Turns out... I may have overbloated my expectations of the Monogatari Series...
Can you blame me? When the biggest detractors of the show on MAL call it fetish bait for pedophiles and a glorified harem anime, the only thing I could think was: "This shit's right up my alley!" Well, you can now look at me and laugh. But in all fairness, the anime does have a bit of promise, if only by its structure. By that I mean the barely used in anime, incipit in media res, or basically, shit happened before, and we'll talk about it later. That leaves a small layer of mystery that might be the only reason I even remotely care about this show after watching its first season.
Now for what the anime is actually about. Well there's this dude named public class Araragi(); who goes around heping his public string friends; who are haunted by public class Entitites(); who don't really have an explanation as fo rwhy other than they are somewhat related to random, mostly Japanese monster tales. The rest is left to the watcher's imagination until they watch the rest of the series
Its characters, now not to be mistaken, every single character is different and overall pretty well written. But there's a massive problem, and Araragi and Senjougahara are the biggest culprits, when it comes to general intreractions, the characters feel more more like self learning AIs (thus the bad programming joke, don't blame me, it's been years since I last touched code) with a very well written backstory than actual characters. And even when they try to fix the issue by adding comedy, it just doesn't work when your main brand of comedy is garbage meta humour and jokes relying on Japanese folk culture. And unlike Gintama, I can't find any fansub to explain me most of the jokes so I have no idea if it would be funny with context, although probably not. And if only that was the only big problem.
Character issue not helped by the faxct Araragi sounds like a damn narrator.
Also, what the hell Shaft? A production couldn't be more pompous unless I watched a lobster flavored champagne in a fancy glass spinning in a random pattern and somehow called it art. The panels, which I thought would be endearing turned out to be annoying, and after a point, I just ignored them all. I don't know if the source material was required to be adapted this way, but if that was the case, I'd rather be blind than having to watch an anime like that. It turned a perfectly serviceable anime into a flawed production. And if that's Shaft's biggest flex, they might be condemned to mediocrity. A shame, character desingns were plenty good, made me want to put my dick everywhere near the cat.
Yup, not holding my breath for the rest, but still a watch.
