Oh, Ougi, she's also one of my favourite character. I love her everytime she's not on screen failing at being subtle.
All things considered, like how many of my friends adore this series, all the years I spent on it, the absurd ratings everywhere, I will probably watch it, but I think it'll take some months before I actually get the will to.
So Senjougahara finally got relevant again huh? It took what, eight years to get back to it, that's actually impressive for them to remember who is the series poster girl, there had been so much Shinobu in the recent installments I thought I was going to drown in obnoxious blonde vampire lolis.
No fan service actually sounds both like bollocks and a pleasant surprise, didn't think they wo- (>apart from a Hachikuji scene) OH COME ON! She is dead for pete's sake! She died and she went to hell or heaven or whatever, why is she still here, bugger me.... Jesus I'm old, I cannot stomach much of this cack any longer.... Also, it doesn't take much to have less exposition than Tsuki, Owari and other recent chapters, any more than that and I would really find more enjoyment in studying the plot from textbooks rather than watching the story unfolds.
So I've heard, but aside from my disinterest in finding out how they ended a story that never had a real story to begin with and my dislike for the directing, I've always been quite skeptical of mal's top ten since that one time it was more than half made of Gintama (or that one time Your Name occupied first place since the last year, bloody hell). Not like I believe there's any sensible anime top ten anywhere, but this one is particurarly hilarious.
You were right about this "kittens-kun" for some reason he did not like what I said and he just delete all my comments. He behaves like an infant.
ah I see, I also was not convinced with Jintai in the beginning but then you start to fondle with the protagonist of the story, she is a really well written protagonist and I have seen in many users profiles that if you like Kaiki you probably will like Watashi. She is a cynical character but it also really cute and funny, just give another chance to the anime that I'm sure you'll find something of value.
I think you should give priority to Mononoke since you like the Monogatari Series, I think Mononoke is going to impress you in a very good way, it is basically a mature version of Monogatari with more advanced, dark and important ideas and concepts, it just better in every way. Watch the first two episodes and you will understand what I am talking about, it's another level.
The movies were nothing spectacular and they were more of the same. I'm never interested in reading the novel because I do not see the point in reading something I've already seen.
Changing the subject, I can see that we have some similarity in our tastes (Kaiki, Hyouka, Blame, Byousoku 5 Centimeter), so I would like to recommend something to you. I also see that you are relatively new to the anime world and I always like to help new people.
For now my recommendations are: Jinrui wa suitai shimashita, Mawaru penguindrum, Mononoke and Oregairu.
What are you looking for in an anime? What is the thing that attracts you most in an anime?. I see you like artistic and stylish anime but also you want the anime to have interesting concepts and ideas. You seem to be an INTP like me.
I can see that you are a person with a better perspective of the situation than the majority, it's good to see a fan with clear ideas but I do not see that the series has been correct nothing worthy of standing out, the pace is too fast to give a sense of importance to the scenes, it is necessary to do each scene carefully and take the time to transmit the feelings of the characters of not being done some scenes will not have the importance that should have. None of the scenes had a good impact for me because they were not built with care and creating an atmosphere for my person to feel immersed in the story, most of the things in OW2 just happen so suddenly that I just don't care.
Never heard of Vandermeer but Mieville is a great modern author if you are looking for weird fiction, his Perdido Street Station and The Scar borrow a lot from Peake's and Lovecraft's weird.
Your problem with long books I have with comedy anime, usually it happens that I want to watch some serious, over complicated, weird anime and just postpone in favour of the next romcom I can find, so that I'm left with too much boring stuff at once.
Lovecraft drinking game: take a shot every time something is 'hideous', 'nameless', 'accursed', 'blasphemous', 'madness' is mentioned and the narrator is an anonymous drug addict who faints a lot. You'll be dead by page five. I like what Lovecraft did for literature, but not necessarily how he did it: despite some original short story here and there, most of the times his narrators are too dull and the events too descriptive to rouse any sort of reaction. Nonetheless, most of what he inspired somehow appeals greatly to me, from Bloodborne’s lore to Sunless Sea’s narrative, from Eternal Darkness Sanity’s Requiem to Amnesia the Dark Descent, or the Alien series, the list goes on. Reading how many people where influenced by him, it seems that basically everyone is capable of being successfully lovecraftish, expect Lovecraft himself.
The main difference between Mushishi as an anime or a manga is the pacing: since you can read at the speed you want, the manga flows faster whilst the anime is a lot quieter, full of silences, nature shots, contemplative moments and relaxing string music. It falls nicely into the mono no aware category I talked you about. I’d recommend the anime as a starting point, if it’s too slow you can always switch later but there so much beauty in it I don’t think you’ll have any problem.
I seldom have problems with long books, usually the issue lies with books themselves. If it’s engaging, more pages mean just more enjoyment, otherwise even one hundred pages might be a drag. During two separate summer vacations, I devoured The Count of Monte Cristo and Les Misérables in five/six days each, so much for “the longest novels ever™”, meanwhile Ivanhoe lasted for weeks because it was so damn boring. Same goes for Mistress of Mistresses as I was saying, it was a wonderful book, and quite short compared to the abovementioned classics (around three to four hundred pages, excluding footnotes) but it was so damn complex it took forever to reach the ending, and I’m not sure I even understood properly how it ended.
Uh yeah, Ergo Proxy, I remember how cool were the first episodes and how much I liked the ninth (?) episode which was all Wittgenstein’s exposition, but after that there’s absolutely nothing left in my memory. It was somewhat cool I guess, I should give it a second chance too one day or another.
I was actually happy to hear that a hentai manga actually decided to take itself more seriously and deal with real world issues. But tbh, it was just constant torture porn with unrealistic situations. I know it doesn't make sense to complain how a hentai manga isn't realistic but when it tries to be, and fails, I feel like it's a good complaint.
Lovecraft was often quoted about his love for and the inspirations he got from Dunsany (he also referenced him in one of his early novels, don't remember which one); Susanna Clarke obviously was birted as the child of Jane Austen and Dunsany, she's the best modern fantasy author I know of and yet she only published two books; Neil Gaiman's Stardust is Dunsany rewritten for the kids; some weeb stuff like Urushibara's Mushishi and Yamazaki's Mahoutsukai no Yome are indirectly linked to the concept of magic and fantasy seen in Dunsany; then there's Eddison, which didn't took much inspiration from him rather from some of the same sources. But where Dunsany relied just on the magical and poetic of fantasy, Eddison also added the romance from the novels of manner of the Victorian era, took ALL the norse saga without watering down the content at all and also loved to quibble about weird metaphysical philosophy regarding beauty, spirit and aesthetic. He's hard to read, painfully so in some passages, Mistress of Mistresses might be one of the top hardest books I've ever read just from the sheer complexity of his prose and content. I'd recommend Clarke and Urushibara as a start.
Qualia was a weird trip, luckly I studied and (oddly enough) liked most of the philosophers quoted in the novel/manga so it was a tad easier to digest. I was never really convinced by the finale and the infodumping in some chapter derails from the weird and imaginative and just strikes as boring and tedious, but overall it is an impressive work. The novel was once easy to find from the translator group Nanodesu, then somewhat all the download links disappeared so I had to backtrack all the web for like a hour for a pdf. My quest was fruitful.
Take it easy with Aria, if you watch it in the evening after a day work and you feel sleepy, it's perfect. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou follows some of the same staples, but it is far, far more complicated and immersive, probably the most beautiful and outstanding weeb shit to date.
My current profile pic with the two kids is from Made in Abyss, now airing, strong candidate for anime of the season/year as of now.
Dunsany and Peake differs greatly though; the former took inspiration from fairy tales, folklore or simply his own oneiric imagination, which is what inspired all the following authors mimicking his approach to fantasy; Peake's Gormenghast instead is akin to Shakespeare that got Nabokov to write the Addams family, I don't even know how exactly it worked so well.
A Lollipop or a Bullet was a nice find, I had a friend of mine who already bought the volumes and since he was so passionate about the reading I went to buy them myself: indeed, it was worth the purchase. It surprised me how well it worked despite being an adaptation from a novel, very few manga live up to their literature counterpart, this and Qualia the Purple being the prime examples.
You probably already heard just enough about Aria if you browsed even a little, but I'll give my two cents about it because it's always a pleasure to go back to: Aria simultaneously came from and inspired the vast majority of tropes related to two Japanese subgenres, mono no aware and iyashikei. The former being, according to wikipedia "'the pathos of things', and also translated as 'an empathy toward things', or 'a sensitivity to ephemera', [...] the awareness of impermanence, or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life." The better examples to explain this concept are previous to Aria and probably inspired a lot of what was in the manga, Ashinano's Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou and Taniguchi's the Walking Man: mono no aware is all about describing, both visually and with prose, the natural, the everyday, the flowing of life and other zen gibberish. In the end, it's pointing out, while keeping it at a safe distance of sheer admiration and extraneity, the obvious unseen in life.
Iyashikei instead is a label coined by mostly by the public but there are tens of titles that can be referred to it, that is why I consider it a genre. The literal meaning would be “(capable of) healing or give comfort”, and it’s probably a tad harder to explain because it’s all the more related to emotions and feelings than mono no aware. The simplest way to put it is that iyashikei is meant to make you feel good, showing you goodness, positive outlooks on life and smiles and flowery all around while still keeping it strictly related to slice of life vignettes. I don’t know if there was anything that could be labelled as iyashikei before Aria (Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou probably, but not much), which makes it harder to explain how much Aria was innovative and important when it came out. Imagine, if you would, something like a series of short stories, or fables, or even a sit com, where the common scheme is to present a theme, expand on it, see how the characters react according their own personalities and what is gained by dealing with the theme at the end of the episode: this is the standard for iyashikei except, as I said, it’s all about positive and happy outcomes.
One of my favourite excerpt from Aria (chapter 28 or Aria the Natural episode 26) is when the young protagonist, in the middle of training, wonders what her mentor and role model wanted to be like when she grew up; when she asks, her mentor replies by rolling a snow ball to make a snowman, meanwhile people come and help her, this happens a couple of times: in the end, she answers to the protagonist “when I was young, and I made snowballs, it always happened that people joined me, helped and then went home happily. So, I thought I wanted to grew up to be like those people.” I don’t know if you can imagine how happy I feel just to remember this episode or how awe inspiring and emotional such simple words can be.
So, when you put together mono no aware and iyashikei, you get Aria, a series which is the purest form of escapism, not showing wondrous worlds or adventures but an everyday where problems and sadness virtually do not exist, where you can be taught about the joy of simply sitting in a beautiful plaza sipping coffee or aimlessly walking around a town admiring buildings, observing people, clouds, flowers; it teaches you to value yourself and every moment, to look at obvious things as they were never obvious, to appreciate new things as they were miracles and old things as they were new, to savour happiness and beauty and how beauty is everywhere, it can be so cheesy to the point of being plain embarrassing but that’s part of its charm. It’s the literal embodiment of “smile at the world, and the world will certainly smile back”, what inspired my outlook of life and the forma mentis I hope to achieve, so yes, I’d say I recommend it. It's hard to predict whether you'll like it or not, people react differently to it because it's as slow and eventless as you'd imagine (fans always joke about Aria beng "a series about nothing") and personally, even after reading and loving it back in the days, it took me a couple of months of being unable to think about anything else to realize how much of an impact it had on me. It's also recommended to savour it a little piece at a time, to fully embrace its meaning you don't want to watch more than a couple of episodes per day. Which is actually the right approach anyway, if you are charmed by Aria you wouldn't want it to ever end.
Feel free for goodreads, haven't opened it in a while because these past six months were a busy nightmare (also I got a new pc so there was a ton of games I had to play and the time for books simply disappeared). Gormenghast might be the best written thing ever conceived period, but alas I did not read all that much to really judge and fellows such as Nabokov and Victor Hugo pose quite the challenge to Peake.
The Haruhi series reads really well, if not only because Kyon is a very compelling narrator, kind of like Oreki from Hyouka just a tad more proactive or Iichan from Zaregoto just not a sick psycho. I regain newfound appreciation for the series every time a book is published in Italy, which means every couple of year or so. And if you want to watch the anime that's fine too, Kyoani did an amazing job at it and, to point a parallelism with Monogatari, they manage to animate a series which heavily relies on the main character narration without giving you the feel that you are listening to endless monologues or pointless chitchat.
Monogatari's fanservice to me appeals as it does in visual novels such as Majikoi or Grisaia: that is, there are moments where I can affirm that's pretty much the saving grace or the most interesting feature the story has to offer. Which is kind of unfair, because yeah Monogatari has its good moments, while Majikoi and Grisaia back in the days made me laugh til my belly hurt, which is a very noble achievement if I say so. Still, today when I reminisce about the titles my first thoughts are usually "Man, that Christmas/sauna 3some scene was hot as heck" or "This dialogue here is really engaging, but why are there subtitles on my jailbat ghost loli panties?" Then I realize I need to take a shower and go out to grab a beer.
Light novels can really read like bad scripts from anime episodes, yet Zaregoto shares the similarity with the Suzumiya Haruhi series to appear as actual literature, putting relevant thoughts, descripitions and narrations between the dialogues. The book is probably your best choice.
The anime looks pretty much exactly as you would imagine, except there might be even more CGI and weird camera panning than usual, making every shot just unbearable to watch if you don't have any weird filter fetish. Also, the adaptation follows 1:1 the book by putting almost every single (un)meaningful sentence in it, so again the book is preferable, otherwise you would read a pdf file instead of watchin an *animated* series.
Shaft made some pretty neat stuff even with Shinbo direction, aside from the first iteration for Monogatari Hidamari Sketch fit his style pretty well, then there was ef where the imagery actually meant something (from time to time) and also Madoka was quite the visual achievement. But then again, aside from Shinbo I might simply got tired from Nisio as well, I chose to watch Koyomimono during the past days because of the shortness and during the episodes I found myself thinking "God, how I wish these characters would just shut up, and stop with this garbage animation already". I should just stop, Owarimono sounds waaaaaaay too unappealing to me right now.
All Comments (21) Comments
All things considered, like how many of my friends adore this series, all the years I spent on it, the absurd ratings everywhere, I will probably watch it, but I think it'll take some months before I actually get the will to.
No fan service actually sounds both like bollocks and a pleasant surprise, didn't think they wo- (>apart from a Hachikuji scene) OH COME ON! She is dead for pete's sake! She died and she went to hell or heaven or whatever, why is she still here, bugger me.... Jesus I'm old, I cannot stomach much of this cack any longer.... Also, it doesn't take much to have less exposition than Tsuki, Owari and other recent chapters, any more than that and I would really find more enjoyment in studying the plot from textbooks rather than watching the story unfolds.
ah I see, I also was not convinced with Jintai in the beginning but then you start to fondle with the protagonist of the story, she is a really well written protagonist and I have seen in many users profiles that if you like Kaiki you probably will like Watashi. She is a cynical character but it also really cute and funny, just give another chance to the anime that I'm sure you'll find something of value.
I think you should give priority to Mononoke since you like the Monogatari Series, I think Mononoke is going to impress you in a very good way, it is basically a mature version of Monogatari with more advanced, dark and important ideas and concepts, it just better in every way. Watch the first two episodes and you will understand what I am talking about, it's another level.
Changing the subject, I can see that we have some similarity in our tastes (Kaiki, Hyouka, Blame, Byousoku 5 Centimeter), so I would like to recommend something to you. I also see that you are relatively new to the anime world and I always like to help new people.
For now my recommendations are: Jinrui wa suitai shimashita, Mawaru penguindrum, Mononoke and Oregairu.
What are you looking for in an anime? What is the thing that attracts you most in an anime?. I see you like artistic and stylish anime but also you want the anime to have interesting concepts and ideas. You seem to be an INTP like me.
Your problem with long books I have with comedy anime, usually it happens that I want to watch some serious, over complicated, weird anime and just postpone in favour of the next romcom I can find, so that I'm left with too much boring stuff at once.
The main difference between Mushishi as an anime or a manga is the pacing: since you can read at the speed you want, the manga flows faster whilst the anime is a lot quieter, full of silences, nature shots, contemplative moments and relaxing string music. It falls nicely into the mono no aware category I talked you about. I’d recommend the anime as a starting point, if it’s too slow you can always switch later but there so much beauty in it I don’t think you’ll have any problem.
I seldom have problems with long books, usually the issue lies with books themselves. If it’s engaging, more pages mean just more enjoyment, otherwise even one hundred pages might be a drag. During two separate summer vacations, I devoured The Count of Monte Cristo and Les Misérables in five/six days each, so much for “the longest novels ever™”, meanwhile Ivanhoe lasted for weeks because it was so damn boring. Same goes for Mistress of Mistresses as I was saying, it was a wonderful book, and quite short compared to the abovementioned classics (around three to four hundred pages, excluding footnotes) but it was so damn complex it took forever to reach the ending, and I’m not sure I even understood properly how it ended.
Uh yeah, Ergo Proxy, I remember how cool were the first episodes and how much I liked the ninth (?) episode which was all Wittgenstein’s exposition, but after that there’s absolutely nothing left in my memory. It was somewhat cool I guess, I should give it a second chance too one day or another.
Qualia was a weird trip, luckly I studied and (oddly enough) liked most of the philosophers quoted in the novel/manga so it was a tad easier to digest. I was never really convinced by the finale and the infodumping in some chapter derails from the weird and imaginative and just strikes as boring and tedious, but overall it is an impressive work. The novel was once easy to find from the translator group Nanodesu, then somewhat all the download links disappeared so I had to backtrack all the web for like a hour for a pdf. My quest was fruitful.
Take it easy with Aria, if you watch it in the evening after a day work and you feel sleepy, it's perfect. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou follows some of the same staples, but it is far, far more complicated and immersive, probably the most beautiful and outstanding weeb shit to date.
Dunsany and Peake differs greatly though; the former took inspiration from fairy tales, folklore or simply his own oneiric imagination, which is what inspired all the following authors mimicking his approach to fantasy; Peake's Gormenghast instead is akin to Shakespeare that got Nabokov to write the Addams family, I don't even know how exactly it worked so well.
A Lollipop or a Bullet was a nice find, I had a friend of mine who already bought the volumes and since he was so passionate about the reading I went to buy them myself: indeed, it was worth the purchase. It surprised me how well it worked despite being an adaptation from a novel, very few manga live up to their literature counterpart, this and Qualia the Purple being the prime examples.
You probably already heard just enough about Aria if you browsed even a little, but I'll give my two cents about it because it's always a pleasure to go back to: Aria simultaneously came from and inspired the vast majority of tropes related to two Japanese subgenres, mono no aware and iyashikei. The former being, according to wikipedia "'the pathos of things', and also translated as 'an empathy toward things', or 'a sensitivity to ephemera', [...] the awareness of impermanence, or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life." The better examples to explain this concept are previous to Aria and probably inspired a lot of what was in the manga, Ashinano's Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou and Taniguchi's the Walking Man: mono no aware is all about describing, both visually and with prose, the natural, the everyday, the flowing of life and other zen gibberish. In the end, it's pointing out, while keeping it at a safe distance of sheer admiration and extraneity, the obvious unseen in life.
Iyashikei instead is a label coined by mostly by the public but there are tens of titles that can be referred to it, that is why I consider it a genre. The literal meaning would be “(capable of) healing or give comfort”, and it’s probably a tad harder to explain because it’s all the more related to emotions and feelings than mono no aware. The simplest way to put it is that iyashikei is meant to make you feel good, showing you goodness, positive outlooks on life and smiles and flowery all around while still keeping it strictly related to slice of life vignettes. I don’t know if there was anything that could be labelled as iyashikei before Aria (Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou probably, but not much), which makes it harder to explain how much Aria was innovative and important when it came out. Imagine, if you would, something like a series of short stories, or fables, or even a sit com, where the common scheme is to present a theme, expand on it, see how the characters react according their own personalities and what is gained by dealing with the theme at the end of the episode: this is the standard for iyashikei except, as I said, it’s all about positive and happy outcomes.
One of my favourite excerpt from Aria (chapter 28 or Aria the Natural episode 26) is when the young protagonist, in the middle of training, wonders what her mentor and role model wanted to be like when she grew up; when she asks, her mentor replies by rolling a snow ball to make a snowman, meanwhile people come and help her, this happens a couple of times: in the end, she answers to the protagonist “when I was young, and I made snowballs, it always happened that people joined me, helped and then went home happily. So, I thought I wanted to grew up to be like those people.” I don’t know if you can imagine how happy I feel just to remember this episode or how awe inspiring and emotional such simple words can be.
So, when you put together mono no aware and iyashikei, you get Aria, a series which is the purest form of escapism, not showing wondrous worlds or adventures but an everyday where problems and sadness virtually do not exist, where you can be taught about the joy of simply sitting in a beautiful plaza sipping coffee or aimlessly walking around a town admiring buildings, observing people, clouds, flowers; it teaches you to value yourself and every moment, to look at obvious things as they were never obvious, to appreciate new things as they were miracles and old things as they were new, to savour happiness and beauty and how beauty is everywhere, it can be so cheesy to the point of being plain embarrassing but that’s part of its charm. It’s the literal embodiment of “smile at the world, and the world will certainly smile back”, what inspired my outlook of life and the forma mentis I hope to achieve, so yes, I’d say I recommend it. It's hard to predict whether you'll like it or not, people react differently to it because it's as slow and eventless as you'd imagine (fans always joke about Aria beng "a series about nothing") and personally, even after reading and loving it back in the days, it took me a couple of months of being unable to think about anything else to realize how much of an impact it had on me. It's also recommended to savour it a little piece at a time, to fully embrace its meaning you don't want to watch more than a couple of episodes per day. Which is actually the right approach anyway, if you are charmed by Aria you wouldn't want it to ever end.
The Haruhi series reads really well, if not only because Kyon is a very compelling narrator, kind of like Oreki from Hyouka just a tad more proactive or Iichan from Zaregoto just not a sick psycho. I regain newfound appreciation for the series every time a book is published in Italy, which means every couple of year or so. And if you want to watch the anime that's fine too, Kyoani did an amazing job at it and, to point a parallelism with Monogatari, they manage to animate a series which heavily relies on the main character narration without giving you the feel that you are listening to endless monologues or pointless chitchat.
Monogatari's fanservice to me appeals as it does in visual novels such as Majikoi or Grisaia: that is, there are moments where I can affirm that's pretty much the saving grace or the most interesting feature the story has to offer. Which is kind of unfair, because yeah Monogatari has its good moments, while Majikoi and Grisaia back in the days made me laugh til my belly hurt, which is a very noble achievement if I say so. Still, today when I reminisce about the titles my first thoughts are usually "Man, that Christmas/sauna 3some scene was hot as heck" or "This dialogue here is really engaging, but why are there subtitles on my jailbat ghost loli panties?" Then I realize I need to take a shower and go out to grab a beer.
The anime looks pretty much exactly as you would imagine, except there might be even more CGI and weird camera panning than usual, making every shot just unbearable to watch if you don't have any weird filter fetish. Also, the adaptation follows 1:1 the book by putting almost every single (un)meaningful sentence in it, so again the book is preferable, otherwise you would read a pdf file instead of watchin an *animated* series.
Shaft made some pretty neat stuff even with Shinbo direction, aside from the first iteration for Monogatari Hidamari Sketch fit his style pretty well, then there was ef where the imagery actually meant something (from time to time) and also Madoka was quite the visual achievement. But then again, aside from Shinbo I might simply got tired from Nisio as well, I chose to watch Koyomimono during the past days because of the shortness and during the episodes I found myself thinking "God, how I wish these characters would just shut up, and stop with this garbage animation already". I should just stop, Owarimono sounds waaaaaaay too unappealing to me right now.