SO, because I actually found my rant from back then I'll post it here for everyone's and my own amusement so bystanders who look at my list can stop wondering "Why does he hate Casshern Sins so much?" Have fun reading:
<<"Casshern Sins" is the most pretentious bullsh** I have ever seen in my life. What the f is the point of the show?
The whole thing can be summarized to basically "if given the opportunity most would prefer eternal life, but to truely call it 'life' there also has to be death too". There, saved everyone from wasting 8-9 hours on this trash heap of a show. And before anyone tries to come on with the "yOu JuSt dIdN't UnDeRsTaNd It" argument, NO just no, you don't need a degree in metaphysical sciences to understand the show, and besides, the ONLY anime that I will freely admit to not having fully understood at first watch are Serial Experiments Lain and Mawaru Penguindrum. The characters are one-note bland boring robots/humans/whateverthef's that don't add anything to the show at all in substance, contradict themselves constantly or just are completely bad. And when there's finally an interesting character it's either killed or written off in one episode (episode 3 with Akoz, episode 7, 8 or 9 with Janice). (Also, how the f do you CHOKE a ROBOT, why the f do they need to breathe anyway? If Casshern, Dio and Leda are the only ones created to feel emotions and reproduce like humans, then why the F do all the other robots too!??!) And what the F is Braiking Boss's deal, non-sensically going back and forth between laughing at Casshern and everyone else for having brought the Ruin over the world and apparently caring for the robots that died by doing stuff like making graves for them. And why is NO ONE actually giving him the blame for the Ruin, he issued the order to kill Luna, and everyone just says 'damn Casshern for bringing the Ruin upon us'.
The story doesn't go anywhere and fails in handling every single theme it tries to address. On top of that it's boring af. The tree outside of my living room window flailing in the wind is more interesting to watch than these characters on their bs journey. I realized that because while watching some of the episodes I actually had to rewind a few minutes multiple times because I was watching said tree flail around. And after rewinding I understood why I spaced out in the first place because the characters were just aimlessly wandering through the desert for 5-7 minutes without any dialogue whatsoever. And suddenly, the tree in the storm seemed like a masterpiece to me.
For the pacing we gotta look at the general types of pacing in anime:
There's the normal pacing you have in most anime, there's fast pacing for some action anime, there's break neck fast pacing like Kill la Kill, there's slow pacing for most slice of life shows, there's really slow pacing for things like the romance in "love chuunibyou and other delusions" or the whole of "girls last tour", and then there's Casshern sins pacing which is moving at such an atrociously slow snail tempo that you could make, say, a 30-35 min OVA that still contains everything this 24 episode show had in it. Not to mention the repetitiveness of the in a lot of cases episodic nature of this show. If I have to hear the phrases "Kill Casshern, devour Casshern, then we get eternal life" or "What am I? what is Luna" or "I am/you are the one who ruined the world, I/you need to atone for this sin" one more time I think I'm gonna throw my newly acquired phone against my wall. I wanted to drop the anime multiple times, as early as episode 1 when the first 10 minutes or more is nothing but a fighting montage and badly designed scrap-metal robots repeating the same line said above over and over, but I beared with it for the whole thing to see some kind of merit to its storytelling. I should've listen to my gut and actually dropped it cuz now I won't ever be able to forget the atrocity I just whitnessed.
I never thought I'd actually find an anime that I like less than Akame ga Kill and God of High school, but hey, here we are. I have my own little rating system where I, even if I think it's complete trash or sh*t, I don't go lower than a 5/10 in rating a show, this is the first time I broke that rule and gave something a 3-4/10 because I felt like it would be insulting to sh*t because THAT at least has a purpose for existing. Well, animation and art were at least above average in a lot of cases, which is also not really used to that great of an effect in the bland fight scenes, only scene that stands out in that regard is the still shot of Casshern with his face full of blood and Janice's singing in the background.
I think I have said everything I wanted about the show now and will just finish off this little rant with wishing you all an early merry Christmas and a happy new year. >>
To add to this rant, I personally think that the soundtrack is kind of amazing and really fits for this post apocalyptic mystery robot setting.
If I decide to edit this one after my rewatch, you'll find the edits down below here:
