This last season wasn't the greatest. All the top reviewers are scrambling to write 1/10 and 2/10 reviews for God of High School, SAO part 9 and whatever bland isekai was shat out this season. The sad fact is that if you took all 10,000 anime ever made, those are all probably more accurately in the 4-5 range. You wanna know what real 1/10 shitfest looks like? Welcome back to the 1980s. There's no internet. There's no way to know what anime are good or bad. You pick out a random laserdisk or VHS with a hot anime waifu and hope for the best. Some lucky folks managed to pick out stuff like Gunbuster, but others grabbed something like Nora. It's a little cheaper than other laserdisks and the girl looks kind of cute. How bad could it be?
The first thing I'll say about Nora is that it has a surprisingly catchy soundtrack! Oh...and it's also the most poorly animated thing I've ever seen. EVER! They axed all the in-between frames to save on budget and used only key frames. Nora is 30 minutes and runs at a rate of 2-3 frames of animation per second for large portions of its runtime. I don't think you can even really call Nora animation at that point. It truly is more akin to a powerpoint presentation. Even the people at Dingo Pictures would look down on Nora's animation! You have to laugh at the sheer audacity of the people who released Nora on to store shelves in the state it was in and charged money for it.
Nora has something special about it beyond the horrendous animation though! It also breaks a general trend of anime. Nora is OP beyond all reason. She is hands down the biggest Mary Sue I've EVER seen in the medium, which means Nora can claim to be the strongest character in the history of anime. Usually, Japanese comics are written by 1 person and have a beginning and ending. Japanese readers have always expected characters to be somewhat human and struggle to achieve their goals. There are some exceptions like Duke Togo, or joke characters like One Punch Man, but this has historically limited power creep in manga/anime. American comics are the polar opposite. They run forever with often over 100 authors contributing to the history of a character. American readers love the concept of their hero being the strongest and Superman in issue 2101 is expected to be a little stronger than he was in issue 2100. It becomes this childish pissing contest of "Nuh Uh, my character can run at infinity plus 1 miles per hour!" For example, DC is so childishly, stupidly broken at this point that over a dozen characters have speed or strength described as beyond infinite and those aren't the top tier! The top tier of characters are those that can annihilate the multiverse in an instant, then remake it from scratch, then destroy it again.
What does this have to do with Nora? Perfect waifu Nora achieves the power journey that took most DC characters 90 years in 30 minutes. In half an hour, Nora displays telekinesis, teleportation, time dilation, pyrokinesis, reality warping, flight, and that's not even all her powers. She's some kind of Elder God for no explained reason. Shonen battle kids can argue all day about if X character in Dragonball can beat Y character from Bleach. I can laugh and say Nora would just blink both of them out of existence. She could just rewrite the timeline so they never existed. She's THAT broken! If Nora got a 13 episode anime, she'd be as strong as DC's Lucifer Morningstar. I kind of love the sheer absurdity of a space bounty hunter with no explained origins being that powerful for no reason.
The whole anime is free to watch on Youtube, but if you want to own a piece of anime history, the original laserdisk is for sale on ebay in heavily used condition for the low price of 330 American dollars! Shipping and sales tax not included!
