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This manga made me break up with my girlfriend. Only a few days have gone by.

Never before has a piece of media influenced my life like “Goodnight Punpun” has. That triangle is the most genuine and relatable character in all of fiction.

I can’t put all my thoughts into words right now. I’ll just leave some quotes instead:

“You’re just going to end up dead or in jail if you treat life like an endurance test and try to bottle up the haze of your wrath and lust inside your head, you know.”

“Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been desperately hedging my bets, battling my ... fears and my depravity, and living conscientiously - all so I can be a winner.”

“Thinking back on his twenty years, there had never been a time when he’d had a connection with anyone. Never.”

“I have nothing to lose and nothing left to protect. No worries, no conflict, no kindness. This is the ideal I was searching for.”

Short and sweet, as everything should be, Fire Punch is the kind of story you read in one sitting. Then you wait three months, and you reread it to understand everything that was going on. The more I consume fine art, not just manga, the more it becomes a rule for me that all good media needs to be enjoyed multiple times to be fully understood and appreciated.

And you will WANT to read Fire Punch in one sitting, multiple times. The story grabs ahold of you and drags you through scene after scene, fast enough to never become obvious or obnoxious, but slow enough ... to let every moment sink within your consciousness. The main characters are some of the most realistically depicted bundles of emotions in manga (at the same level as Goodnight Punpun), yet always act in ways you weren't expecting. The themes, as controversial as they are, are handled beautifully, and our main character does a great job of mediating for the audience amid everything going on around him.

Fire Punch is about suffering. Any joy in this story is seen either in flashbacks or gained by our characters through intense schizophrenic episodes. How long are you willing to suffer to achieve your goals?

There's a lot to not like about Space Dandy. The fanservice is gross and unnecessary, the main character is a creep, and a lot of the episodes fall for the anime stereotypes and cliches that turn me off from so many shows. And yet Space Dandy can't make me hate it. This feels like the closest any anime I've watched has ever gotten to an American sitcom like Seinfeld; just fun characters getting into random wacky situations every episode. So many hilarious plots and situations are packed into these 13 episodes; it's insane what the writers are able to do with only 5 recurring characters. ... The writers also really effectively use the "midpoint switch" where the plot takes a shift into a new direction after the midpoint commercial break of the episode. This allows for episodes that you thought you guessed the ending of to completely switch up on you and go into an insane new place before the episode ends. Also the animation in this show is spectacular, especially the plant episode. Hopefully, season 2 is as good as season 1. I'll be watching your progress with much interest, Space Dandy...

If you consider yourself an anime fan, you'll probably like this. But if you're like me and think that 90% of anime produced is unwatchable garbage, this will probably bore you out of your mind—at least the first half will. The second half is a bit more engaging, but as a whole, this show is just a bunch of uninspired tropes. Not a single character is unique or interesting; they're all the most basic anime stereotypes imaginable. The plot is kinda interesting? But the show spends way too much time introducing me to characters I don't care about, which drags on the story to the ... point that I'm uninterested in what is happening, especially in the first half.

This is a Mecha show, so I assume that the appeal for most people watching this is the Mecha fights, but I found them unbelievably boring to watch. The choreography is practically nonexistent, and the end result of every battle is predictable after episode one. The animation is technically impressive, but the choreography isn't appealing or interesting to look at, and none of the characters are compelling enough for me to have any emotional stake in the outcome of any battle. Also, the fights just don't seem real. It doesn't feel like a giant robot is punching and shooting lasers; it instead feels like I'm watching someone play with action figures. There's no gravity or power behind anything happening. The only fight where this was done well (and the only fight in the show that I actually liked) was in episode 3, and it wasn’t even a Mecha fight.

At the end of the day, this is one of the most boring and generic anime I've ever seen. How far Gainax has fallen. You'll like this if you watch shows like "Reincarnated in another world with my girlfriend but I'm level 100000 and she's my pet" or some shit. Though I can't recommend it because of the gross fan service. Leave it to Japan to degrade and objectify women.

Bastard! is another show that sucks and only exists to show boobs. That being said, if you watch this drunk with your friends it's really good to make fun of, so it's not complete garbage. Dark Schneider is another main character that is just a self-insert for incels to have a power fantasy to. The funny part is how pathetic a character Dark Schneider is. He's such a Redditor, maybe it's just in the dub but Dark Schneider sounds like the biggest loser. They tried to make him sound cool, but he has a hilariously stereotypical reddior/incel voice. The story is also bizarre. It's kinda ... a Berserk ripoff; Guts, Casca, and Griffith are all here for some reason. But Casca and Griffith are wizards and Guts is a ninja. All the women are, of course, just there to have their clothes ripped off and moan and all the other shit incels goon to. Especially the Yoko character, who is ONLY FIFTEEN. Kinda disgusting. If you unironically like this you're a pedophile. HOWEVER, if you come into Bastard! knowing that it's stupid and for incels, you can have a good time making fun of how bad it is.

The best part of this manga is the atmosphere. The feeling of following these characters down endless hallways, tight tunnels, and other unrecognizable environments of twisted technology never gets old. It perfectly captures both the sense of curiosity from viewing these highly detailed and infinitely encompassing landscapes, as well as the sense of dread of what lies within them. It's that thriller element that keeps you turning the page, even without much of a story and hardly any dialogue.

A little confusing at times, but worth the uncertainty. If anything, you're as lost as the characters are. The main character especially has the most deadpan, ... slightly confused face for the entire manga. Even in fights, his face reads "Why am I here, why am I doing this?" And not even in an existential way; he's genuinely just as confused as to who his enemies are. We'll get some lore dumps from other characters, but they rarely ever seem to matter to the main character. He just keeps walking.

Just keep walking. Just keep walking.

Just complete corporate slop. Shippuden also had lame episodes and filler, terrible pacing, corny dialogue, etc., but there would be a cool fight or plot point in Shippuden every now and then. Even through all of the boring bullshit, there was still an interesting story and interesting characters, but Boruto has none of that. The new characters in Boruto are boring as hell and just copies of their parents. The returning characters are just lamer versions of what they were in Shippuden, and half of them shouldn't even be here. Why are episodes dedicated to characters like Choji or Shino or Ino; they shouldn't have ... even survived part 1 of Naruto. I only watched the first 34 episodes and you can tell they have no good idea where the story should go and are just wasting time. When I got to the fishing episode I had to stop. I just can't watch churned-out corporate slop anymore. I'm amazed how stuff like this is still getting made; it's not 2004 anymore. Either animate the manga or take a break until the manga can catch up. Just feels outdated, juvenile, and boring. I'd rather have the Naruto franchise laid to rest than be revived and dragged out like this. Maybe the manga is better but I just don't care anymore. Soulless.

Dragon Ball is awesome dude. Kinda the most awesome thing you can watch/read. Is the plot kinda mid? Yeah. Is there much character development? Not really. Does the series have a profound message? Nope. But none of this matters. Dragon Ball is fun, and that's all it needs to be. It has awesome fights, loveable characters you can root for, comically evil villains, and some great humor and jokes. Dragon Ball isn't trying to be deep or smart by overcomplicating its story, or giving its characters huge existential questions; it knows what it is and stays in its lane, which is why it's so effective. ... It was great to read this right after watching Monster; I didn't have to think and could just enjoy seeing Goku be cool and beat up bad guys. This is where the huge difference lies between Dragon Ball and other shonen like Naruto. Naruto tries to be deep and smart, but in doing so just overcomplicates its story and bores the hell out of its audience. Dragon Ball plays it straight, and does it better than almost every other shonen on the market.

I don't think it's a hot take to say that the anime is WAY better than the manga in this case. The FLCL manga is VERY hard to follow and figure out what's going on, not just from a plot and story standpoint, but the paneling and art itself. If I hadn't watched the show beforehand, I would've been completely lost reading this (not that I wasn't confused regardless), so I pity the wretch that goes into this manga blind. Even if you are a fan of the FLCL anime, I can only recommend this manga to the utmost fans of the show. The manga ... is basically just a worse retelling of the events of the show, with a few interesting, yet minor, changes; at the end of the day this only serves as a novelty or a footnote for the series as a whole. Cool to check out, but doesn't have much value.

Whoever made this watched Evangelion and said "I want to do that but only the last two episodes."

One theme in the story that really resonated with me is memory. If no one remembers it exists, then it never did! How many memories have been lost to the passage of time, or even due to malicious human involvement? Just like how Lain uses the internet to shape reality in the show, we have to deal with false memories and realities on the internet in 2024. Just insane how much this show foreshadowed.

Bizzare. And insane. And kinda creepy. Honestly wish it was maybe 6 episodes shorter? ... I feel like maybe it would have been a lot more effective if the story was more tightly packed. Regardless, "Serial Experiments Lain" is a genius look at identity, and is prophetic to the information age that we live in today.