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Aug 16, 2019
Cannon Busters, season one at the very least, will likely not be your favorite anime ever. It's an incredibly interesting series built from a lot of disparate parts with references and ideas and concepts from all over the place and it's fun to pick them out and notice them. It also stands rather well on its own, albeit with a bit of difficulty due to the hesitance with which the series gives you unique information about the setting.
The characters are great, lovable, they bounce off of each other well and they banter. The humor can be hit or miss but it was usually a hit
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for me personally, so I'm gonna give it a thumbs up there. The one thing that could not be said negatively about this show is character designs. From Philly, to SAM, to side characters like Hilda, Manic, and Bridge, this series' designs are slick and unique and memorable even if the names aren't quite reinforced well. I had to google to find the main villain of the season's name and her henchmen are impossible to find the names of without digging.
Action's incredibly solid, well animated with some amazing cuts in here, and great amounts of spacial consistency to keep you engaged in how the environment plays into every battle.
Big stumbling block when it comes to story. The story of the first season is incredibly all over the place and it seems like it's just setting up elements for a later season without much care for the coherence of this season. If this series gets cancelled, it'll be a shame, because we don't get the full story for a lot of our characters.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the incredible amount of black representation. Most background characters and main characters are black and noticeably so and it's amazing to see a series so densely populated. Most anime fans like usual probably don't care about representation because chances are they've been represented their entire lives and never ever have had to think about what it feels like to not be at the forefront of a story. But as a black person, it feels amazing. The series is incredibly lacking on queer characters. Sucks, but it's how it goes.
Give Cannon Busters a shot. It's not amazing, but there's something in there for literally every kind of anime fan and it needs your support to continue and get better.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Aug 2, 2019
Soul Eater's anime has two very big and important themes that recur over and over again over the 51 episodes that Studio BONES made. How important is parentage and lineage in what kind of person you become, and is evil based on nature or nurture?
This will contain some spoilers.
I say the anime, because the manga and the anime notably take a large divergence from each other sometime around the fight for BREW and they generally have different things to say aside from some shared themes. Since this is the anime, I'll be focusing on the anime.
It should be obvious off the bat to anyone paying
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attention to the anime that every main character has some important tie to the ideas of lineage, parenthood, and abuse. Maka has very blatant issues with her father and her mother's completely missing, as an aside a very interesting choice for an anime to make considering that Spirit's wife left him because he was a pervert who couldn't control himself. It isn't touched on in the anime much but Soul changed his name to distance himself from his family members. Black Star has the burden of the sins of the Star Clan on his shoulders and the spitting image of his demonic father White Star. Tsubaki is the hope of the Nakatsukasa Clan and, due to that, was a source of spite and ire for her brother. Death the Kid is the son of the Lord Shinigami, effectively the god of the universe and the man who made every important plot element happen in some way, shape, or form. Liz and Patti, the Thompson Twins, are notable for their lack of family members, orphans who spent their time being delinquents. You could go on and on, extrapolating for each main character. From Crona with his abusive relationship with Medusa, Asura- oop, I forgot! The anime didn't include that.
Instead of getting sidetracked diving deep into themes, lets talk about a few more technical things along with my few little gripes that I had that take this anime down from being like, super duper amazing.
As someone who's read some of the manga and who knows a lot of the stuff that happens later on, the anime feels like what it is. An adaptation based on an unfinished product. Important things, like Asura being Lord Shinigami's son, the way that Shinigami children are formed from purged madness, Soul's family issues, the rest of Crona's character arc, just a lot of things that were left undone. And while some of it is handled well, namely ending Asura's arc and Crona's, some of it is a little limp and would've really loved the information given later in the manga. Even still, I love this adaptation to bits and I think with some tweaks it could stand on its own even better without requiring a full manga rehaul.
The soundtrack is utterly amazing, full of funk, psychedelic rock, hip-hop influence, ambiance, really just an experience all itself and it's utterly iconic from OP to ED. There are children to this day that still remember the first line to Resonance and for good reason.
The visuals of Soul Eater are utterly amazing. Fight choreography is beautiful, the way that characters all fight so uniquely even when using the same weapons speaks a lot to how strong the character personalities are handled and brought out through animation. Now, this is definitely an early 2000s product because you can see a lot of blatant animation reuse. It might bother some people, I thought it was really charming.
Acting was solid, I watched the sub because the dub has not one but two men who've sexually assaulted women in it and I'm honestly not really here for supporting that kind of mess. That being said, my best to Crona's dub voice actress, she played my nonbinary child very well and I wish her the best.
A few other minor nitpicks. Some very blatant racist caricatures appear in a shot or two during the party episode where they first go to fight Medusa and it's distracting, especially for a series that has 5 not only very well made but not stereotypical black characters in it.
Blair as a character is worthless and exists exclusively for tit shots. It'd be cool if she was a character and interesting in her own right, but she isn't. Most scenes involving Blair are a massive waste of time. Same goes for Excalibur, to be fair, but I love him. But, the Excalibur episodes are massive wastes of time. Far be it from me to claim that I know how to schedule and produce an anime, but two was maybe enough? They should've cut the Hiro episode or the Ox episode.
A lot of sexualization of minors in this series, not as much later on but it's really bad early on with the first Kid episode, with Tsubaki, and some other stuff. Also I really, really don't need to see child Medusa's underwear. I just, I don't.
These are all nitpicks, some bigger than others, what's more important is the heart of Soul Eater and that's characters. Each character is unique, they have their own arcs, they have a lot of relationships between all of them that feel genuine. Except Liz and Patty, unfortunately. Liz and Patty do get the short end of the stick as far as character interactions and they don't do much by themselves so by the time the series ends they've served their purpose with Kid showing what a fully in sync Meister-Weapon pair would look like but haven't developed much past that unlike Soul, Maka, BlackStar, Tsubaki, and Crona who've all had big arcs in Amish. Big ol' arcs.
I don't want to take up all your time writing a total write-up on Soul Eater's themes and character arcs but I'll say solidly that it explores the things that it's about well and even the smaller things don't take away much from the experience.
Oh, and if you don't like the ending, you're an idiot.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jul 10, 2019
Kill la Kill is rebellion. Kill la Kill is freedom. Kill la Kill is problematic as fuck and unapologetic about it and it's almost easy to forget that the main character is an underage girl who didn't want to wear the skimpy outfit her dad made for her because wow holy fuck. Let's. Disavow that for now and just talk about the series merits.
Fast, kinetic, powerful. Kill la Kill commands attention. It wants your eyes but it doesn't want your undivided attention. Kill la Kill, and I cannot believe I'm saying this, wants you to think.
Kill la Kill, as a story, has some really simple
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things to say.
1. Your body is beautiful no matter what it looks like and you should be proud of it in any way you can be.
2. Your freedom is worth more than a sense of belonging and is best achieved by finding people to care for.
3. Fuck fascists.
Yes, Kill la Kill is an overwhelmingly antifascist narrative about class consciousness, body positivity and true freedom. The characters are bold and well defined and each have a unique hurdle to pass in their path to accepting who they are and looking for better and it all culminates in an amazing fight at the end where the main characters literally destroy something that represents fascistic ideals.
It's also a story about lesbians. Ryuko is not straight. Please stop lying to yourself so you can jack off to a 17 year old girl.
As far as quality of production goes, you don't need me to tell you that it's fucking up there. Go look at it. It certainly has its lazy moments but I can guarantee you that those moments only serve to add to the charm of the series. This show would be a 10/10 if not for the creepy stuff Aikuro does early on and the constant underage fanservice. Go watch Kill la Kill, go punch a nazi.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jul 10, 2019
FLCL is the quintessential coming of age story. I wouldn't call it the greatest coming of age story in anime. I'd call it easily one of the greatest coming of age stories in all of fiction. Within 6 episodes, FLCL manages to pack in an incredible amount of rebelliousness, irony, detachment, sarcasm, genuineness, horniness, sadness, nostalgia, and every emotion that you can really attach to what it feels like to be a kid growing up.
It's a pretty complex little story told through seemingly disjointed episode beats that all tie back into a couple of overarching themes about trust, lineage, agency, abuse, and projection. Even visually,
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the story manages to repeatedly use its immense visuals to tie together various ideas and themes directly without hitting you over the head with them.
Characterization-wise, FLCL doesn't waste a moment. Haruhara Haruko is an iconic character with no equal of a similar pedigree because of how thorough the series is in fleshing her out and not just creating the platonic ideal of a manic pixie dream girl but someone with genuine damage and who hurts as much as she hurts others. Naota is a believable young boy growing up in the shadow of an unfortunate familial lineage. Even Canti, a robot that literally cannot talk, gets his own arc and is fully characterized.
Art-wise, FLCL has a ton of talent jam packed in from beautiful animation to amazing backgrounds to great set pieces to great character designs. This series was unafraid and boldly changed artstyle as it pleased to fit its scenario and created some of the most breathtaking shots known to the human eye.
SOUND. I don't often talk about how a series sounds because there aren't many occasions where that goes beyond character acting and maybe foley, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention the soundtrack by The Pillows which takes every emotion you've tied to your childhood and everything you've experienced before and ties it to this series. FLCL commands nostalgia. This OST has such an unbelievable sentimentality to me that it feels like I've been listening to it for years when I've really only listened to most of it in the last year.
If you don't like FLCL, that's fine. Everyone's entitled to their opinions. But I find it hard to understand why. I watched it six times in the course of one month after finally finishing it after spending 19 years unable to do so. This series is big, and it means a lot. Give it a watch. Open up to it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Jul 10, 2019
Rosario+Vampire, in manga form, represents one of my favorite genres that I've self-titled and it sounds pretty harsh by itself but the explanation will make a lot more sense as I go on.
Rosario to Vampire Season I is mistake fiction. This manga is, for all intents and purposes, a ramshackle creation that's very clearly carried by the seat of its pants and a prayer pretty early on into the story. It's amateurish, it's naive, and it's pretty clearly the creator's first full story. And that's amazing, because you get to watch as not only the creator becomes more adept at telling stories and characterizing
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his characters but he increases the quality of the art.
Something that R+V has on a lot of other harem and harem-esque series is that not only does the main character have a pretty decent drip of personality after some time but the girls all have their own interpersonal relationships that don't depend on their relationship with the main character. So not only is there a genuine sense of rapport built between the entire cast, but it becomes reasonable and even heartwarming when moments happen that lead to the traditional "we're friends aren't we?" moments. Including a genuinely heartwrenching moment in the final volume between the main character and main love interest. Oh, and the 12 year old character isn't constantly sexualized. Like, holy shit, got it in one there.
The way the story starts is incredibly vapid. It's typical harem trash, monster of the week, heterosexual to the max. But as time goes on, they add a few interesting layers, including some genuinely interesting commentary on othering, the idea of blood purity, and how racism can fester even within groups hated by others.
And the art, oh god, the art. Ikeda goes from this admittedly charming, cutesy style to this gripping, realistic, and incredibly breathtaking and eyecatching artwork that has an incredible sense of kinetics in fight scenes and a great eye for detail. The way this man shades with his pen will make my loins quake for decades to come.
It's still got some issues, the story can be a bit bog standard, the characters don't get a ton of depth compared to in the next half of the manga, and it has some big tone problems on occasion BUT all things considered, this could've turned out far worse from how it started. But, as I said earlier, it's mistake fiction. And it's amazing what kind of quality can come out of works made by the seat of your pants and with the mind of a newcomer.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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