Just caught an episode of a show called Final Space on adult swim but it has a TBS presents header. Has some pretty fun animation and pulp scifi stylings. Writing is a mixed bag of low brow gags and cartoon silliness while trying to have a plot. Pleasant enough junk food that feels kind of nice to watch.
im watching mamoru oshii’s slapstick lesbian vampire cartoon right now
HOLY SHIT its hilarious. the main character is a blood donating enthusiast and she meets a vampire who wont drink from people so she starts a blood donation club to feed her vampire and the whole thing is peppered with political commentary and massive jerking off over warmachines, but like oshii makes fun of himself about it. its cute and i love it
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I started watching Hunter X Hunter (2011) as my new getting-stoned anime and I am now completely obsessed with it. It’s funny, for the first few episodes it really masks itself as a by-the-numbers shonen anime for kids, but once the first arc gets going in earnest, it is surprisingly weird and colorful. It has this great perverse side too where about once every 3 episodes the cheerful tone gets suddenly ruptured by a really dark, surreal moment. Like, the villain casted clown magic that turned a dude’s arms into flowers? And they really lingered on the shot of the armless dude after? Wild.
About 20 episodes in, after a long steep in what appears to be a fantasy world with no relation to our own, as the protagonists plan out their route to go infiltrate a vampire castle, suddenly they just start exchanging email addresses with some minor character and then they use a library computer to order plane tickets online. Really sent me.
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Also, there’s an arc where they’re all competing to become Hunters, and one of the contestants is a smarmy dipshit who brought his laptop and just spends the whole test sitting on a sewer pipe and basically digging up his opponents’ embarrassing tweets from 4 years ago, lmao.
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hxh is the best
this is a really good observation that also caught my attention, first time i watched (then read). i love how quaint it is now that much of the story directly envolves stuff like, the rise of home videogame consoles and the internet-as-a-space.
later in the story they do this non-chalant jump in technology by having characters that are, essentially, instagram playboys from the gulf who are also serial killers and cultists. the manga’s been going for almost twenty five years after all
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the main thing i remember from hunter x hunter is that lots of time is spent having people explain things in intricate detail. the workings of a trap, the rules of a game, etc.
it’s good
oh and there’s a character whos name is canonically something like qsrfbdmo wsrbdknmrt
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I kinda fell off in one of the final big arcs in the anime but I still adore it. Killua and Kurapika are two of the best highschool edgelord-bait characters ever.
It goes the weirdest places at a million miles a second with complete confidence.
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Hunter X Hunter just keeps getting better. I just watched a scene where two main characters are sailing on a Spanish galleon receiving a letter sent by eagle, which contains a slip of paper with a URL on it for a site where they might be able to download a ROM of a rare and sought-after vocational training video game for an 80’s console that “had a lot of cult classics back in the day.” They need a copy of the game because they’ve gotten ahold of a memory card containing save data for it which might contain secrets.
Essentially, the MC is on a quest to load up his long-lost dad’s Animal Crossing village to see if he left any important notes to his animals in there 10 years ago. I love this show, god damn!
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somehow, playing a bunch of Phone Horse Girls Raising And Gacha App for the past month got me interested in watching the two most recent chunks of advertainment produced for it
Umayon: this a dumb series of 3-minute comedy shorts designed to introduce as many horse girls as possible to you, the viewer, while making dumb jokes. it’s okay (the episode that’s a real dumb sentai parody featuring very best and very smart horse girls Haru Urara and Sakura Bakushin-O is my favorite)
Uma Musume Season 2: I was not expecting what is ostensibly an ad for a phone game to be so goddamn grim and well-produced. unlike the first season, which seemed very stock Sports Story and was about how cool it would be to own main character Special Week in the game, season 2 focuses on a different member of the season 1 team as she goes the entirety of the sports drama spectrum (she breaks her leg three times over the course of the season) and deals with the meaning what she’s actually doing and what you do after your dreams are crushed. the drama goes hard and it’s way less silly than the first season and even the slight shift in character design from the first show and the game puts in untold amounts of work in making the characters more expressive and selling the dramatic stuff (which is good because now the racing looks pretty bad in comparison to anything else in the franchise). it might be one of the better sports cartoons in spite of it trying to sell you Tokai Teio With New Hat (literally, two of the main horses got new race outfits and guess what, they got patched into the game yesterday)
pretty much the only complaint I have is that former main character and mostly well-rounded character Special Week has been demoted to “one note comedy side character” who is either trying to extol the virtues of carrots or crying hysterically
season 1 was a fun little trifle but I actually, legitimately recommend season 2 as A Good Show if you can get past that they’re horse girls
just watched the first two episodes of joran the princess of snow and blood. i enjoyed them.
it’s set in an alternate history where fascist shogunate japan is a major world power in the 1930s thanks to… leylines allowing them to develop advanced technology? but mainly, it’s about a sad woman with a sword violently killing people. there’s a lot more blood than you would expect from a tv anime. like, bubble era oav amounts of blood.
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megalobox is still such a good old fashioned down on his luck hard man in a rotten cyber future anime it feels completely out of time. like i said before this is like a tower records vhs anime (well probably less boobs) i’m still loving it in season 2
odd taxi is also great. a weird noir-ish funny animal/furry show that is totally down to earth and human. i don’t know how to really describe it? achewood meets terriers? anime better call saul? it’s very cozy and human and pulpy and i’ll probably be able to describe it better one there is more than one episode
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Always gives me a more early 2000s Production IG vibe, at least visually.
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HxH’s trendline is phenomenal. i love all the mechanically detailed card descriptions you have to pause to read in the MMO arc
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Yeah really! I’m partway through that arc now and those are just zooming by me, but whenever I manage to read one it sparks my imagination. It’s making me really want to read the manga after I get through the show.
This is seriously top 5 anime for me, it’s pretty remarkable!
But also Hisoka is mostly a fantastic villain, but every time he shows up, they get slightly more explicit about coding him as a pedophile, and it’s starting to get pretty uncomfortable!
Like I get that his deal is supposed to be that he really just gets turned on by fighting a worthy opponent, but this show has him staring at 12-year-old boys’ asses, it’s really a bit much.
to be honest i really didn’t like hxh at first (not really sure what to blame there? leorio and the vaguely paedophilic clown, to start) but it really goes to some wild places and i am sort of a sucker for shonen characters throwing lots of weird rules at each other, which hxh does a surprisingly good job of staying consistent with when everything else about its setting is nonsense (e.g., the first hunter exam is supposed to pass something like one student every three years on average and later on we learn thirty hunters have been lost to some obscure videogame? incredible)
hope you like the volleyball mini-arc coming up
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The weird but internally consistent magic/skill system that is Nen really transforms the show, and it makes me wonder whether any of the (many, many) Japan only HxH video games are any good.
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I mean like every time someone uses a nen ability, there’s literally a title screen for the ability, with a catchy name and a fancy little logo, and casting it is framed like a character casting a spell in an RPG. But the abilities themselves are way more inventive than those in most RPGS. A guy casts a spell that summons a floating ghost fish that takes bites out of you, but as long as it’s summoned you can’t feel pain and you can’t die until the spell ends. What the fuck, that rules.
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i watched million yen women and it was really good but like dorohedoro it seems to chuck in rules just for the sake of rules at one point and like … is that just “anime bullshit” and our for the course or
i might not be the best person to ask because i enjoy and seek that stuff out. dorohedoro’s bullshit is kind of its own from what i remember, and i haven’t seen million yen women