Statistics
All Anime Stats Anime Stats
Days: 95.1
Mean Score:
5.28
- Watching12
- Completed402
- On-Hold22
- Dropped31
- Plan to Watch141
- Total Entries608
- Rewatched0
- Episodes5,639
All Manga Stats Manga Stats
Days: 35.7
Mean Score:
5.73
- Total Entries109
- Reread0
- Chapters5,779
- Volumes570
All Comments (34) Comments
Thank you for accepting, my friend.
I wasn't huge on the Lustrous anime, but I'll definitely give the manga a shot once it wraps up. I think the manga sounds quite interesting.
I think MAPPA has some talented animators although they do seem to struggle utilizing background CG sometimes. Like if the characters are standing on a CGI ship the ship tends to look absolutely awful. I think this is likely due to budget constraints. Hopefully they get a bigger budget for S3 if S2 sells well in Japan.
I've watched Bakemonogatari but that's all I've seen from that franchise. I actually wasn't a big fan of Bake. I appreciated the use of French New Wave inspired cinematography. I appreciate the effort that went into the sheer number of puns and Japanese wordplay in the dialogue. I think the series is visually stunning and definitely oozes style. I just had a hard time resonating with it on a personal level.
Elfen Lied has a LOT of gore and nudity, so a lot of people watched it just for that. It also has a reputation for having one of the dumbest fandoms in all of anime consisting of really cringy teens and 12-year-old goth girls. It's why a lot of people are very embarrassed they ever watched it, let alone liked it. However, it's often important to separate the work itself from the perceived fandom. Let's say you meet a MAL user who says "I watched Haibane Renmei because the internet said it was a masterpiece and I really wanted to look smart and cultured so I wouldn't get bullied on a forum I use." Then you meet 10 people in a row who watched Haibane for that exact reason. Does that mean Haibane is a pretentious piece of shit and you should avoid it? No, it just means that you happened to meet some people who watched it for a silly reason.
Elfen Lied is definitely a flawed work of media, but my love for it is entirely unironic. I watched Elfen Lied when I was 18 back in 2006. Prior to watching Elfen Lied, I mostly stuck to shonen and high fantasy novels. I only knew how to process good vs. evil stories with a very simplistic, Manichean morality. Elfen Lied has a protagonist who does all these horrible things yet in just 13 episodes actually tries to make the audience understand her position and wish for her to achieve rebirth and redemption. That hit me in a way that nothing before had. I shed tears for the first time in any media since I was 6. I completely changed my media consumption habits to chase that feeling again. I largely abandoned fantasy and switched over to classical literature, mostly Russian lit. As a result, I was able to gain a greater sense of empathy and mature my simplistic morality. If I were turning 18 in the current year, that special anime that challenged me and blew me away would have been one of the same series as everyone else on Myanimelist. Something like Galactic Heroes, Vinland Saga, or Ashita no Joe. Back in 2006 in the United States, we didn't have access to Joe or LotGH, nobody talked about Texhnolyze, and Vinland obviously was yet to be written. So that special series for me happened to be Elfen lied. Since it had the largest impact on me, it's remained my favorite series of all time. I've seen the series over 12 times and actually helped write the English wikia in addition to writing fanfiction. I'm definitely one of biggest Elfen fans on MAL. However, I can also take a joke and I'm very willing to laugh both at it and at myself.
I'm actually a bit behind on my Berserk reading. I took a long break to let the manga get ahead or ideally finish and then Miura died and I thought it would never be completed. At this point, I'm probably just going to reread the whole thing starting later this year or maybe early next year.
Burnt Field was great! Season 2 wasn't super plot heavy, but it still had a lot of sweet moments and character development. Shaft has always really excelled in creating atmosphere and using its artsy visual style to display the emotions and inner thoughts of its characters. There are some Shaft anime I don't like, but they can absolutely hit it out of the park when they adapt something that works well with their style.
I plan on reviewing March S1 and Vinland S2 soon. I've not written nearly as many reviews this year since I've been focused on another writing project instead in my free time. I decided to write my own S2 for my favorite anime since it will never get one. Elfen Lied has always been a bizarrely fascinating anime to me. The manga is absolute dog shit, but it has some interesting ideas buried within it. The anime director really made a heroic attempt to take this dog shit manga and try make it into something good. This is what allowed the anime to become somewhat of a cult classic with a small but devoted fandom. However, it was held back by not only the flaws of the source material but by the less than stellar animation company and above all by the limited run time in which it was given maybe half the episodes needed to successfully tell the story it wanted to tell. I thought it would be a really fun challenge to show what a season 2 could like that would be faithful to the anime timeline and characterization, but also be something that modern anime audiences could enjoy.
Houseki no Kuni is great, I hope more of it gets adapted eventually.
Also a Nana, Monogatari, and Bocchi enjoyer I see. Great taste. ^^
Hope you're doing well!