Yeah, i was into Berserk during and immediately post-college, which probably not coincidentally was also when i was remotely invested in ASoIaF/GoT. The whole reason i stopped following the latter was because i lost tolerance for grimdark shit.
I think both series have strikingly similar issues (interminable hiatuses, getting tangled up in long plot tangents, & wanting to revel in their grimdarkness as much as (or more than) they want to critique it).
That’s fair. IDK, like i said it’s been awhile since i read it, and Golden Age (and Guts/Casca/Griffith’s sorta-love triangle) was just more memorable to me. But come to think of it, since i also watched the anime(s) and that’s the arc they’ve retreaded over and over, it’s also the arc that i’ve seen the most of, so that makes sense. Hmm. I also can’t remember where i stopped except that it had those faeries and that little kid and i found all of them annoying.
I never read/watched Beserk during my formative years and didn’t really know a thing about it until I binged on the Golden Age movies about two years ago after I graduated. I mostly went in to it because I heard it get name dropped alot in Dark Souls talk and wanted to see how it inspired the game. I also just love oppressive worlds with monsters and enough sword and sorcery to keep me engaged. The horrible hellscapes, monsters and seeing the human spirit pushed to a breaking point are the key ingredients that I’m into. The rest I kinda eat around or accept as a bad taste.
Revisiting Samurai Jack’s Greatest Adventures™ 50 years later was pretty fantastic. Also kind of feels like they suddenly got a hankering to put in all the PG-rated adult language in one episode though lol
If ever you get to missing weirdos, part 4 has you covered.
I got into Jojo ten years ago via the part 3 final showdown, so it’s crazy to see me kids go in uninitiated. I’ve rewatched the show so many times to show it to friends.
my usual complaints about the characters in arc 3 (as opposed to arc 2 where they’re almost universally wonderful) and the grating “comedy” and stuff still apply and the season 3 opening is so much worse than Stand Proud and all the rest but yeah otherwise things are getting way better
My favorite quality of Jotaro now that I’m older is that he’s painfully unaware of how dumb his jokes are. Granted, I don’t think Araki was aware of it either.
Here’s some (too long) one-line current season anime reviews by bug based on the first episode or less:
ID-0 has some really cool Soma-like premise about losing your body to an artificial one, but immediately drops it at the end of the first episode because can’t not have fanservice.
Dungeon ni Deai wo Motomeru no wa Machigatteiru Darou ka Gaiden Sword Oratoria (you bet I copied that) is another MMO anime, and it’s way too anime for my tender taste buds, so I only made it five minutes in until I put it on my “maybe if I end up in a mental ward with internet access” backlog.
Quan Zhi Gao Shou is another MMO anime, except it’s not because it’s made in China, or South Korea, no probably China, anyway it kinda plays in a not so distant e-sports future, and everyone in it is doing nothing but play MMOs, sleep, smoke, eat junk food, and play more MMOs, and they all look fucking amazing doing it, I don’t even know if they still have showers in this world, but I find the glamorized disrespect of one’s own body alluring.
Seikaisuru Kado is Arrival the anime version.
Alice to Zouroku is another ESP girl escapes laboratory gig, and that’s kind of uninspiring, but it’s also a buddy movie involving a loli and her grandpa, so uh, well, it’s not as bad as it sounds, really.
The whole of season 8 of adventure time is really doing it for me as far as the balance of action, jokes, and heavy existential dread goes. It’s a lot of fun! The islands and elementals arcs have taken the better parts of the later seasons and gone wild with them in such a fun way. Also all of these little characters returning that I kind of half remember like Wyatt or Carroll make me realize that I’ve really only watched every episode about once and I should really do a rewatch maybe? I kind of liked Lena Dunham’s voice as Betty better than Felicia Day but I mean it’s not like a huge thing. Day seems like a much more expressive voice actor than regular actor in any case. I wonder how the UK is going to take LSP saying “spazzing out”? Seems like a much more derogatory term over there?
It’s daunting, but i want to rewatch AT and liveblog it, rly bad. When i was actively keeping up with it in its heyday (s1-4ish) it was my favorite show, and i am still fond of it, and want to be able to articulate why i think it’s still a very good show. “Does Adventure Time suck now or what” is a point of contention in my conversation spaces and i wanna push against that.
All i can say about it right now, off the cuff, is that i deeply appreciate that the crew continued to try to evolve this long-running, highly popular animated series instead of trying to maintain the same high year after year, and i love that they leaned into its D&D nerd roots to do so – all the callbacks to one-off jokes or characters piling up to create a messy mythology, in the service of continuing to tell wild, stupid, funny stories.
well the immediate followup to that episode was “my stand turns you into a child and also i’m a pedophile” so uhhh arc 3 continues to be itself and i am not happy about it
i probably do hate myself enough to watch all of it but i mean
every once in a while you get an anubis or a divine geb and somehow almost everything works and the rest of the time you get a standup routine written by a racist MRA
i can’t seem to watch things i know i’ll like because they make me cry cuz i got Dysphoria so i’m just sorta stuck with this?
i don’t remember part 2 going that far but if it did it was… less constant about it?
i dunno everyone has their own barometer for how much horrendously problematic bs they can tolerate and…everything is just a lot less charming in arc 3 which makes it a lot harder to ignore, at minimum
i can’t blame anyone who can’t stand any of it though
