Extra Anime Update

I didn’t think I’d be making the next update this quickly, but a lot of developments happened pretty fast after I posted the last one.

But first let me mention some things I should have mentioned last time.  On the subject of watching older Anime I’d watched Scrapped Princess, Fuuka and the Wiseman’s Pupil Isekai, and all of the Danganronpa Anime.  And the subject of things I waited for the Dubs I should have included Lupin III vs Cat’s Eye and Lupin Zero

Lupin III vs Cat’s Eye has dropped and I was a bit disappointed, this CG ANimation style didn’t work with these character designs, and many aspects of the plot I found frustrating.  But it has increased in eventually trying to watch the original Cat’s Eye, but I’m getting too busy with current Anime right now.

I decided to finish the season of Fruit of Evolution and start season 2, it’s a fun show.

Then the Dub for Gundam Witch From Mercury started with no warning, I was caught completely off guard.  It started with episode 0 so the show proper won’t begin till the first Sunday of February, the same day the new PreCure should start.

At any rate for the time being I’ll have at least one new Anime to watch every day or the week.

Anime Updates Gaiden 2023 Begins

For the first update of 2023 I shall begin by discussing the Dubs I’m watching on HIDIVE which are actually from winter 2022.

The Eminence in Shadow is interesting, the way it was described on YouTube by Gigguk and Mother’s Basement isn’t wrong but it does take its time building up.  Tonally speaking it’s taking itself pretty seriously.

Each of the first 3 episodes feels like a pilot to a completely different show, then 3-5 feel like a proper miniarc.

I keep considering dropping in, not because it’s bad or anything, lots of shows I dropped I don’t actually see anything wrong with, it’s simply a matter of keeping my particular interest.  And thinking about that every Monday has made me realize that it’s kind of harder to make the decision to drop a show when you’re going week by week.  If the next episode won’t be for a week anyway I figure I might as well leave on Watching and see how I feel then, and then since it only takes under half an hour I typically have nothing better to do.  Deciding to Binge a show meanwhile could mean devoting the rest of the day to that show.

Reincarnated as a Sword has also been consistently entertaining but I won’t call it one of the best Isekai of 2022.

Akiba Maid Wars I’ve only seen 2 episodes of, it took longer to start, but it’s fun, I’m enjoying it.

Now onto the proper Crunchyroll Dubs of 2023.

Sugar Apple Fairy Tale had an interesting pilot, but I’m not sure I’ll keep watching.

Rougo Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for My Retirement is a rare example of a show I’d actually read some of the Manga version of already, and this pilot lived up to my expectations.  I’m merely concerned it may wind up rushing things going forward.

The Ice Guy Anime I wasn’t able to complete the pilot for, it looks very well made, but once I could tell it was basically just a Gag Manga I tuned out.

Ningen Fushin feels like it’s trying to be the Anime Vox Machina, I didn’t like Vox Machina but I do like Anime.  I’m confused on whether or not this is an Isekai or not, the Idol being present isn’t explained in the first episode.

Bofuri season 2 started with a Christmas episode which was interesting.

Looking forward to shows I haven’t started yet, more confirmed Crunchyroll simuldubs I may start but I don’t know how for certain, it depends if any catch my interest.

Shows I’m still holding out hope will get Simuldubbed include Magical Revolution, Tsundere Villainess and Spy Classroom. 

Starting January 28th a new main plotline arc of Detective Conan will start so I may actually be consistently following it week by week for a while.

When February starts I’ll watch Detective Conan: The Culprit Hamazawa once they’re up on Netflix.  

And I’ll at least try to watch the new PreCure subbed which is called Hirogaru Sky! Pretty Cure, set to debut on February 5th.

Front Loaded Fan-Service is another reason for the 3 episode rule.

I've kind of known this for awhile, but it became prominent in my recent viewing of Fuuka.

Fuuka was a show I'd tried to watch back in 2017 but was turned off by how much fanservice the first episode had.  But lately as Boochi has increased my interest in Anime about Anime Girls starting bands I wanted to give it another shot.  And as I watched the first episode again I really got the subtle vibe that this is not a show designed to be built around that kind of thing, but you have to be pretty Genre Savvy to get that vibe the way I did.

And indeed episode 2 already has way less, episode 3 is the Beach episode which getting that out of the way so early itself felt kind of interesting, and even more so that this Beach episode feels less Fanservicy than the episodes that proceeded it.  After that the fanservice is gone.

But it's frustrating enough in that first episode to effect the overall score.  If the first episode had been written differently I may well be willing to give this show a 10 out of 10.  It's rare for a show to make my eyes water and not get a 10/10, this show didn't get the full crying that Robotics;Notes or Umineko achieved but they did get moist.

It pisses me off that I can't give it a perfect score because of this massive issue right at the beginning that probably turned off many who could have enjoyed the rest of it.  So I gave it a 9/10.

This isn't the only time this happens but a lot of others are more muted.  The first episode of K-On has that shot of Yui landing on her @$$ that is unlike anything else the show ever does.  I remember a Podcast talking about Manabi Straight saying it's first episode has some kinda creepy moments the rest of the show never has.

With the first season of the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha franchise the fanservice of the early episodes does disappear but it does take more then 3 episodes to happen.

Update May 2024: Weirdly enough I'll even add Prisma Illya season 1 here.  Most of the big Fanservice moments people meme on from Prisma Illya aren't from season 1.  The first episode features an elaborate sequence the likes of which will not happen again in season 1.

Superman and Overpowered Anime Protagonists

For the last several years there has been so much discourse in the Anime Communality about how a protagonist being "overpowered" ruins any sense of "tension" or "stakes", this is most overbearing in Isekai discourse but it's relevant to a lot of modern not actually Isekai Fantasy shows and VRMMO based shows.  Also the Magic Academy genre which I'm indeed not into but not for this reason.

As a modern Anime Fan who's actually been into American Superhero Comics for longer it reminds me of Superman discourse.  But with Superman few take it seriously anymore, or at least anyone spouting it unironically can be safely assumed to have not actually tried to read many Superman Comics.

Thing is I don't always like how Superman fans go about defending him.  One Twitter argument I had involved a person saying the best Superman stories always involve him fighting someone stronger then him.  And I'm like no, plenty of great stories come from challenging Superman with situations you can't simply punch your way out of.  Superman The Movie never has Superman fight any super powered beings and it worked out great.  The earliest Siegel and Shuster stories also were not about fights.

However one thing I think Superman fans need to be willing to admit more often is that sometimes Superman being overpowered is the point.  Sometimes it is fun to simply see a normal criminal in over their head get easily taken care of.  Sometimes it's fun to see the people hijacking a Plane find out Lois Lane is on it and realize they ____ed up.  And sometimes it's fun to simply see bullets bounce off Superman's chest.

And that's the comparison I also make to the iconic scene in episode 4 of Sword Art Online when a bunch of bad guys start slashing away at Kirito but we see that he's so much higher leveled them them that he's recovering HP faster then they can deal damage.  That moment is in so many SAO hate videos cited as the moment they knew the show would just be a mindless power fantasy with no tension or stakes.  But to me it's simply the VRMMO Anime version of bullets bouncing off Superman's chest.  It's also an early one off episode where Kirito isn't even serving as the protagonist in this context, it has nothing to do with the "stakes" of the main story.

A lot of the Memes about Superman in the Silver Age are not even based on anything in the main Superman books, they're mostly the antics that went on in the Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane comics and occasionally Supergirl's solo stories.  In modern Anime terms those are the equivalent to a Slice of Life Gaiden(Side story) spin off show like Slime Diaries.  But there's a lot of Isekai or Isekai adjacent Anime that are just Slice of Life in a fantasy setting to begin with like 300 Slimes.  I think the reason so many people didn't get In Another World With My Smartphone is that it was essentially one of those but before people got used to their presence, in 2022 we had Land of Leadale from the same director which was treated with a bit more respect.

Batman v Batman v Batman

I want to start off this post with a Confession, back in the era of the Nolan Batman movies being the culturally dominant take on Batman I was among those who chose to express my fandom of those movies in part by hating on Tim Burton's Batman movies, saying those were acceptable when that was all we had but now Batman's finally being done right.

I wasn't as virulent about it as some, I never denied that I'd enjoyed them and I even enjoyed re-watching them at the time.  But I was definitely one of those who felt the Nolan movies were more legitimately Batman because of what I personally prioritized in the Batman Comics that I personally liked the most.

So I'm Sorry, this is my Apology to the Burton movies and their fans who had to deal with a lot of crap from idiots like 19-27 year old me.  

I still have my criticisms of those movies and they may actually be relevant to a future post of this blog, but they are ultimately very good movies and legitimate takes on Batman.

But now here we are a decade later a new Batman Reboot is out and the cycle is repeating with people coming out of the woodwork about how Nolan's Batman movies were always cringe and embarrassed to be what they were and now Matt Reeves has finally made a Legit Batman movie.  And now it's like Karma, I'm in the position of those I was once annoying to.

I don't hate The Batman, I respect a lot of what it does.  But it is in my current mental rankings my least favorite Live Action movie containing Batman characters, and the gap between it and second lowest is pretty significant.  I actively like every other live action movie with Batman characters in it that exists, including each versions of movies with more then one version, even the ones that were contentious when they were new.  And there are now a lot of those, it's kind of doubled since the time when Rises was the most recent.

One thing that amuses me is how they keep hyping up finally getting Batman as a Detective, and I recall how that was literally one of the hooks for The Dark Knight as well, the little subplot about the Bullet, and even when I was at my most blindly loyal to The Dark Knight I kind of had to admit that was it's most underwhelming aspect.  In The Batman he fails at being a Detective, every single time he doesn't figure out anything till it's too late.  We still don't have a good Batman Detective film, if you wanna see what one would look like watch a Detective Conan movie.

What this movie is more then any other Batman movie is Film Noir Batman, accept as I've said in a prior post that is undermined by the big action movie ending.

Trashing Nolan's movies in contrast to The Batman feels kind of sillier to me then trashing Burton's take to hype up Nolan's because Burton and Nolan absolutely had stylistically different approaches and because of David S. Goyer Nolan's movies drew on more actual Comics.  The Batman is largely drawing plotwise on the same specific Comics as Nolan's movies with a mostly similar gritty and realistic style.  And as I've also said before the entire premise feels like what online fans were imagining Nolan's 3rd movie would be before Bane was announced, people wanted it to be The Riddler doing some Se7en/Zodiac/Jigsaw knock off BS, a lot of those Fan Trailers are still on YouTube I think, and I was into them at the time but when I got older I saw how cringe that premise would have been, but now The Batman did exactly that and people unironically love it, though a couple people have done YT videos on why it's bad actually.

There are more reasons to prefer certain Batman movies over others then just recencey bias/generational bias.  A lot of the people who preferred Burton's take even when that opinion was at it's least popular liked that it felt like the earliest Golden Age Comics.  Nolan's movies, or the first two at least, while drawing specific plot points from other eras and writers, in their overall vibes and tone were like Denny O'Niel comics of the 70s, that's why O'Niel was chosen to write the Novelization of Begins.  While The Batman's stylistic vibes feel like they are going for the Scott Snyder audience, which is perhaps key to why it doesn't appeal to me, I've always hated Scott Snyder's Batman stories, even Court of Owls I never liked.

TheOverlySarcastic people went on about how obvious it was to them Nolan hadn't read any Comics till working on Rises.  And that's just laughable to anyone who actually remembers that era, how Nolan and Goyer were constantly talking about exactly what Comics they read, they talked about their love of O'Niel's stuff from the 70s, and his Man Who Falls story from the 80s, but also how elements were being taken from Year One and The Long Halloween.

Breadtube has long been criticizing the politics in Nolan's Batman movies, but The Batman is ultimately the same, it includes some systemic corruption as a plot device but in the end says ultimately most cops are good, it says the Police simply need to be reformed not abolished.  Both are at their core ultimately Centrist like most Superhero movies.  But at least TDK has an explicit rejection of Hobesianism that an Anarchist viewer can cling to.

The fact that Nolan's movies bent the No Kill rule has always been a little controversial, but at least the No Kill rule was part of the story.  In The Batman he doesn't kill but that doesn't mean anything, no one was trying to get him to kill or arguing that he should.  I'll take it actually being part of the story but having some holes in the execution over it never coming up at all.

All of that aside, I again do like aspects of The Batman, the performances are all good, and I think there's potential for it's sequels to be better.  But right now it's the cinematic representation of the Batman Universe I have the least fondness for.

Mostly this post is a cautionary tale, I want fans of Battinson to be prepared for what criticism their film will receive when the pendulum swings again, and to maybe stop themselves from going too far down this Nolan hating road, because we aren't at the height of where it could be yet, it was in The Dark Knight's year that the anti Burton stuff reached it's apex.

My tastes have changed enough since the Nolan era that those films are less my ideal take on Batman then they used to be, but as overall films I still like them the best even over the Animated Batman movies.  However my favorite Batman actor going off the performance itself is Ben Affleck now, especially in Suicide Squad and the Theatrical Cut of Justice League.