doesn’t get explained enough in anime. The act of socializing with other married couples and dealing with marriage.

Each moment in this show is dedicated to participate in how Kaoru and Hajime find a comfortable middle ground through communication and they do this for everything! Through marriage and even through pregnancy. A lot of people chalk up its strengths to relatability and comfort but it’s nothing so arbitrary as that. It has a legitimately nice and interesting plot that remains progressive, at least till the end of the first season. Admittedly, I didn’t like the second season. It wasn’t nearly progressive and efficient as the first one. Besides moments of genuine delight that I found in seeing some characters interact and the last few episodes giving an equally delightful excerpt of how our married couple came together; I thought it could’ve shown the many stages of pregnancy and how they were to handle it. In fact, the pregnancy almost felt like a non-factor.

As a whole, it was a very amusing and calm short series of actually meaningful happenings that connect with each other unlike a lot of 4-koma manga adaptations. Take a seat back when you watch this one- it’s great.

SPOILERS (obviously)

Studio Ghibli films is famously directed by Hayao Miyazaki. And for good reason, I mean, he’s amazing in almost every piece of animation he touches. However, in this case, Gedo Senki ,which can be roughly translated to “Tales From Earthsea”, was directed by Hayao’s son: Gorou Miyazaki. For sure, I would say it is as bad as a lot of its viewers make it out but, first of all, I’d like to applaud Gorou’s efforts in his attempt to direct in a way fitting for a Ghibli title. I don’t think he should be put down for not quite reaching his Father’s standard but ... should be celebrated as someone who probably did a better job at directing than most veteran directors in his first try. And yes, this was his first official work as director.

But as bad as Gedo Senki could be, the one thing I felt was preserved, albeit not really built upon as it should’ve been, was the fictitious world that you can obviously tell has a lot going on yet nothing at all. For whatever reason, Gedo Senki is, conceptually, an anecdotal story inside a world of many happenings. This was the crux that should’ve been the selling factor for this entire series but, oddly enough, it hardly felt like they built upon any sort of history. The one thing we got was that humans and dragons lived in harmony as “one”, whatever that means.

I should mention that this was the opening cinematic to the film. Two dragons appear in the middle of the sea; fighting it out and one gets wounded and then the king of Elad gets word that dragons were sighted by a crewship. So, he takes a walk and chats about it with his “Wizard Root”..? Which, I think it is just another way to say “Court Wizard”. We should probably just call him the court wizard. Anyways, that’s the last mention of dragons until, like, almost the very end of the movie. Thankfully or maybe unfortunately, you kind of forget it very quickly because right after this conversation; where they even bring up the fact that the king’s son is missing. His son turns up right behind him and just gives his Daddy a good ol’ shank! They later confirm that the king died from his wound but nobody cares anyways. The son’s name is Arren, except, it isn’t and we’ll get to that.

We’re not really given a thorough explanation of why Arren killed his Father. The whole idea is that he has this split personality but it isn’t very clear if it is a split personality. He just kind of gets really angry randomly and super aggressive. For whatever reason, this doesn’t present itself as a huge problem later on. In fact, the uh… “Ghost” of said personality almost finds solace for some odd reason. It doesn’t exactly explain that either. I am guessing because the “real” Arren started to “care about life” thanks to Therru (Teru, in case you’re wondering how it is pronounced). Except, her name isn’t Therru but we’ll get to that.

Ged, the bloody archmage; the strongest wizard in all the lands runs right into Cob’s trap and finds himself held captive along with his lover, Tenar. They make it pretty clear they have storied history. To shed more light upon the “Arren finds enlightment through Therru” part, they do this sudden cinematic where they’re standing atop a hill near the house Therru and Tenar lives in and as the waves crash against the rocky shore; a dragon, that we later find out is actually Therru, flies above their heads. This is where you’re supposed to remember that this movie opened with hinting at Dragons being a huge story element of some kind; which left me kind of confused for the rest of the movie. Well, more confused than I already was. Cob chokes Therru to death while Arren is hanging from his sword that got stuck inside stone. Except, she doesn’t get choked to death. This is the scene where she slowly stands up, reveals she has a sharingan and also reveals that she’s a dragon. And that’s really all you need to know about that. Granted, I think this was an effective way of giving Therru’s backstory some leverage. We only had words to define what happened between Therru and her Mother but what we didn’t know was that Therru was the dragon in the start of the film and the dragon she was likely battling against was her Mother.

Therru gives Arren a ride back home on her back and completely forgets about Ged and Tenar who end up walking the entire way. Mind you, Tenar had to have Ged lean on her shoulder because Ged was injured. You can probably tell I am super pissed at Therru; the little bitch! Although, somehow, Ged and Tenar get there not long after Therru and Arren do. Which is kind of immersion breaking; I’d imagine a fucking dragon flying is much faster than a middle-aged woman partly carrying a middle-aged man. Yet, they get there almost on par with the speed of a flying dragon. I feel the need to dwell on this more than I should but… eh, fuck it.

That’s really it. They wave goodbye as Ged and Arren set out to travel once again. Tenar and Therru continue to work on the farm and they have no real discourse over the fact that Therru’s a FUCKING dragon bro! Not even a sheer mention of how metal that shit is! But that wraps things up. Thanks for your time… Oh the names! Right. So, like, Arren and Therru have “true names”. Arren’s true name is “Lebannen“ and Therru is “Tehanu“. As you can imagine, it isn’t clear why this is even a thing. Apparently Cob needed him to confess his true name to gain immortality bla bla… Actually, I wanna talk about that scene for a moment. Cob, a random stranger who’s probably gay, let’s be honest, stands bedside to Arren; gives him a drink and tells him “don’t worry it’s not poison”. Arren drinks it. What? Bro… What kind of stupid mental fuckwit do you have to be to actually be that stupid.

Ah, the names! Ok, so… I thought about it for a little while and I conceived it was some sort of ancient law or unspoken rule that dictates that you need to hide your true name and use a replacement name in your regular day-to-day lives. Then, I realized maybe that’s too much of a stretch. But for the life of me, I do not understand this. Ged’s also called “Sparrowhawk” but I think that’s just a nickname. I don’t wanna assume there’s a Mother ,even in fiction, that would name their son “Sparrowhawk”. It is unthinkable. It seems to me that’s a nickname. So, are these the only two people with “true names”? There’s no indication that other beings we’ve seen have true names.

We can safely say that there’s much to be desired in the writing department but it still left me wondering. Right in the corner of my mind; a phrase so devilishly apparent popped in: “I bet it’s better in the manga”. Except, this didn’t feel like anything a Japanese person would make. Gedo Senki had major fantasy western vibes, just by looking at it anyone could tell. I clashed my fingertips against the keys on my keyboard to find that it is a series of American novels written by Ursula K. Le Guin and Gedo Senki was an attempt at adapting parts of the 4 books while, strangely, also including some of The Journey of Shuna, a manga written by Gorou’s Father, Hayao Miyazaki which was published back in 1983. To be clear, it’s mainly mentioning a lot of the story elements, not necessarily a retelling of a story that you might find inside of Le Guin’s series of books. This was to the extent that Ursula felt the need to clarify to Gorou that because the plot is “entirely” different that it is “his” movie and not “her” book. She goes more in-depth in her critique of the film in her blog. An insightful read, might I add. LINK: http://www.ursulakleguin.com/GedoSenkiResponse.html

As proud as I am of Gorou Miyazaki’s direction and neat depictions of the creatures and landscape of Earthsea; I would’ve liked to see him do smaller, less challenging films for Studio Ghibli before Hayao let him take this up. The context, of course, was that Hayao was thinking about retirement at the time. But given that Gorou doesn’t seem interested in following in his Father’s footsteps in the animation world, I wonder if this was an attempt by Hayao to motivate his son.

The kind of show I would only recommend to someone that just loves making fun of the most hysterically bad anime, a lot like Garzey's Wing. If you need an example.

Before I start shitting on this anime, I wanna give it a brief pat on the back for presenting something that isn't particularly common nowadays. A romantic subplot. I haven't gotten far enough to see how it resolves, if I know these kinds of subplots I am going to make a guess and say that Megumi and Akito go out for awhile and Megumi dies. Afterwards, Akito hits dat Cap'n ass and makes her scream ... "YURIKAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" and so forth... In hindsight, Akito was already thinking about Yurika while dating Megumi so i'm probably wrong. Eh, who cares. The backspace is all the way up there; not moving my fingers that far.

Anyways, the show is very spastic for the sake of telling a longer than normal story while also using what feels like increasing the speed of a nightcore youtube video to "2" for comedic effect. This makes it SO hard to grasp what even is happening for the first 2 episodes. And even when you know what's happening, it's absolutely mind-boggling how little they care about the things going on around them. It's like watching a whole different timeline where death is a joke to them and they constantly use it as a means for comedic episodes that's literally unimportant for the first 15 minutes of the episode until the plot decides to kick-in.

It's hard to care about ANY of the characters because they are either a Shinji rip-off or a joke. Oh and the voice acting is... Hilariously bad. Not as hilarious or bad as Early Reins' VAs but... Well, it's up there. I'm going to laugh arrogangly now:

Hahaha HAHAHA hahaha HAHAHA

The first half of Net-Juu no Susume, otherwise known as Recommendation of The Wonderful Virtual Life (Not Recovery of an MMO Junkie), was actually quite a joyous watch. Typically romance is a genre that lacks variety and intrigue. NJnS takes the additive route of just applying an MMO on top of the bland cliche scenarios you'd normally find and, surprisingly, it creates some level of appeal.

Gloriously followed up by the characters, Morioka or "MoriMori", is a shut-in who quit her job to play MMOs all day everyday. Well, really it is to escape the real world that is filled with anxiety and depression ... but... y'know how it goes. Inside this MMO, she eventually meets the pink barfbag that is Lily and since Mori created a male character; the obvious conclusion is that Lily is also a man.

But keep in mind, predictability isn't always a bad thing. If anything, trying to work around keeping Lily's identity a secret for a given period of time likely would've complicated things and that is a common problem many other anime make. Anyways, Sakurai, who we can already guess is Lily, comes to an understanding that the situations happening with MoriMori in real life is awfully similar to the situations described by Hayashi, Mori's avatar in the MMO. In this scenario, anime has portrayed male characters very stupidly by just having them chalk it all up to sheer coincidence. Not Sakurai, he mans up and investigates what is going on, uncovering the identity behind Hayashi actually being Morioka! And that's really cool! I, very much, appreciated how intelligent and proactive Sakurai's character has been... Up until this point.

But post episode 4 it really falls downhill. A lot of slow dialogues of that do nothing for the show and even though Kowai seems to have read "The Bro Code" front and back, his attempts to set up Sakurai and Morioka together fails time and time again simply because Sakurai lost his pair and decides that he isn't going to go after Morioka because fuck logic. After all this, it is just a slow decline of pointless dialogue to pad the show's run time. Oh and the other characters really don't matter. It is mainly a story between Morioka and Sakurai with actual assistance by Kowai.

I personally wouldn't recommend a virtual life. MMOs are a pain and gets boring very quickly with the repetitive gameplay and pointless dialogue; much like this anime.

SPOILERS (obviously)

Akame ga Kill! really delivers on providing all the tools for a revolutionary shounen action show. The idea of pairing two super-powered groups of humans could never NOT be exciting! The emotions and passion for their respective flags is a story bursting out of each character; and they certainly introduce some very interesting and cool characters in this show. In fact, I don't think I found even one of them unappealing.

However, Akame ga Kill suffers from a few major issues. The first and surprisingly ironic one is, of course, derived from the meme "Akame ga Kill Everyone".. Because, well, pretty much everyone dies ... and while a lot of deaths were preceded by fairly awesome fights, a large portion of the characters' deaths felt like they were just cutting the character short of their respective stories. Probably the best and well done death in the entire series would have to be Lubbocks and arguably this makes him the best character, in my opinion.

But a lot of the deaths, including Mine, Chelsea, Sheele, Susanoo, Leone and even Tatsumi all had either very ridiculous deaths that didn't feel necessary or just felt cut short. For example, Leone just took a bunch of bullets for no reason even though she could've easily just moved away and Sheele died 5 episodes in even though she was assisted in battle by Mine, this just made them look very weak.

Another issue is that none of the fights felt like it had any proper build-up. Granted, it is only a 24-episode adaptation but a lot of the fights felt sudden or forced. Unlike Akame vs Kuromi AKA Battle of the Sisters which felt appropriately timed and had good build-up. But overall, this took away from a lot of the potential fights. There was also no appropriate "Tatsumi vs Wave" fight. I mean, the whole point of Night Raid vs Jaeger is that it's a group battle to the death, I automatically assumed Tatsumi vs Wave was being built up for one last clash but it ended up in a disappointing finish of Tatsumi and Wave coming together and fighting the young king. Even though, Wave didn't actually do much. He just got tossed aside and Tatsumi basically mega-evolved and died to win.

Had all the tools to make a really cool battle royale but ended up cavin' into the plot that was pretty barebones to begin with. Unsatisfying ending and poor direction. Dead-looking backgrounds, which I get was always to raise the tension of the anime. But making everything look dark and unappealing isn't the ONLY way to go. If it wasn't dark then it was an open area of ground and forests; basically, super unimaginative backgrounds and aesthetic. It definitely all went to the characters who looked really cool, each one of them. The weapons were somewhat creative. But there wasn't much time to admire any of those aspects of this show... At least, they don't let you.

Very cool little musical number here. Recommend everyone to give the music video a watch. The art is what makes it feel special, it nails that storybook look while giving off a melancholic vibe. Only gets more entertaining as it goes on; very happy how it ended.

Though, it could very unclear halfway through depending on what kind of cliche you are thinking of when you see how things play out. Aside from that, the music is fine. Nothing to write home about. Definitely worth sitting through it for the few minutes it runs. But if you decided to watch this in the hopes it'll ... excite you for Yu-Gi-Oh! Bonds Beyond Time, don't get your hopes up. If you think that movie is so shitty you came here, it's about as bad as you might think.