Ranma 1/2, the 80s version

i kind of want to watch this one again but the length is a big problem since i don’t want to binge it (and i know i will because i love that series). since watching the remake i have had this feeling that i want to experience the original adaptation again.

for me, this month has been quite weak. finished fma and haven’t started yet any new series and since the season just started i don’t have yet an opinion about the shows i’m trying.

Fullmetal Alchemist (2003): finally finished it and i am incredibly amazed at how much i loved it. i had many problems with Brotherhood’s last arcs so i expected something similar but i really loved everything it did with the story. ending was a bit rushed and left some open things that were later addressed in the movie but even then it was quite enjoyable.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shambala (2005): this deserves it’s own entry since, holy shit what an amazing movie is it. if it didn’t require 52 episodes of context i would recommend it to every single person i would ever met because it is that level of amazing. it serves as a perfect closure to the series’ story while also being an interesting piece of historical fiction and an interesting comentary on the events it portrays. i don’t tend to revisit films often and i want to watch it again soon with a more critical mindset.

Polar Bear Cafe.

As much as I love puns, clasic Japanese comedy duo acts (I forget that term for Japanese Abbot and Costello), and slice of life… I kinda hate this manga.

And maybe I’ll give Girls Cry Band a shot. It looks fun.

Very slowly forcing myself to rewatch season zero of Yugioh. Not really digging it this time. It’s fun but it’s too formulaic each episode and the change in the characters and stuff is so fucking slow. I love all the games Takahashi invented for it though, pretty unique in that sense.

Manga:

Sand Land: Fun Toriyama one shot. Not a whole lot going on with it, but the art’s cute and the characters are fun.

Akira (5/6 volumes): I’m surprised I haven’t read this yet - it’s great. One of those comics that reads really fast. Makes the movie look super overrated.

Anime:

Cromartie High School: This one was a pretty quick watch. Extreme Adult Swim energy for a comedy anime

Eureka Seven (24/50): The plot is starting to happen - super interested to see where this goes, particularly with how it relates yoolder mecha shows.

Mobile Suit Gundam AGE (24/49): In the middle of the second generation arc. It’s uhhh fine - I’m thinking about trying the game, despite having limited skill in Japanese.

Fang of the Sun Dougram (44/75): Still enjoying this show, but it’s loooong. Like Legend of the Galactic Heroes, I have to nibble at this one to get the most out of it.

Oh, and I finished Star Wars: Rebels!

I got into the currently airing Pokemon anime and it’s honestly pretty fun. I’ve also been watching Gunbuster and season 2 of Gundam 00. Not an anime but I’ve been rewatching my favorite how Community since the beginning of the year and I reached the final season.

Anime:

Sakamoto Days was great. It’s gorgeously animated and as creative and unflinchingly silly as JoJo. Easy A.

Beheneko is a flaming trainwreck that I keep wanting to do a dedicated review/rant thread about because it’s just so awful on every level in a way that’s pure spectacle. It’s reincarnation fantasy slop about a generic hero in a generic fantasy world reincarnating as a tiny behemoth kitten which looks like just a normal cat, and then horrifyingly becomes a harem show because every single female character on the cast wants to fuck the hero, who they think is a normal but magical cat. Also it’s vaguely(?) transphobic but in a very weird way where there’s a supporting character who’s a generic offensive caricature but is otherwise just sort of there and well-liked by everyone and just generally reliable and helpful? I hate every part of this show but could not look away, the unique blend of baffled confusion, disgust, and anger it invokes was just too nourishing. An F surrounded by increasingly angry question marks and wordless screaming.

Manga:

How Do We Relationship just finished. It’s a poignant, sometimes harrowing, and very grounded yuri manga premised around more or less starting where yuri stories usually end and so deals with like normal life, personal conflicts and dysfunction, messy breakups, the fear of homophobia, etc instead of being some whirlwind romance. A+, no complaints except that it could have maybe done a better job wrapping up some of the side character’s stories and exploring their issues.

Other:

If light novels count, Zilbagias the Demon Prince is surprisingly good for edgy reincarnation fantasy slop. The premise is that a hero whose home was destroyed by a demon-led army and who’d spent his entire life after that as a soldier fighting on the front lines against their imperial conquests dies while on a doomed assassination mission aimed at taking out their leader, only to subsequently wake up several years later as said leader’s seventh kid. I went into this expecting trashy, edgy slop and was pleasantly surprised when it does things like repeatedly interrogate the protagonist’s genocidal hatred of the Demon Kingdom and its peoples and temper his perspective by humanizing them without actually changing his material goals at all, because even though they’re all also people who aren’t ontologically evil as he’d initially believed the Demon Kingdom as an imperial institution is monstrously evil and has to be brought down even if that also hurts some innocent people or people who were actually quite nice to him personally. It also stops the story dead to cogently talk about socio-economic inequality and demonstrate that literally all it takes for a demon to develop empathy and question the brutal fascist ideology of the kingdom is to be on the margins and care about someone the system would rather see dead, showcasing that the demons’ cruelty is something that’s learned and rooted in material self-interest instead of nature. Also the Demon King himself is a reformist lib who’s trying to efficiently and peacefully run the imperial horror, slavery, and murder machine in a rational way and it actually acknowledges that this is still bad, actually, and he still has to die. It also holds up a mirror and basically says “the human kingdoms do evil, fucked up things too, but the empire is still evil on an entirely different scale and must be destroyed” instead of equivocating the two.

Unfortunately it also does some weird gross fetish stuff that kind of gets glossed over because the text doesn’t really linger on it, and it’s sort of turning into something harem-adjacent even though the protagonist is entirely disinterested and seems to have been vaguely ace even as a human. The manga adaptation is also extremely gross and bad trash drawn by a pedophile, which not only does not gloss over SA and weird fetish stuff it goes out of its way to insert more of it. I earnestly hope this never gets an anime adaptation because that would be even worse, because I think it’s a story that literally only works in a pure text form that’s stuck firmly inside the head of someone disgusted by everything he sees.

Overall, maybe a C, tentatively a heavily qualified B if it keeps its current trajectory and doesn’t veer off into becoming more explicit slop or pull some lib shit like the protagonist deciding he could be a good Demon King that does even more liberal reforms of the fundamentally fascist empire or some nonsense.

manga

i recently finished futari escape, a lighthearted comedy manga about a mangaka’s daily life and her roommate/girlfriend(?) who helps her destress by being unemployed and funny. really good manga, a bit yuri bait-y until the last volume where it gets very explicit that these two have already confessed, done their whole passionate love stage, and just live together in the more calm part of a relationship. was a really fun read and is both very cute and has a bit to say about the nature of escaping the capitalist productivity grind by asserting your will through really frivolous and stupid trips at times you really shouldn’t. inspired me to visit my friend in another state randomly one day, which was fun. B+

just started reading yokohama kaidashi kikou, a manga about a robot girl whose owner has left her in charge of a cafe in a post-apocalyptic world. it’s really fucking good, and it has a lot to say about climate change and the ways in which humanity can be granted to robots. i’m only 16 chapters in, but it has incredibly breathtaking art given that it’s black and white lines on a page. seriously so impressive. also gay robots, so it’s really easy to read it as a trans yuri narrative. so far, A simply for the art and what it’s had to say. apparently it also has an OVA, which i plan on checking out at some point. maybe i’ll make a post about it.

Tokimeki Tonight

I think I saw like one episode of that, I should get back to it. I’ve been wanting to watch more anime with vampires and werewolves and stuff.

Ranma 1/2, the 80s version.

It’s a good 'un! How far did I get? 11 episodes into Nettôhen plus the first 18 episodes is… 29 episodes, yeah. But it’s a LONG 'un isn’t it! So I haven’t watched '80s Ranma in yeeeaaars.

Gravity Falls

I think I rewatched the first few episodes of Gravity Falls a few months ago, and it honestly wasn’t as good as I remembered. The style of humor just wasn’t quite as much my style as it apparently used to be, and since I want to try Spongebob eventually, that perhaps doesn’t bode well for that show…?

But at the same time, even though a lot of the jokes didn’t really land, some of the jokes do still hold up. I think it’s a matter of just how much GF (or at least the first few episodes) pelt you with joke after joke, that a lot of them are basically bound not to land. And the ones that do land? They make for a LOT of iconic and quotable moments — I cannot tell you how many times I’ve said “BUTTER AIM IS GETTIN’ BETTER!!!” with that exaggerated arm-crossing gesture.

Gravity Falls generally just kicked fucking ass when I was in my early teens. I can tell you right now, the plot is gonna advance and it’s gonna go places. The ending I remember thinking was spectacular, and the show was notable at the time for just how rarely new episodes came out, and how few episodes there were.

Honestly, on the topic of 2010s cartoons from Seppoland… I wonder how Over the Garden Wall and Star vs the Forces of Evil hold up. I remember adoring both of those as a teenager, too, although SVTFOE I was already falling out of love with by the last season.

But anyways, as for the stuff I’ve been reading and watching:

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Manga:

Not much for manga, but I’ve been reading Yotsuba& in Japanese and Sailor Moon in Esperanto again. God Yotsuba& is so good.

With mom:

In terms of anime, mom and I finished Is The Order a Rabbit?? Dear My Sister and The Miyakawa Family’s Hunger, and we finally finished the Ranma 1/2 reboot the other day, which I feel had honestly kind of an abrupt and underwhelming ending, but hey they’re making a season 2 anyways.

We finally started watching Do It Yourself, which has been on my planning list literally since it came out in 2022. DIY is indeed as good and unique (by SOL standards) as it looks! We’re even blessed with two characters raised outside of Japan, Kouki Kokoro (AKA “Shii”) who is from Nonspecific Country in Southeast Asia, and Juliet Queen Elizabeth VIII who is from… Seppoland, surprisingly. People call her Jobko 'cause she always says “good job”, and she uses a lot of gratuitous English to signal her background. Don’t we all.

Otherwise we’ve been slowly continuing stuff: Ojamajo Doremi, Nadia: the Secret of Blue Water, Ameku MD: Doctor Detective, Cells at Work: Code Black, The Boondocks, and we’ve continued to stall on Samurai Champloo and The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan. We’re now just three episodes away from finishing Nadia — one of the episodes we watched in the past month was actually a shitty clipshow with image songs, just skip episode 34, legitimately — and Ameku I have to note had just a ridiculous scene taking place in a burning building.

But hey, sometimes that just happens, right? Making anime is hard.

The last Boondocks episode we watched was “The Fundraiser”, which features that character Cindy McPhearson voiced by none other than the Shinigami-green Zionist freakazoid herself Tara Strong. So it was kind of interesting hearing the voice I associate most with Twilight Sparkle talking in this “white girl feigning AAVE she learned through gangsta rap music” way.

Alone:

By myself I started Angelic Layer, and it hasn’t super caught me in the first four episodes, but I’m gonna give it an extended try. I watched the OP on a whim and was struck by the sheer Aesthetic of it — it looks like a sci-fi Cardcaptor, and indeed it is actually based on a Clamp manga! However it’s really a sports anime, based on a fictional game wherein you use your mind to control these little robot dolls to fight one another, and I guess that premise just isn’t the most interesting thing in the world to me. That character “Icchan” is kind of a creepy weirdo, too. I do like the main character Misaki, though, she’s a good kid.

I also paused Tokyo Mew Mew after the twelfth episode and started watching Sailor Moon again. Last time I watched Sailor Moon was around two years ago, so it’s good to finally be back. I decided to keep watching SM dubbed just because it’s funnier that way, but it’s the Viz dub rather than the original dub where Luna’s English. I’m also noticing in SM that pink tint thing that people were talking about, that it was an artifact of digitizing the show? I don’t remember what the deal with that was.

Blorptube:

We finished Nyoron: Churuya-san and even created a separate channel for it. We also finished Kill la Kill and the ending was just as HYPE as I remembered it, I literally wrote in the chat that I couldn’t stop myself from making weird noises at like 3 AM due to my excitement, to which Sulv remarked something like “lol Erika’s pogging” and yeah I kinda was, how can you not pog at that?

So anyways after Kill la Kill we’ve now started JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean, which certainly has an interesting premise, taking place in a Florida prison. However the first night we were watching the first episode I suddenly developed like a mouth ulcer so I couldn’t really pay attention cause I was just like “Why’s it hurt when I eat bread?”, and now it’s basically too far into the series for my exhausted ass to get much out of it. But I never really was into JJBA anyways.

And I guess I can now mention that I’ve been holding My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic rewatch parties every Saturday before the Blorptube Anime Night’s “main feature”. Twilight Sparkle being voiced by a racist freak is apro-fucking-pos in hindsight, since rewatching MLP:FiM now — certainly its first season — the like implicit (or explicit) racism towards non-pony sapients, and sometimes between different types of ponies, is just fucking everywhere. And sometimes racism towards real groups of people, too! Zecora, the zebra character, is clearly based on these stereotypes of African witch doctors.

So my analysis of Equestria as being a settler-colony, and the three main pony “tribes” as being roughly analogous to English, French, and Spanish-speaking settler groups in Turtle Island (or other internal divisions within settlerdom elsewhere), I feel does add a lot to the experience. Like on the one hand the show isn’t nearly as innocent as it used to feel, but on the other hand it’s a lot more interesting, to put it that way.

But even putting all that aside, there’s still some sweet moments and some funny moments, some catchy songs… And there’s also a few moments where the characters are just like jerks for no reason. But all in all it’s still a blast to rewatch, especially with friends who either haven’t watched it in a long time or who have never watched it before.