Your Latest Disappointment

Oddyeus said:
Zankyou no Terror - the introduction of Five ruined everything.

mayukachan said:
Apparantly, there are people who can actually make sense out of Glasslip.

Tristana said:


Wow, that spoiler.

School Days. It would've been a really good anime if the ending wasn't so fucked up. :/

FauxAzn said:

It's just sad watching such a fresh and interesting protagonist wasting away on such a bland plot.

PrimeX said:
Date a Live.. it's like TWGOK with action they said... what a fucking joke

QuattroVaginas said:
All of the comedies this season. Denki-gai no Honya-san is probably my pick of the litter.

Superpieguy said:
The anime adaptation of Akame ga Kiru! is a real let-down. I had expected it to be as great as the manga, but it just does not seem to be as entertaining to me as the manga I held so dear.

Shadow-Samaaaa said:
Inou-Battle. I wanted comedy, not drama.

mayukachan said:

that episode was random AF lol

...and trinity seven continues to bore me each week

Extreme3708 said:
Now people are bashing Akame Ga Kill for deviating from the Manga. Funny thing is they weren't talking shit back when it was at its peak.

SightScreen said:



Before airing, this show was hyped up by the manga readers to appear as an amazing super mature and serious story about good guys who are as bad as the villains, and where everything is grey in morality.

skudoops said:
Who did this? No one who knows the source material would ever say such a thing, it seems like that reddit user projected his own expectations on to what people were saying the show would be like.

SightScreen said:
As I said, ThatAnimeSnob, who also does a lot of reviews & analysis on youtube.

Honestly, the source material is irrelevant when judging an anime. It's like trying to justify all the baffling choices in the Star Wars prequels with the lore from the Expanded Universe.

The guy's a total elitist, but he's spot on with everything he says in that post.

SightScreen said:


As I said, ThatAnimeSnob, who also does a lot of reviews & analysis on youtube.

Honestly, the source material is irrelevant when judging an anime. It's like trying to justify all the baffling choices in the Star Wars prequels with the lore from the Expanded Universe.

The guy's a total elitist, but he's spot on with everything he says in that post.

SightScreen said:
snip

skudoops said:


I think you misunderstood what I was saying, I meant who hyped it up to be an "amazing super mature and serious story about good guys who are as bad as the villains, and where everything is grey in morality." ?

I was mentioning that anyone even remotely knowledgeable of the source material knows that isn't true at all.

mayukachan said:
Genji Monogatari Sennenki probably. Expected it to become an instant favourite (romance + historical genres win me over okay?) but it was LITERALLY about this guy banging up all the medieval girls in Japan. At least I got to hear my favourite voice actor whisper stupid pick up lines.

SightScreen said:


ThatAnimeSnob made a good point for why it sucks:

Before airing, this show was hyped up by the manga readers to appear as an amazing super mature and serious story about good guys who are as bad as the villains, and where everything is grey in morality. And then you watch a few episodes and realize you got trolled since there is absolutely nothing mature or serious about it. Because it’s just another shonen and not a mature seinen.

The most glaring problem it has is the inconsistent tone. The series loves to ruin any serious mood it’s trying to build by having a scene where a guy cries over the death of a person he likes immediately being interrupted by boobs falling on his face and treating the mourning as a joke. It’s like it has dark moments but makes sure you will never take them seriously. And indeed, with such a high percentage of done to death school comedy and fan service you are occasionally forgetting that this is supposed to be a show about ruthless assassins killing sadistic corrupted officials.

Aha, but you see there is a catch here; the fans of the show will then tell you what they really meant is that the show is over the top and aims to entertain people who got tired of 3 very commonplace things found in fighting shonen. - It doesn’t waste time on dramatization, where the characters will be crying over whatever drama is going on for 50 episodes. Enough with that crap; just start punching each other, that is all we want to see! If you are sick and tired of crybabies, here you go, have boob shots to make a joke out it and move immediately to the fights. - It doesn’t try to make the characters idealists, where they do stuff out of the goodness of their hearts or stop being bad guys because of a friendship monologue. If you are sick and tired of people doing everything for love or justice, here you go, a show where the good guys are killing people because they are paid to do so or just love killing, and has bad guys who don’t give up on their objectives because of nakama power. - It has far less plot armor and far more death. If you are tired of shows where characters never seem to die no matter how much damage they receive, here you go, a show where they constantly die on both sides of the conflict and never resurrect (although to be completely honest, there is still a fair amount of cases where characters escape death in a very convenient and cheap way).

All the above sound cool, right? And yet they aren’t, since the show sucks for the exact same reasons. Since it doesn’t take anything seriously, you just don’t care about whatever happens in the story or the characters. How are you supposed to react if on one moment the hero is crying for the unjustified death of his friends and on the exact next moment a slutty dressed bimbo throws her rack at his face? The drama is ruined, the themes are ruined, and no matter what horrible things happen to these people later on, you won’t give a shit, because they treat tragedy as a joke. Good shonen keep the mood comical and the personalities dramatic. They do not do the reverse thing we see in Akame ga Kill, meaning dramatic mood and comical personalities. That ruins the drama entirely.

Since it doesn’t have ideals, it also makes everyone to act like an irredeemable 1-dimensional paragon of evil, whose personality and goals are described in 5 words. The claim that morality in this show is grey is a lie, since only the good guys are the ones being grey. The bad guys are pitch black evil and never show the slightest sign of remorse or questioning of their horrible acts. Hell, they don’t even have any motivation for torturing and killing hundreds of people other than “Because we can lol”.

And since it constantly kills characters in every episode, there is no time to get to like any of them. In fact the only thing you will care most about is the over the top gore and death scenes. Which aren’t that over the top if you watched enough 90s OVAs as I did. And even if it was as graphical, it would still mean nothing because (newsflash) gore and splatter are just shock factor and have nothing to do with characters because you only care about the act of bloodshed and mayhem than about the butchered people in the middle of all that.

The comedy and fan service parts are also so lukewarm and commonplace in most anime nowadays that they actually work against the extremities the show heads for. They destroy the grimdark atmosphere and even make you laugh when someone dies instead of actually feeling thrilled or surprised about it. If the story was about of a horny guy who wants to get as much pussycat as possible, throwing in bath scenes, and falling on breasts becomes relevant. If on the other hand the story is about a group of people fighting a corrupted government, then the boob jokes become unnecessary. They don’t serve the narrative; they work against it by being distracting; taking away from a show instead of adding to it.

Now some may claim that fan service is often used as comic relief to ease the very heavy tension of a show. If a show is too serious or grim all the time, then many viewers will be fed up with it after a point on. But throwing in an occasional camel toe, oh that offers variety and a silver lining to every black cloud. That is all sweet and well intended but it also happens to be meta-logic. It doesn’t exist to serve the narrative but rather to make the viewing experience more palatable. And by that I mean taking something which could have been a well made serious and grimdark story, and turning it to an easily digestible mediocrity aimed at mass consumption. The very fact that makes it an easy watch is what ruins it in the longrun.

And sure, you can say this method works, because the show is very popular. And that will make you look like a complete idiot for trusting popularity to dictate what counts as good. Just because most anime fans are ronery manchildren with no taste or high demands, and because most creators are sleazy money grabbers who would sell their own mother if it makes them money, doesn’t mean that anything popular is excused to be a great show.

Someone even suggested viewing this show as if it has a lot of black humor, making fun of all the violence and the ideals other shonen have. I guess that can work, effectively making it guilty pleasure for those who hate Naruto. They will watch the first episode and be like: “This is not another Naruto! There is blood, and there is death, and there is no talk no jutsu! The hero kills his enemies; he doesn’t try to reason with them!” Oh wow, he doesn’t try to reason with his enemies, major improvement. Too bad this way nobody has depth or gives you any reason to care.

For all intents and purposes the characters in Naruto have far more depth than those in Akame ga Kill. Although the infamous “talk no jutsu” makes Naruto to look completely stupid, on paper it also means that he doesn’t try to solve all his problems with violence and death. He tries to have a dialogue with his enemies, reason with them, understand them, make them realize stuff they missed. Yes, it is childish and stupid if you are no longer a kid but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. If you are a kid, this makes complete sense and is even ten times better to the villains in Akame ga Kill who cannot be reasoned with. They are one dimensional cardboard villains, dry, and irredeemable. This is what makes them far more shallow and boring next to the ones from Naruto. At least there you had options; you could talk or fight. Over here you have no options; you can only fight them. How does that make them any better? Where is the character exploration?

I could go on nagging about the still frames they use to save budget or how retarded is the script in several scenes, or how rushed is the pacing so they can cover as much as they can, or how amateurish are the scene transitions, but I won’t do it because down to it they don’t matter. The story would still be bad even if all those things were done right. You watch this show as a parody of Naruto, you laugh at it, and then you forget about it since nothing in it really matters or means anything. It’s just another Deadman Wonderland and yet another example of how tasteless modern fans are for hyping this piece of crap instead of something far more worthwhile.