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Meh. I've just finished Owari yesterday, so I figure I might write something for this which is relatively fresh on my mind.

Honestly, the last two episodes weighed heavily on my score, because really, they were the only good ones.

It was certainly interesting to see the various pins which each episode adds to the overall fabric of the saga, but they aren't all that necessary, and the mysteries itself weren't interesting at all. The impression I get is that Nisio needed to tell the Koyomi Dead tale in some way to create a cliffhanger for the series finale in Owari, but had not enough material to ... stall us for a whole book, so his ingenious decision was to write several unrelated stories, since by now he is so stablished as a cult writer that he can do anything he wants because a big part of his fans is certain to swallow it.

The only thing it added was a bit to Sengoku's character (which didn't really made me like her), but Owari did enough to make Koyomi unecessary. Despite having all (most) these characters close to my heart, I really prefer when they do things in order to advance the plot in some way instead of just chatting around, because since SS these conversations unfortunately became more and more lacking of a subject.

I don't believe he is just milking it at this point, he seems to really care about those characters, but some aspects of it are obviously just to beat around the bush. Now that we are done with the first part of the story, I really don't know what to expect of this new age of the Monogatari series.

Amazing.

They did it.

Nisio and Shaft managed to give a proper ending to a series in which one misstep could bring forth its doom.

As I wasn't particularly a fan of Tsuki (in this case, just some aspects of it, as I enjoyed it overall) Koyomi and the first part of Owarimonogatari, I was genuinely mindful that this could end as a screw up, even if I had all my hopes up for it.

The recurring problem with the Monogatari series, in my view, comes precisely from its
strength. The obvious enemy of a good series that focuses on delivering its story by a lot of dialogue ... is the lack of something worthwhile to say. Many times, it relied way too much on repetitive overexpository dialogue of things the viewer had already understood like they were retarded or something, way too much uninteresting idle chatter (this can come off as subjective, but the casual plot unrelated chit chat of the series kinda died for me after Second Season) and, yes, stupid fan service.

I don't think it is the case that Shaft's producers noticed that. Even though it's still a frequent complaint by (western, at least) fans of the series, the general acclaim each new season usually receives implies that they are still doing something right.

However, maybe it's the fact that this season lacked virtually all of the flaws I listed before that made it so special and and ending fitting of the sprawling story of Monogatari, together with the excellent plot.

Instead of spending overtime with meaningless froth and silly fan service, they focused on interesting conversations concerning the story, its character and the development of both, which this series conveyed in a way that, honestly, is only comparable with Season Season, and even then I couldn't say which of them had the most interesting and important character developments of the series. All episodes and all moments were importants before finally leading to the conclusion of the first Monogatari "mega arc" comprising all the tales told until that moment, and how Araragi's future was and would be affected by it.

My inspiration to write this has just extinguished right now, but I am just glad that, in the end, this series didn't disappoint me. It's way to easy to end predictively or coarsely whenever a story sprawls to the point when some of its parts may be better if forsaken from the whole, but at the same time refreshing when a series prove your worries wrong and lets you out of it with a smile on your face.

I could not ask for a better sense of closure.

It was all worth it. Thank you.

Tiring.

I believe that the problem with writing a light novel series heavily based on witty dialogues is that, after twenty something books, you kinda run out of things to say.

As the anime series is almost a word by word adaptation of the novels, it reflects them by taking forever to just get to the point between endlessly idle chatter and the necessity of reminding the viewer what the story's about every 2 minutes or so like we have some kind of mental disability to grasp what the characters are saying the first ten times they said it, so they have to recap everything again! Even ... if it isn't as bad as the necessity of the author to remind us what a goddamn vampire is each two paragraphs like in Kizumo, it's still pretty annoying.

At least we were told an excelent story on the Sodachi arcs, which had more relevants moments than the opposite, being, in my view, one of the best narratives of the anime until the moment (it was even weird to watch so many episodes without so much fiddle-faddle), but the second half of the anime could be around 70% shorter and we probably wouldn't miss much by it. Frankly, only the scenes of SurugaxShinobu clash and Senjougahara's call (also other by the very end, which is a bit spoiler-ish) were actually good, because the rest, meh. Not that the story in this arc was useless; it was actually necessary, but it had way too much futile moments when compared to actual narrative development. Even if this particular tale was actually handled in a kinda poor way for such an important event of the story, at least Monogatari still manages to be generally good when it focus on its plot.

FLCL is one of those works that causes a real dichotomy: people either hate it or love it, rarely staying in between. I am glad to say I stand with the latter: this is truly a masterpiece, and the ones that calls it "overrated" or "pretentious" or just "bad" are apparently more angry with the hype and the "complex" reputation it received (when it is even not all that complex) and the said pretentiousness of people that like it. And of course, they just don't know what those words mean, they use it as a means to classify anything that they don't like rather than ... to REAL overrated and pretentious works.

FLCL is not pretentious, because it is not pretending to be anything. I understand that the sheer randomness of the show might not tingle with everyone, but if that nature itself was a problem, Nichijou wouldn't be so loved. And if everything you use in your criticism is subjective, a matter of taste, you are definitely the kind of person not worth being listened to.

Now let's get that out of the way: FLCL is not pretentious, because it suceeds at what it aspires to do: random hilarity mixed with a story told rather by allusions than a direct approach to it, and if someone doesn't like that kind of work, most times the problem lies more with the critic than the work itself. It's like taking one of those "profesional comic book movies critic" to criticize an Ingmar Bergman movie, or closer to our medium, people that go into Nijigahara Holograph expecting it to be Solanin or Punpun. You can't blame the work for being one thing if you dive into it expecting it to be literally the opposite of that.

And since it suceeds at what it tries to be, it can't be "overrated", for people like it precisely because it does what it does right, whereas its critics comes from the principle that they didn't like the essence of what it did in the first place. I am not saying you can't like it. But you gotta use your words right. Knowing the difference between something that is bad and something that your sole opinion of it is bad is a key to growing up and developing an accurate palate for all artform. I don't like Mass Effect 2, for example, but the fact that I am alone, stranded on an island surrounded by a sea of people giving it praise might mean that the problem lies with me.

About the anime, there's nothing much that can be said about it at this year and age. I enjoyed it as something random, and reading about it for 5 minutes before diving into it was enough for me to get all of its symbols and enjoy the show in a deeper level. I recomend doing that, I rather understand people that don't like it because they didn't read anything about the plot before (I probrably wouldn't like it that much if I hadn't), but it's a rather simple one to grasp.

Whenever I must give an example of absolute dreadfulness, SAO is always one of my favorite things to bash on. No redeeming qualities whatsoever, just straight on, utter garbage.

Lately I've been wondering if I should watch Eromanga Sensei in the search of a new epitome of trash to beat on since SAO is long dead meat, but maybe my sanity has just been chastised enough.

An afternoon of boredom can really make you go places. I am just glad my common sense whistled into my stunted brain and I could stop just before I could see Kirito turn into Edward Cullen.

FIRST AND FOREMOST, if you liked the setting of this anime even at the slighest (fantasy amidst a common firearm human war) I urge you to read Arrowsmith, by Kurt Busiek. It's a nice fast-paced done by the book (but done right) comic book that mixes Word War I with magic, dragons, viscerous salamanders and funny talking pagan ogres that deserves more attention.

Now, for Dragon Dentist.

I discovered this anime more than a year ago when someone compared it to FLCL. I've just watched FLCL, so I thought I would finally watch this one too.

As for the comparison, I don't have the slightest idea from ... where the person was coming from.

While the anime for sure is nicely animated and it's fantasy setting and overall idea really interesting, it just doesn't work. It's kinda like giving a nice fantasy story for Netflix to make an anime out of it, and it's attempt at deep philosophing just falls flat and at the end it's unfifilling and boring. Different from what other said, the characters were not that badly done, but except for the woman who turns into a weird gundam this doesn't mean they weren't uninteresting. Also, the idea of a guy that never gets hit can actually be interesting, but here it just felt ridiculous.

Much has already been said about Lain, so I will just add a personal thought of mine that I don't see it often being said.

As much as I like this anime, it is one of those which can be fairly labeled as pretentious. Different from most cases, I use this word here with its true meaning: not precisely as an indicative of bad quality, but rather that the story tries too hard to be something it isn't.

It is not a bad thing because, for the most part, Lain works. However, by the end I felt that its chopped into bits narrative was much more ... a means to feign complexity rather than present real complexity. In the two last episodes I started getting most things that happened over the anime, and it had, well, a surprisingly simple resolution. The narrative gets you confused much more because of its structure and deliberate concealment of information than by real complexity.

It has a really good story, though.

TL;DR: the problem with Kizumonogatari is that it was never a good story to adapt in the first place, and the studio's efforts to turn it into an interesting tale proved fruitless.

TL;DR2: "oh god this is awful" rant

While the animation and art can be soberb, there not much they could do to deviate from the source work, and just like it the movie is a colossal bad joke. The fact that the writer included a superpowered school manga gag into the story almost looks like he knows Kizumonogatari reads just like a boring, jaded and over the top shounen series, with nothing new in it ... but the fact that it is the beginning of the Monogatari series.

Although exposition dialogue is a trademark of the series and it is often done in a very well and quirk way, in Kizumo it is just plain dumb, like the one you would find in a bad fantasy novel, where a guy who lived on a fantasy land for all his life apparently doesn't know how the currency or magic system of said land works, and just like it, apparently the average reader of Kizumo is too dumb to keep in mind the inhuman skills of vampires (to be fair, I feel dumb for buying the book so there's that), so the writer did us a favor to remind us at least two times per pages how whimsical and stupendous are the new abilities Araragi got as a vampire (funny enough, the book even acknowledges at the beginning how worn off are vampires these days — but nevermind it, the series got famous for using expository dialogue so it will as a matter of fact always work, no?). It might be interesting when done on animes like Jojo, and on mangas, but it just gets repetitive and boring after so much pages on a book. And, unfortunately, it turned out to be the same way for the movies adaptation.

The ad lib slapstick comedy bits (like the gush of wind at the beginning and the MWAHAAHAHA gag of Episode fight) looks just silly and outright stupid, rather than the interesting visual humor the series usually does.

Also they did good to keep the fighting scenes on the anime as just gags or really short ones, because in here they were really meh.

I will probably check out part 3, but I got no hope for it whatsoever.

This is really one of a kind. Even if at the same time it is an
amalgam of almost everything thats wrong in manga and anime today, it still managed to give me a fun time, so I will give it that. There's no significant character development whatsoever through all the course of the story (even the guy to girl development seemed a bit off and in times, artificial (very, very artificial)), but this time it didn't really matter much. I will talk about the wrong things I mentioned before, and focus my review on that.

First and foremost, this is an ecchi manga, so I ... believe fanservice doesn't apply here - however, it has just the same problem as bad fanservice goes: IT MAKES NO GODDAMN SENSE! Most of the time it was obscenity for the sake of it, and it just popped out of nowhere and went for about many pages just because, even sacrificing any kind of character traces it had built until now. Yeah, its clearly an ecchi manga, but I think even ecchi mangas should, I dunno, respect whatever kind of inteligence readers of the genre still have.

And this brings out the next problem: the nonsensical, sometimes utterly stupid humour and character actions. Yeah, a guy riding a trident into the sunset and exploding into a massive mushroom might sound credible in a Uncle Grandpa episode, but all this kind of crude humour through all the manga felt really tiring and boresome. The ecchi stuff enters greatly at this category as well.

The bizarre sense of pace: it may be just me, but almost all shoujo manga feels the same thing with a different story. This is not so bad, because the diversity fills this void, however it always goes like this:
*close at the handsome fella*
~shocking, foreseen catchphrase with sometimes a little bit of nihilism~
*sparkles flies, now both are blushed and the camera focus on both guy and girl, this second with a troubled face*
~actually unimportant character that just comes out of nowhere to create a false sense of choice for the protagonist and a drilling feeling of rage for all readers who were actually cheering for this second because the main's interest was actually boring, annoying, offensively retarded or even a serial rapist~
And yeah, Boku Girl follows this path, however, the problem with following a formula is that, if you screw up, it's more of a crime if you did create your own way of telling a story. The pace here felt off, but I can't really explain why (not a pro in this), however, reading Masamune-kun no Revenge, I can tell that at least Boku Girl didn't screw up THAT badly.

So yeah. As for the general rates MAL provides, the story, apart from being a transgender story, doesn't really have anything to offer so meh. I really, really liked the art though (apart from those bizarre eyelashes the girls all have - and for some reason even Mizuki before turning into a girl), even though the first chapters had one of the most bizarre senses of anatomy I've ever seen. The characters, too, hadn't much to offer, although I liked them, all of them are really bidimensionals and not that worth mentioning. But, welp, I really liked it overall.

Asano is formed with the kanji combination 浅野, where 浅 alone can mean shallow or shameful, and 野, plains, rustic or civil life. Inio is formed out by hiragana, so I don't really know if this is his real name (I searched for it and came up with nothing), but this is as far as my japanese knowledge go (with the internet's help).

Interesting enough, 浅 in combination with からぬ assumes a new meaning, of deep (of emotions or connections). Personally, I think his name sums up playfully not only Nijigahara, but all of his work.

Well, most important: if you walk in this manga expecting to ... have a good time, or thinking this is Solanin (or even Oyasumi Punpun) you are bound to have a bad time. This is neither. A good comparison I could make, since this is always a good comparison to confusing things most people doesn't seem to get, is 2001. For me, I actually found Nijigahara, while rather confusing, more interesting, if not deep, than 2001 (don't get me wrong, it is one of my favorites, I just was not impressed by the so "deep philosophy" people always talk about when mentioning the movie).

Even if it is confusing at first, it is certainly not unpenetrable. Reading for the first time after hearing about how confusing and deep way down Mariana's Trench it was, I still managed to get the trivial enjoyment intrinsic to all Asano's work, that enjoyment of reading a slice of life, and get a good chunk of understanding about what was going on, so I can just think that people over exaggerate on it, or the ones who didn't managed to get a thing from it are just lazy. After all, it is a work that relies on symbolism and discreet nuances; it is not intended for the complete understand in just one read. It's 300 pages long, there are few dialogues if compared to other Asano's works, it's not War and Peace. So I think it is a perfectly reasonable work to udnerstand.

At the core of this book, I believe there is the message I presume Asano tries to pass out on all his works (and, maybe, chants to himself every morning before getting out of bed): you got to keep on living, no matter what.

Ah, and I agree that Asano will never be able to write something like that again: this is an amateur work. Not that it is bad, just that it was a tricky shot. It was probably the one most resembling of what he conceived in mind. I hope I made some sense.