Back to misericord's Profile misericord's Profile

i resurrected my MAL account just to put on record how bad i thought this show was. this has to be the stupidest anime i've ever watched. in the first episode or two i thought, hey, a high-school romance anime that deals with things realistically. no crap about holding hands, it's about the stuff that really went on at school - making out, cheating, sex - and then the rest of the series happened. women prostrating themselves in grief, worshipping, ready to kill and be killed for the harem blob. every episode there was a new romantic 'reveal' that made absolutely no sense. i can't ... even put it into words. i refuse to break this down into story, art, character, sound, blah blah - it's just utter shite.

do not watch this. it gets dumber with every episode, and not in a fun way. i've got to find better things to do with my time.

this goes from being a severely dated 90s ancestor of chobits to being a mashup of end of evangelion and cat soup in one episode. really bizarre. stick with it to the end and you'll see one of anime's great thematic reverses.

for all its flash art and sweeping narrative arcs, sanctuary is a ham-fisted manga companion to ayn rand. engrossing enough, but don't take its juvenile neoliberal theories seriously, please.

also, the depiction of women is absolutely shocking. i see a lot of guys here giving this series a 10 and calling it 'beautiful' and all that. really? there are maybe three solid female voices in the whole series, and they're all putty in the hands of the main characters from the moment they meet them, seemingly for no reason. for instance, in the very first volume, in practically their very first meeting, the deputy chief of ... police abandons her duties as a cop because she fancies the (criminal) protagonist so much. this is absolutely ridiculous, and it's embarrassing to see guys totally ignore this glaring issue.

a dazzling constellation of every bad manga trope. this was utterly diabolical. why do the japanese find it so hard to actually tackle the issue of hikikomori in a manga? a couple series (nhk, onani master) have touched on reclusive characters, but the majority of hiki coverage in manga is like this. insulting to the intelligence of the reader, ridden with cliche, just awful awful awful. god.

a thoroughly moving read. it oscillates between seinen and shounen at times, but honestly it thrives on borrowing from the sensibilities of each at different times. an absolutely excellent blend of serious reflections on life and boyish flights of fancy. and, as it progresses, a truly harrowing read. an experience i'm all the better for.

an enjoyable aesthetic experience, but it's immediately clear that this is very much a matter of style over substance. you could call it a bitesize parable, i guess. although only in the framework of its own (a)moral code, it does have a moral to the story, a lesson to be learned.

points for an idiosyncratic style that is easy on the eye, but it was also much too easy on the brain, a cruise-control sort of read. perhaps this is inevitable, given that it's a one-volume work.

whilst a pleasant little escape-from-the-modern tale, reminiscent of the beginning of spirited away, there is little more in this. where a lot of manga spend too long in the 'this can't be real!!' disbelief stage, this one pretty much skips that entirely as the protagonist, who starts out as a crass and sour young girl, quickly is converted into the idea of protecting *her* forest. some of the environmentalist overtones are also shoehorned in with little grace.

a quaint little escape, but really a bit juvenile and clumsy in its attempts to talk about something deeper. for the kids, honestly.

i think the obvious criticism of this manga would be its brevity. there was scope for a whole lot more. it really gave off the impression that taniguchi had been told by publishers that he needed to wrap it up.

i thought that taniguchi did well in playing a fine balancing act between agreeable formula and some more mature reflections on family life. it was respectable that he didn't go all ecchi with the school life, but i also think that all of the overwrought 'uwaa~ this can't be real...' stuff was a waste of panels.

all in all, a bittersweet little package on the realities of ... family life, and on savouring what you have.