Anime:

• DandaDan:

Here’s the thing about problematic media- when you swing for the fences, sometimes you miss, but you can’t hit a home run if you don’t try. Ep 1’s definitely a strike and problematic as fuck, but the rest of the show has been batting consecutive home runs (so far). It definitely has Things to Say about gender that are worth saying, and while I do think that screwball coming-of-age romance/sex comedy might not have been the best medium to tackle heavy topics like SA, I’d rather a piece of media take risks and be challenging while trying to say something important rather than play it safe and fail to say anything at all.

(Although, that said, screwball coming-of-age romance/sex comedy is already a genre with a whole lot of problematic baggage and I completely understand anyone being turned off by that. But the larger point is that we have to differentiate between problematic media intentionally reproducing harm vs unintentionally reproducing harm, because the latter can still have value.)

Like, for example: the Boss Alien using an extremely phallic… appendage to pump the Gig-Worker alien full of (what I can only assume are) brainworms that makes them start singing a jingle that’s an ad for an energy drink as a mid-episode power-up to help them better, er, steal Banana organs from teenagers, the punchline for which is JAPANESE BUSINESSMAAAAAAAAN!!!; if that isn’t the most metaphor for how capitalism reproduces patriarchy idk what is.

Context for that take, btw. And stuff like that is what makes Dandadan so good- there is a larger dialogue about feminism as the main narrative and thematic focus (the entire Acrobat Silky arc is such a beautiful encapsulation of how patriarchy encourages women to hurt other women, even if unintentionally; and that the only way to a kinder, more fortunate world is through empathy- Sakugablog has a wonderful blow-by-blow production notes article breaking down the AcroSilky episodes both industry-wise and storytelling-wise for those interested) but even the small throwaway double Ultraman/Regain reference joke has gender-related social commentary baked in.

• Ranma 1/2 (2024)

This show aged a heck of a lot better that Urusei Yatsura, that’s for sure. Ranma overcoming his misogyny by applying the insights he gains from his experience as the other gender is even more relevant now than it was in the 80’s, but the show hewing closer to the manga and giving a lot more interiority to the characters really helps a lot; I honestly don’t remember the original being written or paced as well as this. It also helps that Ranma and Akane are largely more sympathetic characters than Ataru and Lum are. The retro-modern aesthetic and the animation quality overall is fantastic (especially the whacky fight scenes, MAPPA’s animators did a really good job; I really do hope they aren’t getting overworked)

Not much to say here, it’s just a really solid show.

Manga:

• Chainsaw Man

Chainsaw Man is crazy good this week. <— The last half-a-year, basically. Mid-point of part 2 was a bit slow but we had to let my boy cook cos it was worth it.

Where we’re at in CSM btw, without context:

• Centauria

Hey, y’know how we keep joking about a John Brown Isekai? This is the closest thing we’re going to get to that. Imagine Berserk, but the main character is an escaped slave who was granted power by an eldritch sea demon when a bunch of slaver’s decide to “liquidate the cargo” for insurance money and inadvertently draw the demon’s attention.

Spoiler for Chapter 1

The climax of the first chapter is a ship full of slaver’s getting satisfyingly gorily murdered by the hero, who is empowered by the souls of 100 dead slaves crying out for justice.

Is it nonsensically edgy? Yeah, kinda, but it’s also the single most based thing I’ve read/watched all year. Granted, I’m only 4 chapters in but I like what I see so far.

FUN FACT: The authors of Chainsaw Man, DandaDan, SpyxFamily and Centauria have all worked together at one point or another, and they all share an editor (Shihei Lin, who is interestingly freelance atm, even if all these manga are getting published on Shonen Jump’s online platform where he worked formerly).

Given that 3/4 of these have been unfathomably based and absolute bangers (sorry SpyxFamily I’m docking points for not accurately portraying fictional East Berlin as the communist utopia it was historically) I am forming the Shihei Lin Defense Force: I will personally field any questions in defense of the creative decisions these authors have taken, and will counter any and all accusations that the above authors/works are exceedingly/inherently problematic by incoherently screaming into the Void before skulking into a dark corner, curling into a ball and rocking back and forth while repeatedly muttering “media literacy” under my breath.

(The exception, of course, being SpyxFamily).

(I thank God every day I never made a Twitter account.)

BECAUSE TALKING ABOUT SOME ACTUALLY PROBLEMATIC SHIT

• Drama Queen

Oh fuck me I had high hopes that Jump would keep up the progressive streak, but I guess it was only a matter of time. The is going off big time here.

The premise is that aliens have come to earth, taken all the good jobs and gentrified the place. The two MC’s, who are racist against aliens, decide that murdering and eating the aliens is the way to go towards alleviating their economic precarity.

1. Yeah if you squint hard enough it could be anti-colonial instead of anti-immigrant, given the Japanese context, but there are too many right-wing dog whistles in the work (they took our jerbs, the focus on miscegenation in like the first 4 pages, the vaguely antisemitic suggestion that there’s a conspiracy) plus it completely fails to make any of the structural critiques of racism necessary for an anti-colonial narrative (think Code Geass and how Elevens form an oppressed underclass)

2. Yeah maybe they’re villain protagonists like in Death Note or Breaking Bad… except those stories made it EXCEEDINGLY clear that their villain protagonists were in the wrong from the get-go: there’s no such indication here

Reading this is like reading a cracked-mirror version of Chainsaw Man: it’s clearly using the same visual language and themes (the protagonists “very relatable” struggle with poverty, for one) but instead of getting its reader’s to more deeply interrogate their relationship with capitalism through the challenging allegory of an abusive relationship, it just blames everything on immigrants and gleefully embraces misanthropic nihilism. Whooooo cannibalism let’s goooooo!

Seeing something reactionary hijack something progressive to its own ends isn’t surprising, but it makes me irrationally angry. Fuck this.

Hmm…

Anime

So with my mom I recently-ish finished Hitoribocchi no Marumaruseikatsu, it’s a top-tier banger that I highly recommend; and we also finished the chibi-style Barakamon specials, which were decent but far from great.

With mom I’m still watching Minami-ke: Okawari, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, the Ranma 1/2 reboot, The Boondocks, and Cells at Work: Code Black; by myself I’ve still been watching Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card, but I’m putting that one on hold for a few weeks.

Lupin III Part 2 and Samurai Champloo are some more things I’m watching with the family, but we haven’t actually watched them for over a month now, so.

On my recent flight to Mni Sota Makoce I watched an episode of Maison Ikkoku I’d downloaded onto my phone. For some reason I was just hankering for that in particular as IFE. Maison Ikkoku honestly is a pretty underrated show, I’d say, given how mega-popular the other Rumiko Takahashi anime are. I have to wonder why, really… Maybe when there’s no fantastical elements and the characters are all older than 19, it’s harder to sell people on it.

I also tried watching an episode of Bakugan Battle Brawlers dubbed into Norwegian during the flight, but I stopped it midway through. The dub was a little interesting, but not interesting enough to watch a full episode — it’s a low-quality dub for a low-quality show that was made to peddle plastic toys. As far as CCG anime go I honestly prefer Dinosaur King.

---

In the nights before the big flight, I knocked a few things off my planning list. These were mainly things I’d already seen one episode of but didn’t reach any final verdict about.

Are You Lost? — I knew this one was mediocre and described as “ecchi” before I started watching, so I figured I knew what I was getting into, but apparently I underestimated just how boring it would be and just how much the “figure-emphasizing shots” would bother me. I was hoping this show would be better, since the premise of teen girls learning to survive on a deserted island sounded fun, and the episodes are only 13 minutes long… Alas, it would seem that sometimes dead doves should not be eaten. C’est la vie !

Mitsudomoe — I wanted to like this one, because it’s got a fun style and a catchy opening and seems to be well-liked, however in practice it’s just too gross and crass for me. Don’t ask me why the snot joke in Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan didn’t bother me, but the one in Mitsudomoe made me say “no thanks” — sometimes that’s just how these things go.

Love Live! School Idol Project — I’ve got really good feelings about this one. I haven’t seen a lot of idol anime, so the sudden switches to 3D CGI are still a bit jarring, but Love Live clearly has good heart to it, it’s got likeable characters, there is some occasional “cringe” but not really enough to get to me. So I’d say I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how the story of μ’s unfolds, it looks like it’s going to be very heartwarming and sweet. Love Live is incidentally a show I only wanted to try in the first place because I once had a crush on someone who liked it, in fact before I learned that girl’s name I just called her “Love Live” in my head because of the pins on her backpack… That crush would soon fade, but I still wonder from time to time if she’s doing well.

Sketchbook ~full color’s~ — I started and didn’t finish the first episode. Not because I didn’t like it, mind you, but because I figured ma wouldn’t want to miss out on this one. This show seems very sweet and cozy, it looks like it’s basically peak iyashikei — and I would describe myself as by all means a decently big fan of a certain other iyashikei anime show about a group of teenage artists, so if this is anything like that…

---

Manga

In terms of manga, I installed an app called Mihon onto my phone that lets me download manga from Mangadex and stuff.

So thanks to that I got to read a little Tropical Rouge Pretty Cure in Norwegian during the flight. I frankly didn’t enjoy that manga very much, but I’m still thankful for the efforts of the fan-translators who posted it. It seems like it wasn’t actually the full first chapter, though, it seemed like it was just a few pages from the middle of the manga that were mistakenly listed as the first chapter. So I didn’t really have any reference for who the characters were, or what they were talking about, or why I should care about them, and I think that was maybe dragging down my enjoyment quite a bit.

PreCure generally seems pretty hit-or-miss, though, since I tried watching both Smile PreCure and didn’t care for it, and later I saw Futari wa Pretty Cure and enjoyed it actually quite a bit.

Still, I think it’s very interesting that there is this Mangadex translation group “Glittergutta” who translated parts of Tropical Rouge and Delicious Party Pretty Cure into Norwegian — the group’s name means “The Glitter Boys” in reference to Glitter Force, the Saban adaptation of Smile PreCure and DokiDoki! PreCure for Western audiences. So I have to wonder who these two guys are, what their background is for how they ended up becoming such big fans of Glitter Force slash PreCure that they’d try translating the manga into their native language for themselves. The only translations they ever made were all posted three years ago, though, so I doubt they’ll be returning to bring us more Norwegian PreCure any time soon, unfortunately.

Anyways, also on the flight I started reading Sailor Moon in Esperanto using the same app, which I have continued reading after arriving in Mni Sota Makoce. Compared to Norwegian PreCure, Esperanto Sailor Moon is a much more substantial translation covering the first two volumes of the manga, and it is an absolute labor of love that’s clearly had a lot of effort put into it. I wanted to try reading Esperanto Sailor Moon basically because I wanted to see if, given that I’ve already seen much of the Sailor Moon anime, and given the general pros of comics/manga for language learning, and given all the familiar vocabulary of Esperanto, and my previous experiences with “trying” to learn la lingvo internacia, that I’d basically be able to pick the language up just by reading it… And so far the answer is, yeah, to some extent. I ended up downloading an Esperanto dictionary onto my phone to check the words I really couldn’t seem to figure out, but I’m trying to avoid checking dictionaries to the extent possible.

With my mom I’ve incidentally been reading the Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken manga. It’s good to see those characters again, but it’s also not too surprising that a story about animation works better in animation…

Earlier today I got a volume of The Demon Girl Next Door from a used book store that was also selling, somewhat ironically, the selected works of Lenin for $300… That aside, there were honestly a lot of other interesting things in the manga section at that book store, but with only so much room in our luggage and only so much time to look around, I guess things like Toilet Bound Hanako-kun will just have to wait.

In any case, I didn’t realize until I actually cracked it open that The Demon Girl Next Door was originally a yonkoma. That format has been kind of hit-or-miss for me, but so far Demon Girl has been pretty nice as far as yonkoma go. Shamiko and Momo are cute together as always, seeing these “mortal enemies” end up acting like basically a couple. “Don’t give up, Shamiko!”

Last but certainly not least, I recently got the first volume of Welcome to the NHK as a gift. It sounded a bit “rough around the edges” based on the plot description I read, so I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it, but I knew that it was popular, that it’s seen as a masterpiece that comments on various societal issues, so I figured I’d give it a shot. And a story about someone living on the fringes of society — a drug-addicted recluse with paranoid delusions and stuff — sounded very interesting to me anyways.

This being said, this is roughly how Welcome to the NHK has been to read thus far:

Chapter 1 - Welcome to the Project: “Yeah, this is more or less what I was expecting. It’s gross at times but it’s got me interested in where the story goes from here.”

Chapter 2 - Welcome to the Lolita: “Welp, that title doesn’t exactly give me good expec— THIIIIRTY FUUUUCKING GIIIIGABYTES, JEEEESUS CHRIIIIIST.”

…So, you know, once I’m back home I’ll finish reading that volume, but it certainly seems like it’s going to be a bit of a rough read to say the least.

Sent from Mdewakanton Dakota lands / Sept. 29 1837

Treaty with the Sioux of September 29th, 1837

“We Will Talk of Nothing Else”: Dakota Interpretations of the Treaty of 1837

Anime fell of a cliff for me :(

The objectification/sexualisation of women i think just hit a limit but occasionally some stuff I’d watch like Spy X family! That was so good, I need to watch season 2.

I was so psyched when I heard about Dandandan since everyone was like oh its amazing and a close friend even said it might help me get back into it and I thought oh wow. People I trust who know me say it’s great.

I’m glad I read on here what to expect before I sat down to it. I don’t need that rn.

I watched Library War early last month after seeing @Erika3sis@hexbear.net mention it. Thought it was pretty good, kind of a Patlabor vibe minus the mechs.

I’m enjoying Dandadan. It’s kinda tame by my standards, but I can appreciate why some people are turned off by it. Banger op song tho.

I picked up Orb: On the movement of Earth a couple weeks ago and am finding it rather interesting. Not much else to say about it. Does what says on the tin.

Dragon Ball Daima is a cute road trip nostalgia series. Low stakes, nice to watch while in my cozy cocoon before bed.

The Apothecary Diaries season 2 starts next month. Looking forward to it.

I watched Zom100 that was pretty decent.

Not anime, but Helluva Boss has been dropping an episode here and there. That show has no right being as good as it is.

I think I forgot to watch the last eps of Shikanoko.🤷

Mangawise Oshi no ko ended, satisfyingly enough.

Enjoying Chainsaw man, Frieren, OPM, and Vinland Saga.

Hajime no ippo’s current match has been kinda dragging but feels like it’s gonna end this month.🤞

I watched Mob Psycho 100 just now. I know I’m “behind” on things but damn that show was good. I really appreciate that they never once had creep shots of underage girls, as far as I can remember. That being a sincere positive makes me sad on some level.

It’s a good show.

Like everyone else apparently I have mixed feelings on Dandadan. The constant SA jokes are just awful, but pretty much everything else is great. The writing for Acrobatic Silky was amazing and the animation was flawless. The characters are fun and vibrant, the action is creative, the production values are fantastic - the classical music scene in the Turbo Granny fight is a massive highlight for me. That said, this week’s episode was easily the worst. The action was weak and lacking in tension, Aira felt useless which is always annoying and the jokes didn’t land. The constant joke of “haha Okarun is naked, how hilarious” wasn’t really funny to begin with, and wore extremely thin.

Also been reading chainsaw man within the minute it comes out. It’s really good at the moment, but it’s not returned to the heights of early part 2, where Asa was the main character and the art was at its best.

I finished reading Oshi No Ko. I’m starting to understand why some mangaka spend their whole lives working on one thing and die before it ends. Because they can’t write endings for shit. But maybe thats like a universal writer flaw with stuff like Game of Thrones having the same problem.

The author has admitted to getting bored with it and starting work on their next project before Oshi no Ko was done, which is the same thing they did with Kaguya-sama. That had a similar issue of having a good end and them continuing past it but being way worse.

I know its cope but I hope the anime changes things entirely and wish more authors would use those adaptations as ways to tell alternate stories/endings and essentially bug fix the worst parts of their plot. The Attack on Titan anime tried to do that but it wasn’t much better. Kaguya-sama just ended after the best arc and didn’t adapt more.

Anime: just started watching Dandandan. It’s a heartwarming romance with some really bad moments (I think people have mentioned it). I hope it doesn’t have anything like episode 1 in the future.

Manga: vinland saga is my only hope for the medium. This month’s chapter was so perfect that it makes me feel in way I haven’t felt in years for fiction.

Finally started watching Rose of Versailles and I’m kicking myself for not starting it earlier–it’s right up my alley. The 70s soundtrack (OP slaps) and 70s artstyle, the camp villains, the dramatic still reaction frames, the copious shojo sparkles scattered over everything…what’s not to love?

Currently watching Dandandan with my partner who likes it as she enjoys the character dynamic of whimpy man and dominant woman.

Not sure what that says about our relationship but I’ll choose to ignore that.

Also @Awoo@hexbear.net can we sticky this?

Still watching Dandadan, it’s still good imo but I understand why it’s over the line for some people.

Started watching the Scott Pilgrim anime by the same studio with a friend and it seems… real bad? And surprisingly racist? The indian character (one of… 3 POC?) has “mystical powers” that are activated by dance. We got halfway through when we stopped, and I’ll have to check with them if they want to continue. I’ll finish it either way because it’s short, but not really looking forward to it.

No real manga reading lately, though I’m up to date with almost a half-dozen different things (CSM, Kagurabachi, Bocchi, One Piece, Elden Ring).

Such a strong love-hate relationship with Dandadan rn. The horniness kinda sucks, the sexual violence really sucks, but the romcom stuff is so damn cute.

Think I might finally read Berserk.

I’ve pretty much moved to exclusively reading manwha.

One series I’ve been really liking lately is “Hand Jumper”. The art is absolutely gorgeous, the world building is certainly interesting, the characters thus far have enough substance to them to give them depth, and even though it’s still starting out the plot has been quite fascinating to follow so far.

Other than that I usually enjoy keeping up with “Return of the Blossoming Blade”, “Return of the Crazy Demon”, “Regressor Instruction Manual”, “Dungeon Odyssey”, and “The Greatest Estate Developer” as my top followed manwha.

Funny you mention Dragon Ball, I just picked DB back up today after I took a break from manga. I plan on playing the Dragon Quest games and I wanted to get in the mood for them.