Holy shit can’t believe what has happened to this franchise after the phenomenal season 1.
The manga has more animation than the fucking anime. It’s crazy out there.
JC Staff is just not a very good studio. Or, I should say, JC Staff is not up to the standard of Madhouse who did Season 1 and have almost never made a bad show ever.
The S tier studios of the industry are Trigger, Madhouse, KyoAni and Bones. The A tier studios are Mappa, Wit, Ufotable, Orange. Everyone else produces really mixed results.
JC Staff will never ever ever meet the standards that Madhouse puts out. They’re just world class. If you gave the Frieren manga to JC Staff instead of Madhouse nobody would even be talking about Frieren, yet given to Madhouse it successfully knocked Full Metal Alchemist off the top of all ratings after sitting at #1 for 15 years.
JC Staff have never financially recovered from that one joke in Joshiraku
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
JC Staff is a slop factory that is able to produce a large quantity of anime fast and cheap. I’m sure to production committees they’re seen as a semi reliable option but they’re not going to be able to produce something above serviceable when they have so much on their plate and are under tight deadlines.
A-1 is also an A tier studio imo. They have been making bangers for years now. Really excited about Fate/Strange Fake.
Yeah maybe I’m being a little harsh on them. I really feel like Darling in the FranXX really shows just how leagues apart they are from Trigger though because you can instantly spot the scenes and episodes directed by Trigger compared to A1 and it really shows them up. If Trigger made that whole show it would be enormously better.
A-1 upped their game in the last 5-6 years. Before that they had quality issues across shows. Now they mostly have production issues like with Nier.
They also take a lot of projects which makes gap between seasons too big. 86 suffers from it and Solo Leveling will too afaik because they don’t have slots.
I’m just grateful that it was OPM that got shafted instead of Mob Psycho.
It’s disappointing, but there’s plenty of other good action anime out there, especially if you aren’t just looking at whatever came out in the last three seasons.
It really is weird how arbitrary what gets good adaptations and what gets shafted is. Like how Solo Leveling is some completely empty, derivative slop published in the literally-unreadable long-strip format that reads like a OPM/Hunter x Hunter fanfic, but it got two seasons so far of absurdly lavish and incredibly stylish sakuga action scenes where between the quality of its visuals and its fantastic soundtrack the complete absence of writing or characters who are more present than the scenery doesn’t get in the way of it being an enjoyable slop spectacle, while OPM started out strong and seemed very well received with favorable comparisons between it and JoJo’s writing and has just gotten shit on since.
Solo Levelling being adapted and not the plethora of actually amazing webtoon pisses me off
Atleast they’re making ORV. Although I’ll be incredibly mad if it doesn’t get the same treatment as SL.
It also makes sense to adapt Solo Leveling. It’s the most popular manhwa and pulled millions of people into reading manhwa(including me). And it definitely has opened the gates for other manhwa to be adapted by Japanese studios.
What’s ORV?
What the fuck they’re turning that into an anime?
How many seasons will it even take lmao, that’s like 5 seasons of content, thought they adapted tower of god and that has 800 chapters
Omniscient Reader is easily the best long running manhwa and it’s amazing story wise. Makes sense to adapt it.
Part of it literally just the skills of the studios and random events. Not every anime can be produced by the cream of the crop studios, and studios have to bid for the right to adapt shows.
JC staff in particular are not known for sakuga type animation. They are known making mid tier adaptions and butchering the source material.
They are known making mid tier adaptions and butchering the source material.
I wanted to call this unfair because the JC Staff stuff I’ve personally seen has almost always been good enough to finish, but looking back on it I can only really call Azumanga Daioh a favorite, and the rest has been… Yeah, middle-tier, but not necessarily “butchering”, right?
From a strictly animation perspective JC Staff are middle-tier as well, but mid-tier animation is perfectly serviceable for certain genres, just not OPM.
The best thing JC Staff ever made was the konosuba movie and the fact that they butchered small parts of it actually improves konosuba because it’s just the kind of show where you can make something really shitty and have the characters themselves fourth wall break about how shitty it is and the audience will laugh at that. It can get away with being a hot mess in places because the characters are all a hot mess.
Is that the “best thing” in the sense of specifically the best animation quality, or just best in all aspects overall? Because if it’s best in all aspects overall, I’m surprised that’s your pick.
Execution
Is basically to say all aspects overall, right? Though to be honest it took me a minute after seeing this comment before I realized you were saying “best thing in the sense of the execution of the work” instead of “I sentence Erika3sis to death by execution for writing this comment” — don’t ask me why my brain went with that as the first interpretation, it’s 4 AM and I just suddenly saw the word “execution” in my inbox with no context lol
“Butchering” might be too harsh because they don’t do that all the time. But I’ve seen it happen a few times and got annoyed with it.
Well, the first thing to do normally is completely disregard critical reception and consider it in terms of mass market appeal. Solo Leveling is trash, but it’s an extremely popular manhwa (that you would be hard-pressed to call unreadable when it is a very popular format) that has all the hallmarks of the chuuni power fantasy bullshit of many other popular series. Also, for some reason, manhwa adaptations seem to be much higher-effort even though the big ones are often trash (like God of Highschool, though I thought Tower of God, which is even more of a HxH fanfic, was okay).
I do kind of wonder if there’s some larger influence with the wave of “Cool Korea” media in the past several years, which is a very deliberate effort. Like, I’m not saying the RoK directly funded the production of Solo Leveling, but I do wonder if there’s more to it all. I’m also not assigning a moral value to this, it’s sort of whatever beyond the baseline abusiveness of the idol industry, which I don’t think is much better in Japan.
Jojo has lots of problems and I think it’s reasonable to find Phantom Blood almost all lame (aside from Dio being funny sometimes), but I would still compare it positively to OPM. OPM has some good sequences, e.g. I’ll always love the Mumen Rider vs Deep Sea King fight, but I don’t think the writing is all that special beyond the central gimmick of using ironic distancing to disarm people so they get sincerely invested. None of this is relevant to how they are funded though, because Jojo never got OPM season 1 level animation, or maybe not until Golden Wind, and it also had more of a dedicated fan base that was invested way beyond what was already out, with several hundred more chapters to cover, which has never been true of OPM because people only really follow the Murata comic, which has been only a little ahead of the anime, which I think represents a somewhat different investment prospect, because who knows if the manga will just go on indefinite hiatus? And whoops, it did!
I do kind of wonder if there’s some larger influence with the wave of “Cool Korea” media in the past several years, which is a very deliberate effort. Like, I’m not saying the RoK directly funded the production of Solo Leveling, but I do wonder if there’s more to it all. I’m also not assigning a moral value to this, it’s sort of whatever beyond the baseline abusiveness of the idol industry, which I don’t think is much better in Japan.
The trick I think is to foster it at every level.
Consider for example how the UK excels in sports despite being a small country. It fosters sports at every level, before school, in school, outside school, etc.
If we look at “Cool Japan” a notable element of the entire culture that they export comes from manga. Where do manga artists come from? They’re fostered by manga clubs in schools, which are adequately funded by the school club funds, with a teacher offering insight and leadership to the club where necessary. The same can be said for music clubs, photography clubs, art clubs, etc. The foundational pillar of Cool Japan is putting state funds into creating people with an interest in these things, some of which will go on eventually to become creators without ever really realising the state did anything.
I don’t know about the RoK, but I would guess that they’re doing something to fund the production of people who are interested in becoming idols, and they’re doing some things with their manhwa to foster the creation of more people interested in it.
There’s also just the use of media to push it. Sometimes good art exists but never gets anywhere because it has no visibility. Use of media can bridge this gap by pushing to expose it.
Side note: Personally I think socialist states should reconsider investment in sports and consider using the investment in cultural products instead. I think it has higher impact, and I would argue that sports foster individualist competition rather than collectivist cooperation. All of that investment in competitive sport could instead be turbo charging Cool China or Cool Cuba or whatever.
I think it depends on the sport and on the cultural products, because team sports that emphasize teamwork are a real thing, and even individual competitions like chess can function as an expression of the work of countless people (see the dominance of the USSR for a long period), and cultural products can be incredibly reactionary or otherwise counter-productive. I think the main merit the latter has is the necessarily-greater range of expression, perhaps along with not being able to just be culturally perverted by accusations of doping.
an expression of the work of countless people (see the dominance of the USSR for a long period)
Is it benefiting the country on the worldstage or is it just pleasing the citizens because they feel like #1 from the wins?
Sports feel more like a useful internal distraction than a way to manipulate the country’s image or popularity abroad. Sports in the UK distract the population from their problems, and members of the country winning the sports makes them feel national pride. These are internal benefits rather than external.
If a country is stable internally and doesn’t really need these internal benefits, the investment would be better applied to the external.
idk, I think it was a pretty compelling demonstration from the USSR, and I’m not a Soviet. Systematizing and collaborating are good, and it’s good to have people trained on that basis knock down the western wunderkind.
I do still favor cultural exports, of course, though sports itself can kind of be that too, as seen from the soft power of America exporting baseball and basketball around the world.
Yeah socialists are going to say that because we’re susceptible to nationalism brain when it comes to socialist states. What works internally on their citizens works externally on socialists who see it as part of the global communist project. That’s not necessarily beneficial though, socialists are on their side anyway.
soft power of America exporting baseball and basketball around the world.
I uhh, don’t get that impression that much. I feel like American sports are largely niche everywhere except like Japan and a handful of other places. With that said football (soccer) was probably a British Empire export so there’s something to what you’re saying about the sport itself being a useful export. Sports themselves are basically videogames before videogames became popular, videogames are more valuable exports now in my opinion, they’re doing more for Japan than sports ever would.
Chinese animation industry has been popping off. To be hero x and lord of the mysteries were incredible shows that released this year. China also has a monopoly on coomer gachas.
Yes To Be Hero X is great but I think what’s missing is content that is more distinctly Chinese. To Be Hero X could have been made by a Japanese studio with absolutely nothing changed to make it fit. There’s nothing distinct within the show that identifies it as Chinese.
Good thing is that China has a fuck ton of popular Web novels that would become popular overseas if made in donghua.
With the recent success of donghua, there is a good chance to see a lot more stuff coming out. The problem is about promotion. Chinese studios seem to still not be promoting things heavily in overseas markets.
Like, I’m not saying the RoK directly funded the production of Solo Leveling, but I do wonder if there’s more to it all.
Subsidizing it to try to shift some of their animation industry from just quietly being the backbone of the broader animation industry to having their own original series does seem plausible. I almost wonder if there’s not something similar going on with the Chinese animation industry, with how absolutely gorgeous things like To Be Hero X (which looks better than Solo Leveling and is also very well written with like an actual story and characters and themes, when Solo Leveling has none of those things) are.
Jojo has lots of problems and I think it’s reasonable to find Phantom Blood almost all lame (aside from Dio being funny sometimes), but I would still compare it positively to OPM.
I just remember seeing people praise OPM season one as being a standout in the way jojo was in terms of creativity and how fight scenes played out. I don’t think that actually holds up fully, but I do get why someone would argue that it was closer to something like jojo than to the generic shonen slop of the 00s.
Watch Lord of the Mysteries. It’s really good looking and has a very good plot. The first 3 episodes are very rushed but it’s great after that.
I’ve heard that it looks fantastic but is hard to follow/doesn’t make sense if one hasn’t read the books its adapting.
Definitely True for the first few episodes but it’s great by the end.
I’ll check it out at some point then. I still need to finish watching To Be Hero X.
I’ve watched a minute and 30 seconds so far and, no exaggeration, without mouth flaps and motion tweening, there was fewer than 30 unique frames of animation.
I’d say it’s even a drop from season 2, which was already testing a lot of folks.
Edit: just watched second EP. It wasn’t as bad as the first, but still not great.
One Frame Man is never getting another good season
Time to become a mob psycho chad
To be fair end of season 1 was also the point the manga stopped being worth reading, they sadly never developed a second funny joke
Imo it’s more the transition from “monster of the week” to a long narrative that will take like 4-5 seasons to adapt. OPM is ultimately a gag manga and the former is just a better format for that.
this is how i also feel about the manga itself. I think murata really fucked it with saitama vs garou. Ill keep following the webcomic because ONE has yet to let me down
The manga has an entirely different problem going on. Muratas redraws have completely killed my interest in the manga. I flat out don’t know what’s cannon anymore and what’s not. The fucking ninja arc was so bad. The garou showdown was still miles better than whatever happened there.
Lol, I have to reread the last year at least once a year just to figure out what’s canon nowadays. Still enjoying it but it is confusing.
In what manner would you say he fucked it? I don’t like the fact that redraws happen generally, but I like both versions of Garou being resolved. I don’t know why, but I found the idea of talking Garou down to be really nice when the central conceit of the manga is that Saitama can defeat anyone with violence (except God for now), but I also really appreciated the maximal absurdity of the canon fight, seeing goofy jokes drawn with such incredible detail and scale. It’s also funny imo that the logical conclusion of the arbitrarily strong guy fighting an arbitrarily strong rival is that nothing makes sense and reality is tearing at the seams.
That said, I kind of also think Garou was lame in all incarnations and I’m curious about what others think.
I ADORE the webcomic resolution to garou and i feel that its abscense in the manga makes the story so much weaker. And it does not help that murata was going to draw some version of it and then retconned it!
(though this still wouldnt of mitigated the need for time travel and “our” garou not learning the lesson.That’s seriously such a good panel. Iconic even after being retconned.
I just hope Double Kick Woman gets a better adaption.
im imagining a luchador magical girl who does flying drop kicks
deleted by creator
