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Feb 9, 2024
Well it's finally gojover, the dust has settled, and maybe somebody outside of the juju world has realized something happened in Shibuya....
For the sake of authenticity, I'm going to keep the nomenclature that my girlfriend and I use to discuss this series, mostly because I can't be bothered to look up character names.
So a couple years ago, my gf and I were trolling through Crunchyroll's library, looking for some battle shonen to wile away the hours on, and maybe have on for background noise to distract our neighbors from the sounds of.... other things... and we settled on the first season of jubjub kiteson. It
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was alright, the characters and story were a little bland, but it moved along nicely. We finished the first season, mostly slept through the prequel movie, and eventually I read the manga on my phone while on the train to and from work.
A generally okay if not memorable time was had by all. But then the second season was sprung on us, and we remembered that we had watched the first, and so I asked my gf "Do you want to watch this weekly as it comes out?" And she thought about it for a few seconds and said "Nah... but if you watch it I'll drift in and out."
And so the stage was set for the optimal viewing experience, my girlfriend almost entirely ambivalent, and me forgetting that this wasn't getting simuldubbed, meaning I was going to have to read the shonen vocab slop instead of having a middle aged white guy scream it ethusiastically at me.
So how was it? It was alright, probably not as good as the first season, it felt incredibly long, but that might have just been watching it weekly.
So the first bit, nicknamed grand blue shonen by my girlfriend, felt pretty vestigel. We learn a bit about Gojo and Reigen, they act like teenagers and fight Dio. I don't think I fell asleep once during this chunk, but the plot felt very backended, where Reigen's fall to villainy all happened in the last ten minutes of the last episode. All and all average of 10.
Then Shibuya, which was hyped up a lot (and had a much better op) began...and went on.... forever.....
To be honest, I can't remember most of what happened before Dio comes back. There was a grasshopper, Gojo went into his box (I told my girlfriend that he comes out of the box like 120 chapters later just to get murdered by Sukuna, and she just starred at me dead eyed and said "what's even the point of Gojo.") and the incest siblings did some incest. All in all, pretty bad.
After that though, office daddy slaps around the skinny twink, Sukuna talks down to people, Dio spoke again, albeit briefly, and Todo clapped Mahito's cheeks. Much better, would recommend watching clips of some of that stuff.
Overall, would I say our experience with the 2nd season of jujukaiba was a good one? No, but it wasn't a particularly bad one. There's not a whole lot of substance to jujuk, so it's hard to get too worked up about it. It's just good old fashioned content, I'll forget about it (like how I forgot what had happened in the manga) before the third season starts and Shinji comes back.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Sep 20, 2023
Dandadan is.... fine? I guess? I came in to this series expecting something completely crazy, based on the internet's reaction to the series. And the series that I experienced was a perfunctory battle Shonen
Plot: Dandadan is still relatively new, as of the time of writing this review I had read the first 120 chapters, which I believe got me up to date with the series. Much like other early chapters of battle Shonen published by Shueisha, Dandadan feels like its still in its set up arcs. We all know these arcs, you meet the leads and the supporting cast, one after another, with maybe some
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minor bridging plot to tie these short stories together. East Blue, Black Clover's series of stories following Asta and each member of the Black Bulls one at a time, we've all seen it.
In Dandadan, these set up arcs follow poor Ken Takakura, and his quest to recover his dick and balls. Which is kind of funny, it definitely helps give the teenage boy protagonist a slightly more grounded and immediately relatable motivation. He makes a few friends, two boys and three girls. All six of them get standard Shonen power sets and they all fight monsters. Simple, effective and very derivative. Mixing the threats of aliens and yokai is a cute idea, but little has been done with the concept.
So far the plots a solid 5/10, but average isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Art: The art is... pretty good... I guess. Some of the monster designs are creative and some are just references, which is fine if not a bit dull. The page layouts flow generally well, there were few moments where I needed to go back and re-read sections due to cluttered layouts. I can tell all the girls apart, which is fairly rare for a battle Shonen, so I have to applaud the character design in the series too.
All together, the art is probably a 7/10, its clean, flows decently well, if not a bit forgettable.
Characters: Dandadan stars an awkward teen boy. Due to discovering some unseen powers, he makes new friends and challenges the mystery's of the world together..... blah blah blah...... The characters are boring. They're all standard teenage arc types, but the author is pretty good at playing them off each other in charming if ineffective ways. And of course, all three teenage girls have fallen in love with Ken. Why have they done this? Because he's the lead of the series of course.
The chaaracters are charming if not a bit predictable, soooo 5/10.
Conclusion: Dandadan is a battle Shonen. If you like battle Shonen, you'll probably like Dandadan. I generally like Dandadan, its a fairly well put together battle Shonen. It doesn't break new ground and isn't particularly creative, but its solid and didn't feel like a waste of time to read, therefore its a 6/10.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Sep 5, 2023
Transitional media like AOT is important, as its a gateway from children's media into adult oriented media. From a personal perspective, I find that a lot of North American media fails to provide content for older teens that can engage with them on a level that they'll find both engaging and challenging. Anime and manga are actually quite good at satiating this target demographic. Nana, Evangelion, Ergo Proxy and so many more can connect with older teens with mildly complex themes on topics that resonant with them. So how do I feel about AOT, a series that exploded in popularity, just as I was aging
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out of its target demographic. To be honest I think its not as an effective piece of transitional media as the some of the examples I listed above, but its not without its merits.
Personal Context: AOT's anime started in 2013, when I was twenty and living near my university campus. Some friends decided to start watching it as a group, and I joined in. I lasted six episodes before I gave up. I had already read Walking Dead and the available Song of Ice and Fire books, so the "anyone can die at anytime" means of building tension wasn't anything new to me, and I found the world and characters to be small and uninteresting. Fast forward ten years to 2023, the manga is over, the anime has one episode left. The series has become one of the largest media franchises of the last decade, and debates about the series had been raging for years. I had been spoiled about the main twist and the ending, though I was generally ambivalent to the spoilers as an outside observer, but I decided to read the manga as part of my own weird drive to understand battle Shonen. And so I read the series in about two weeks, and thought it was generally better than my initial impressions from a decade ago, but I was still too old to connect with it in any meaningful way.
Art: I wanted to get this out of the way immediately, AOT's art is brutally bad. Characters are frequently off model, despite there being little to differentiate them. Character proportions are constantly odd, which is exacerbated by the survey corps jacket, which consistently shortens characters torsos, and the arms aren't drawn long enough to compensate for the jacket, so characters end up having huge lower halves and tiny upper bodies. These issues of anatomy are compounded during action sequences, where Isayama struggles with perspective, especially when using foreshortening to attempt to draw the eye along the action. He also relies to heavily on speed lines to fill out back grounds during these scenes, but I'm generally forgiving of that in battle Shonen. The art does improve over time, but Isayama never reaches a point of artistic proficiency where I would ever call him good.
Characters: Being heavily spoiled before reading this was definitely a benefit for Isayama's character writing, since it meant I was already aware of Eren's genocidal choices, and read the manga looking specifically for how Eren would grow into that character.
Eren: The best thing I can say about Eren's character is that his arc makes sense. Eren is a an extremely simple character, his goals are stated early in the narrative and generally don't change much over the course of the series. Personal freedom defines his character, and limitations to that freedom are his enemy, whether that be the titans, Paradise Island's government or the entirety of the rest of the world. The scope of his goal changes, but he doesn't. Its simple writing, but it has clearly connected with the target audience. I don't find him particularly interesting due to his simplicity, and I find the scope of his choices monstrous and incredibly selfish. But he is a child and he is effectively written that way.
Reiner: Reiner was probably the character I found most interesting in the narrative. There's a film from a few years ago called "Son of Saul" about a Jewish man in an internment camp who unloads the trains for the Nazi's. The film follows his own personal crisis as he reckons with his choices to better his own situation at the cost of his own people, including children. Reiner's arc reminds me of this film, as an Eladian who grapples with the humanity that he finds on Paradise Island, and the actions he takes to protect his mother and cousin, at the cost of his friends and other Eladian children. Though I find his split personality plot line simplistic and a bit childish in the first half of the narrative, his suicidal depression and reckoning with his own actions in the second half is so much more interesting then Eren's character arc that I wish he were the main character.
I don't have any real impressions of the majority of the rest of the cast so I'm just going to blast through some of the major ones in a sentence each. Levi is a cool guy I guess, his revenge plot is fine, and his abusive upbringing could have been interesting if it was given more time. Mikasa was barely a plot device, I would usually forget that she was in the narrative. Armin, Sasha and Connie were all there. I could've written a paragraph about Erwin, but it would've devolved into me wishing that he and Reiner were the main characters. Zeke's genocide would be the morally justifiable genocide I suppose, but his writing as the beast titan, particularly during the retaking of Wall Maria makes him out to be particularly cruel, that it makes him hard to sympathize with later on when he's trying to justify his own particularly brand of genocide. Sasha's dad is maybe my favorite character, his ability to forgive and the amount of empathy that he displays made him perhaps the most naive and adult character in this manga.
Themes: AOT abandons themes and picks up new ones almost as fast as JoJo abandons ideas that aren't working. However, unlike JoJo, whose tone and pacing is most comparable to improvisational jazz, AOT is trying to develop a cohesive world, so this writing style comes at the cost of the overall meaning of the narrative. Early on the church of the wall is introduced, and with them comes themes of the interplay between church and state, and how the two systems use their influence the control their populace. The church side of this is quickly dropped. I’m not wholly against this, as a lt of transitional media struggles with religion beyond presenting the basic concept that perhaps organized religion exists as a simple form of social organization and therefore “control” from the point of view of teenagers. After this, AOT delves more into issues of how states control their populations through propaganda, both on Paradise Island and in Marley. This is the strongest that AOT ever is from a thematic point, and it plays wonderfully into Reiner’s character arc. But after that idea has been played out, AOT struggles with its ideas about oppressed group of people. This is not an issue isolated to AOT, as many narratives want to use oppressed minorities as their point of view characters, its easy to make their struggles understandable and relatable to teenagers. However AOT fails where many of these narratives fail, by giving these groups super powers. In reality, persecuted groups are usually ethnic and religious minorities that simply don’t have the numbers to oppose majority opinions in whatever state they reside in. They become effective targets of government rhetoric because they’re different and don’t represent a large enough portion of the population to effectively change these narratives or literally fight back. African Americans, the LGBTQ+ community, and the Jewish people to name a few have simply not had the numbers or influence to combat the dogmatic oppression that has been levied against them historically. But the nature of oppression falls apart in the face of super powers. To compare with another narrative that has similar themes to AOT, the oppressed people allegory falls apart in multiple X-Men stories, because Magneto has super powers. Yes, both Eren and Magneto come from groups that are subject to racism and state enforced systems of oppression, but both of them have super powers that allow them to make individual choices that can killed thousands to billions of people. Racism has historically been based on the idea that ideological or visual differences between groups can be exploited, but super powers radically change that idea. In AOT’s case the Eladian’s have the genetic background to become literal monsters, who have already conquered the world. Other ethnic groups and states have a very good reason to be terrified of Eladians, because at anytime, the Eladian king could unless an unstoppable global genocide, that already has established precedent. And because of this Eren’s views become monstrous, he simply plays to existing and justifiable fears of his people, and kills billions. It’s a monstrous act, that’s handled so childishly by Isayama, because he has no real world equivalent to effectively draw from. This action is not like Black Panthers in the USA attempting to organize communities in self defence, it’s something more akin to an angry white boy who vindicates his classmates fears about him by getting a gun and shooting up his school, except its on a massively larger scale. I won’t say that presenting this idea in transitional media aimed at kids is dangerous, but its handled too simplistically for an audience that generally needs a more guided approach to difficult topics.
Plot: I won’t say much about AOT’s overall plot, because most of my thoughts on it where covered while going over AOT’s themes. I was generally uninterested in its basic zombie and battle shonen plot until the time skip happened. While the story is in Marley and fills out the world and characters effectively I was engaged, and finally when it has to justify Eren’s actions and how the magic system worked, I just had to shut my brain off to deal with the titan nonsense and the middle school interpretation of ethnic conflicts.
Conclusion: AOT was fine. It’s an ugly series, with some flat characters and a childish approach to themes that the author is not ready to handle. But overall, the story presents new ideas and twists fast enough that I understand why teenagers and young adults are engaged by it. If it had come out when I was younger, it may have ended up being a formative piece of media for me. But I had already experienced works that used a similar writing style and covered similar themes, so I feel a little cold towards it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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May 31, 2023
A friend of mine warned me that Fate/Zero was an outlier in the Fate franchise and that I was probably not going to enjoy the rest of it. I should've listened.
Fate/Apocrypha is essentially a check list of shit I either hate or find exceptionally boring in anime. Dozens of interchangeable "I can't believe its not isekai" character designs, writing attempting to cover dark topics like slavery and child soldiers with the depth of of a sixteen year old's first fan fiction, and dull super combat moves that are rarely more than big laser swords and explosions.
Its so bland, repetitive and interchangeable with every other basic
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action shonen that it may be the thing that finally kills what momentum I had with the Fate franchise.
Plot: The Yggdmillenia family stole the grail with the Nazi's help fifty years ago, and the church doesn't like that. So they fight. Simple and hypothetically effective, if only this had been twelve episodes instead of twenty five.
Characters: I can't tell any of the Yggdmillenia apart. They all wear the same uniform and have basic anime hair. Some have glasses, one's in a wheelchair. It's fine, none of them really matter, the summons and the little homunculus kid are the characters who actually matter.
Sieg is a boiler plate anime protagonist, he wonders about his personhood, devotes himself to his friends, has to save his people. Blah Blah Blah, its all the same shit on repeat.
Frankenstein's monster, Jack the Ripper and Mordred are all the usual anime gender swap's done to appeal to pedophiles. But Mordred is particularly frustrating after how well written Arthur was in Fate/Zero
Atalanta is the funniest character in the show. She's not supposed to be, but having a fox/cat girl having a melt down about Jack the Ripper's child servant's/meat shields was hilarious and her spending the rest of the show screaming "WHY WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!" while attacking any other named character, kept me going long after I should've given up on the show.
Vlad the Impaler was cool while he was around. His powers being rooted in defense of Romania was interesting, and his power system being influenced by public perception of him, in a way he resented, was definitely the most interesting thing the show did with any of the summons special moves.
Shakespeare was fun, if unimportant. His writings altering reality, and his own summoner having to have his own defenses from Shakespeare writing his own tale as a tragedy was interesting.
I can see why Astolfo caught on in the anime fandom. He's the exact manic pixie dream boy that everybody loves.
Everyone else was so forgettable that I have forgotten that they were in the show.
Animation: It's by A-1 pictures, so it doesn't really have much of its own style or identity. The fights are rarely interesting, usually just characters hitting each other with big ol' anime swords, followed by a big explosion. I don't think there's more than one fight that I will remember. All the dialogue scenes are a characters standing in flat environments monologuing to each other with very basic shot composition, so it was very easy to dissociate out of whatever was happening.
In the end, was watching it worth it? No, it was a waste of time, and it failed on every front from Type-Moon's business perspective. I don't want to buy its light novel, it didn't make me want to buy lootboxes/rolls/whatever it is in Fate/Grand Order, and it didn't make me want to buy any officially licensed merchandise. It was a complete failure of capitalism.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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May 23, 2023
This thing is barely a slideshow, and it might actually be stronger for it. The amount of background gags and non sequiturs they snuck into these three episodes is astronomical. Is it as good as the remake? Absolutely not, its too short to adapt much of the manga, and this lack of time means that the adaptation cannot delve as deep into Lucius's imposter syndrome and despair, and cannot spend as much time legitimately teaching the audience about Japanese bath houses and bathing culture.
In general I don't care about the sub vs dub debate, they're cartoons, so it generally doesn't matter. But in this case,
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David Wald is firing on all cylinders, treat yourself, no preening about "artistic integrity" and "how it was supposed to be seen", watch the English dub. Be floored by the majesty of a true Roman.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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May 23, 2023
I generally think most battle Shonen works best in movie form. Establish the stakes, establish your broad characters, they fight, good guys win, and everyone goes home happy. If you can do it in under two hours I won't feel like I wasted my time, and this movie accomplished exactly that.
Does it make sense....sure..... I do fully believe Seto Kaiba would invent time travel as a means to satiate his own ego after the end of the original series. Do I care about the villains plan? Their motivations? Their name? Nope, I just needed them to stand there, twirl their mustaches and laugh outrageously as
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they detail how they're going to take over the world using the power of their millennium box? Cube? Macguffin that I don't care about?
The fan service was the exact amount that I needed to have a good time as someone who hadn't engaged with the franchise in probably fifteen years, other than abridged.
However, if you don't have any nostalgia for Yu Gi Oh, avoid this like a plague. Its kind of a piece of shit.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Nov 4, 2022
This is one of those Manga's, had it come out when I was fourteen, I would have been obsessed with it. Now, as a jaded old man, weary of the endless deluge of battle manga, I have to say that I'm just kind of exhausted by it.
On the positive side, the layouts are incredible, the manga flows so well. On the negative side, from a writing standpoint most of the characters and the world feel a little flat. I'm sure some aspects of the relationships between the devils existence being dependent on humanities fears will be explored in greater detail as the manga progresses, but
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during "Public Safety" the devils felt relatively removed from society, despite the audience being told the astronomical casualty rates from devil attacks. The new arc has already begun addressing this concern, by using a new character as the main POV, and I really appreciate that. I also appreciate that Denji, despite being the usually goofy idiot that Shonen Jump almost exclusively green lights as main characters, does have direct character growth. In 98 chapters his wants and goals shift due to his experiences, and though they're still childish, they're evolving with his experiences. Since I'm also currently trying to read One Piece comparing Denji and Luffy and both series supporting casts feels somewhat relevant, as they're both battle Shonen protagonist with over powered abilities that neither fully understand, are incredibly food motivated and are both complete and utter idiots. But whereas Luffy has yet to have an ounce of character growth in 300 chapters, Denji grows significantly. However, the same cannot be said for the rest of the Chainsaw man cast, as the majority of the characters are introduced and usually die within a span of twenty chapters, and as a result I can only remember Aki and Power's names, who both grow (especially Aki), but their overall relevance to the plot still drops out relatively quickly. And in comparing this to One Piece, where supporting characters get full arcs to introduce themselves and their backstories, the cast of Chainsaw Man just start to feel like props, in a cold and dark impersonal world.
Will I keep reading Chainsaw Man? Probably, but I don't think I'll be on the edge of my seat waiting for new chapters week to week.
*An amendment to this review*
Its been a few months since I read Chainsaw Man, and wrote this review, and in the interim I haven't felt the need to go back and read the new chapters, but I have read both Naruto and Bleach in their entirety for the first time during this time span. I also watched both Demon Slayer and Jujitsu Kaisen (I don't care if I've spelled that wrong).
Oh boy, did I treat Chainsaw Man too harshly. Compared to a huge chunk of Shonen Jump's output, Chainsaw Man is a revelation. I'm still not in love with it, but compared to the general mundanity of Demon Slayer, and the level of blandness in Jujitsu Kaisen that could've only been achieved by allowing AI to write it, it stands head and shoulders above its contemporaries. And because of this I'm bumping the score up to a solid 7/10. Its good, not life changing, and it'll probably wholly leave my mind within a year or two, but at least its not as bland (Bleach, Jujitsu Kaisen) or scattershot (Naruto) as the other pieces of corporate run drivel that are published in Shonen Jump. (Yes I know Chainsaw Man has been moved to JUMP+, I don't give a shit)
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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