This is actually a Fall 2022 anime review but then I realized that I only watched a handful of shows this entire year and the only 2 shows of note OF THE ENTIRE YEAR that I can think of came from the Fall season so... Happy New Year, here's my entirely opinionated and overconfident assertions of what's Good(tm). There's a couple of shows I've heard good things about that I didn't watch (Summer Time Rendering, Call of the Night, Lycoris Recoil, Akiba Maid War, Isekai Ojisan, Ya Boy KongMing, Mob Psycho Season 3) either from lack of interest or time (in Mob's case the latter). And I watched a couple of good shows that are pretty uninteresting to talk about, either because they're sequels or that they are just solidly competent without being anything notable (Tatami Time Machine Blues, Kaguya-sama, Demon Slayer, SpyxFamily, My Dress up Darling) - so I wouldn't call this post exhaustive nor well-researched, but since when has that stopped someone from vomiting their thoughts onto the internet?

So I guess the runners-up to the two shows that are my AOTY are Cyperpunk: Edgerunners, which was basically Studio Trigger saving CD Project by doing everything worth doing with Cyberpunk as both a franchise and a genre- namely, criticizing capitalism in the most emotionally devastating way possible; and Gundam: The Witch from Mercury for continuing Gundam's anti-fascist sci-fi legacy into the 21st Century, AND for finally making the franchise explicitly gay AF.

Anyway, without further ado:

Chainsaw Man

The Chainsaw Man anime adaptation is pure kino.

That's both a good and bad thing, so I need to explain. And to do that I need to gush about the manga now.

CSM's manga is, no hyperbole, art. Not some ironic postmodern conception of "comic book as art a.k.a the graphic novel" (although you could make the argument that it's a postpostpostmodern deconstruction, but we're just going to get high huffing our own farts)- I'm just saying this is a piece of media that's going to have staying power. That means something. That when future archeologists dig this thing up, they'll take one look and know what our entire deal is as a civilization, and probably why we ended up nuking ourselves or some shit.

They'll know, because CSM is a story about how much life sucks under late-stage capitalism, about how alienating and dehumanizing being divorced from the fruits of your labour is, how that breaks people, about the lengths the powerful will go to to keep this system of control in place by dangling the threat of everything being taken away from us unless we comply above our heads, and about how despite all this the one sliver of hope we have is the bonds we form with the people we care about.

In a lot of way's it's this generations Evangelion, although that comparison isn't exact.

And the manga manages that by leveraging it's medium in ways that are creative and genre-pushing, by doing things on the page that people genuinely haven't seen before.

So the question is, how do we adapt that to the big screen? And the anime's director's answer was that he wasn't going to.

The CSM anime isn't Tatsuki Fujimoto's Chainsaw Man as it appears on the page, because perhaps such a thing cannot exist on the tv screen. It's Ryu Nakayama's interpretation of the CSM manga- where he filters the manga author's love of cinema into cinema, putting the directorial lenses of Tarantino, Raimi, Fincher, etc. behind the camera- as a conscious, deliberate choice. Whether you agree with that choice is one thing (I personally don't, and probably all 5 other manga readers watching the show weekly on Hexbear didn't either), but I can respect it, and the resulting show is something that definitely feels different- animation as though it was live-action, cinema instead of cartoon- another ironic layer atop.

So this show was basically made for anyone sick of the usual anime bullshit. It looks and sounds good, and thanks to the source material it hits hard on really mature themes and doesn't sugar coat things. It's pure kino.

BUT! But, as good as the show is, it can't compare to the source material, in the way that the manga can let images breath and soak and stick with you forever, even when you put the book down. And maybe there was no way for any adaptation of CSM to do that, so props to the anime staff for doing their best and creating something just as valid and artistically accomplished- but if you like the show, please give the manga a read if you can.

Bocchi the Rock!

Where do I even begin with this.

I think going into the fall season everyone had written off this show as another moe "Cute Girls Doing Cute Things" do-nothing slice of life marketed at that awkward demographic of both pre-teen girls and pedophiles, sorry, "lolicons". After all, "Manga Time Kirara 4-koma adaptation about a girl band" already conjures up images of K-On! and everything that entails.

But calling this show just another slice of life girl band show like K-On! is...

Ok, you know what? We start with K-On!

K-On! is a wonderfully comfy show about how you need to enjoy every second of life because eventually we all have to grow up and experience the bitter-sweetness of graduating from high-school. Everything is sugarcoated to hell and diabetes inducing, but that's fine because it was 2009 and we thought we had a future and life wasn't going to be this hard.

(This is also why racist dipshits put up K-On! profile pics on social media because they gravitate to that show's idealized version of the past, but that honestly isn't the fault of the show- the ultimate message is that we all have to move on. But right wingers aren't exactly media literate, so whatever. I digress.)

BTR isn't K-On! It doesn't sugarcoat things (for the most part. We're not getting to CSM levels of darkness, it's still a comedy about a girl band). It gets how terrifying high school actually is. It gets how hard wanting to make art is, how terrifying putting yourself out there is. It gets how lonely it can be wanting people to see you and love you, but at the same time being afraid of being seen because it means that people can hurt you.

The main character has crippling social anxiety. She constantly catastrophizes the worst possible outcomes over the simplest things. She can barely function outside her house, and she's really lonely.

And her dream is to be a rock star because she thinks that's how an introverted person like her can be popular and make friends, to the point where she practices guitar for 2 years in the hopes she'll get into a band because she's still a dumb teenager who clearly didn't think things through.

And yeah, that's the basic set-up of the show. It's the irony of her dream juxtaposed against her reality, and that instinct to laugh when we look in the mirror and realize just how cringe we are because otherwise we'd cry. And although Bocchi's catastrophizing is the lynchpin of the show's humor, it never punches down at her. All her fears have some grounding in some trauma from her past (real or imagined), it's just that her personality twists the worst possible outcomes into the funniest, most ridiculous extremes, and her growth as a character is literally about her fighting her own worst instincts. (She also doesn't miraculously somehow becomes "fixed" at the end, it's a slow painful process. But what she gains for putting herself out there is a support network of friends who love her for who she is and want to support her- and look, I know not everyone gets that support no matter how hard they try, but there's hope in escapism right?)

And the thing is- the people adapting the show clearly love the source material and are having fun, because they've poured everything into this adaptation. If the CSM anime is pure cinema, BTR is pure animation- they break out everything from live action footage to CG to a fucking 3d zoetrope to convey just how deep of a break from reality Bocchi is suffering through. And mixed-media absurdist meta-humor isn't exactly new to anime, Nichijou and Pop-Team Epic both did it before, but BTR does it's ironic shitposting in service to the story- which makes it's humour incredibly sincere.

But that's only half the story, because the other half is the music- because BTR is basically a giant love-letter to classic J-Rock bands like Asian-Kung Fu Generation, and the show goes above and beyond to portray the musical performances. You'll know it when you hear it, but you can basically hear each character in the performance reflected in their instrument musically- which wraps around into the story because each characters instrument reflects their personality and role in the story, and you can literally hear their individual character setbacks and triumphs as they grow as characters and as a band.

And that's it, that's why the show is so good. It's a neat little story about personal growth lavished with such incredible love and attention to detail that we as the audience know exactly what headspace the main character is in, and can empathize with her on an incredibly deep level, and laugh along with her at her own misfortunes, because her misfortunes are our misfortunes.

And there we go! If you're only going to watch 2 shows from last year, I'm personally recommending Chainsaw Man and Bocchi the Rock!

  • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I will give my review on Berserk the manga and anime, the only anime/manga I consumed this year: It's very good and it's such a shame the author died without finishing it. I'd go so far as to say it's right up there with all time fantasy greats like LOTR or Conan.

      • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Yeah I'm watching the movies from the golden age arc right now, on movie two, and I'm totally underwhelmed. I was underwhelmed by the 97 anime too and I hear the 2016/2017 anime adaptation of the millennium falcon empire arc stinks, so that's disappointing. It's like every other anime out that got countless good adaptations while Berserk was done dirty. And I agree, it might just be the best fantasy work ever written/illustrated, it's certainly a contender. The world Miura created is fantastic and I just wish there was so much more of it.

  • barrbaric [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    For me Cyberpunk Edgerunners is the easy pick for AotY. It was so good it gaslit people into thinking the game is worth playing.

    Other Stuff I Watched:

    • Kaguya S3: 9/10, easily the runner up. Yes, it's just more Kaguya, but also, have you considered that it's more Kaguya? Probably the easiest show to watch on this list: during a re-watch when the dub came out, I finished it in 2 days.
    • Spy x Family: 9/10, it's popular for a reason.
    • Bocchi The Rock: 8/10. I have mild social anxiety but I didn't really identify or resonate with Bocchi, idk. She is neither #Relatable nor is she just like me fr fr. It was still a fun ride, and surprisingly experimental with its animation. The only "music anime" I've watched where I didn't hate the musical performances.
    • Mob Psycho S3: 8/10. Felt like a weak ending to the franchise, idk. Still good, but not great.
    • Chainsaw Man: 9/10. Haven't finished it yet, but it's one hell of a ride. That said it is way too horny to be in Shonen Jump, wtf.
    • Devil is a Part-Timer S2: 5/10. Nowhere near as good as the first season. A pretty big disappointment.

    Older Stuff I Watched:

    • Samurai Champloo: 7/10. It has some high highs (the fight on the suspension bridge, the baseball episode) but it also has some incredibly low lows (how many times do we need to have a storyline about women forced into sex work?)
    • Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-Kun: 8/10. A solid anti-rom com that I enjoyed and wish there was more of.
    • Your Name: 7/10. I respect what it was doing but most of it didn't land for me. Still enjoyable.
    • Way of the Househusband: 7/10. The animation (or lack thereof) brings it down, but still pretty good.
    • Code Geass: 5/10. It's about 50% good and 50% the greatest cringe you'll ever see. Loses points for horniness ("We have designed Kallen's mech so that the only possible in-cockpit camera angles are suggestive") and having ridiculous anime poltics.
    • Ghost in the Shell (the movie): 5/10. I get that it set the stage for a lot of stuff that came later, but imo the story told in the movie itself wasn't very interesting.
    • Psycho Pass: 5/10. "Actually the 1984 big brother surveillance state works 99.999% of the time, and only monsters would want to fight against it". At least it was correct that cops won't fight against the system.
    • Moriarty the Patriot: 5/10. I kept yelling at the screen for Moriarty to read Marx. It keeps building up that there'll be a confrontation between Moriarty and Holmes, but that doesn't ever happen. Still fun to see nobles get got.
    • Fruits Basket: 2/10. Super toxic. The main love interest is incredibly abusive to the main character, who also basically takes over as his (and some other people's) mom. There are multiple characters who warn her that she's going to burn out always being positive but this goes nowhere. In the movie the MC's father is revealed to be an actual pedophile. What the fuck.
    • Star Wars Visions: 5/10. A mix of some absolute dogshit and some just okay Star Wars anime. Can't recommend the whole thing, but maybe just watch The Elder.
    • Summer Wars: 3/10. This movie is a reactionary piece against capitalism and in favor of a return to feudalism. No, I will not elaborate. Also it's set in the "metaverse" but it is incredibly vague who is in charge of it. Like, some high-schoolers work as mods, but it's never said if it's government-run (and which government, because it works in other countries???) or private.
    • Revolutionary Girl Utena: 6/10. Too much repetition, though I do get that that's a budgetary/time constraint (hope you like watching Utena climb stairs for 2 minutes an episode). After the 1st duel, you could mostly skip the rest as the actual important content is the stuff surrounding the duel, and never the action itself. If I were grading on a curve, it would get bonus points for being gay when that wasn't allowed, but nowadays it's not gay enough.
    • booty [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      (hope you like watching Utena climb stairs for 2 minutes an episode)

      I unironically did like that. I recognized pretty early on how repetitive it was going to be and never skipped it because I was too busy jamming out :squirtle-jam:

    • Spike [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Summer Wars: 3/10. This movie is a reactionary piece against capitalism and in favor of a return to feudalism. No, I will not elaborate.

      I need to hear more!

      Ghost in the Shell (the movie): 5/10. I get that it set the stage for a lot of stuff that came later, but imo the story told in the movie itself wasn’t very interesting.

      Its definitely more of a theme driven movie more than story. Personally I think it's close to a masterpiece. Better visuals than most current anime and it's almost 30 years old

    • GVAGUY3 [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077 right now I will say, they made it into a playable game (which shows it needed two more years of development)

      • barrbaric [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Not for me lol, now it just crashes to blackscreen immediately.

      • booty [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I recently started watching a friend play through the game for the first time after I played it day 1. I am now thoroughly convinced that everyone who says they "made it into a playable game" or "fixed it" or whatever absolutely did not play it on day 1. The game is almost unchanged.

    • CriticalOtaku [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Not much to comment on your other stuff, but personally I love Psycho Pass because I always thought that the overall message of the show was that a system of power built on faulty premises (e.g. capitalism, racism, patriarchy) will self-reproduce itself and continue systematically even without conscious guidance unless it's torn down root and stem, and that naive liberals thinking that reform is possible only perpetuates those systems.

      spoiler

      Pretty sure the only character who's unequivocally in the right is Kogami, who basically ends the show in exile. The system only keeps Akane around because it knows she's powerless, and that her threats of reform are toothless.

      Of course, I'm only talking about S1, the other seasons can go burn in a trash fire.

      • Spike [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        She has the opportunity to destroy the system and doesn't, instead agreeing with the system to work for a better future under the system's rules. This is shown to be a happy ending and the correct decision

        • CriticalOtaku [he/him]
          hexagon
          ·
          2 years ago

          I don't think it is a happy ending tho, and I don't think the show portrays that. Any ending where Kogami and Akane can't be together can't be a happy ending, and the final shot of the show is Kogami on a boat on his way into exile reading "Swann's Way", which broadly is a book about how things change as time passes.

          • Spike [none/use name]
            ·
            2 years ago

            It's been a while since watching it, but I never got any sense that they were meant to be together. They defeat Makishima, confront the system then leave it to thrive, then time skip to where everything is wrapped up with optimism; Kogami is free, some characters get promotions, new recruits show up ready to go. It feels like everything has worked out for the characters, so I have to conclude the show wants me to be happy with the system

            • CriticalOtaku [he/him]
              hexagon
              ·
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              It's been a while since I watched it too, but my impression was that there was hella romantic tension between those two characters, and Akane really wanted to be with him so her failing to convince him not to kill Makashima is presented as this crushing personal failure- and because she's so invested in reform and non-violence she doesn't go with him into exile.

              Akane does get that entire speech on how she'll reform the system so that people aren't dependent on it, but as she walks out the Sybil System just laughs at her.

              Like, I'd argue that the timeskip is just there to show that the system perpetuated itself by subsuming it's remaining critics and continued- I don't think depiction is endorsement, and I don't think the takeaway is that liberalist reform is the way, rather I feel like it's a criticism of the kind of utilitarian thinking liberals use to justify postponing revolution- in that they think that revolution now will cause more suffering than just letting the system perpetuate and reforming it little by little. Like, I get that the ending is kinda presented as ambiguous but I honestly don't feel like the message was ambiguous at all.

              (The sequel seasons kinda just throw out any kind of coherent critique tho, so I just pretend they don't exist because otherwise nothing in the series makes sense.)

    • ClassUpperMiddle [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The only thing I didnt like about Cyberpunk game was that it was too short, I loved that game.

    • Cromalin [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Chainsaw Man: 9/10. Haven’t finished it yet, but it’s one hell of a ride. That said it is way too horny to be in Shonen Jump, wtf.

      you ain't seen nothing yet. the manga has a chapter that was horny enough it got cut from the app

      re: other stuff, completely out of order. utena isn't for everyone, but it's basically perfect imo. it takes those budgetary restraints and still manages to make each duel unique, with all sorts of background details and animation shortcuts that add thematic weight to the characters arcs. the surreal animation and setting make the mythic arcs of the characters really hit for me. my personal goat, though i get what you're talking about and why that doesn't work for you

      ghost in the shell is one that exists purely in the visuals for me. plot wise it's fairly generic, though compelling enough in its cyberpunk tranhuman philosophy, but the direction and animation is what makes it great

      nozaki-kun is one of my favorite comedies ever. not much to say about it other than the tomoda bit is an all time great, and i wish they'd make a season 2 because the manga has more good stuff

      have not watched code geass since high school, but my impression of it is that it's death note meets gundam, and i'm planning to rewatch it. if it lives up to that i'll probably like it more than you did. to be clear, death note is a bad series that is incredibly fun to watch for most of the runtime, and mixing that with cool mechs sounds like i'll like it a lot.

      • barrbaric [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        you ain’t seen nothing yet. the manga has a chapter that was horny enough it got cut from the app

        :ohnoes:

        My scale here is basically "How much did I want to watch the next episode?", with a 7 as "I don't need to make a mental effort to watch it" and Utena was something I had to push myself a bit to watch. This does hurt it (perhaps unjustly) because of length and having to put effort into parsing the surreal elements; I'm currently stumbling my way through Legend of the Galactic Heroes and though I'm enjoying it, I have to be in a similar kind of space to want to watch it.

        Something I forgot to add is that your explanation of Utena was 11/10 :rat-salute:

        As for Code Geass, I'd say it's like that for the first half, but then kind of loses steam in the second as the scale keeps expanding and it feels less grounded, while the revelations of the show's mysteries mostly fall flat, imo.

        • Cromalin [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          chainsaw man never gets gross horny, and it's always characterful, but it does very much have a very horny chapter spread that was too risque to be on a 13+ app. i really love it personally, but i can't say why until either you get to it or the anime does

          like i said, i get why utena might be a bit much. it's a lot to take in, it's fairly long, you certainly need to be in the right mindset for it to really hit, and even then it definitely isn't for everyone. and thank you for the kind words, i've written a lot about utena to try and express why it spoke to me so much and it's nice to hear i've gotten pretty decent at it :rat-salute-2:

          well i can see that. death note couldn't be consistently fun for 36 episodes, 50 is probably too much to ask for that sort of thing. but i liked the later death note stuff more than a lot of people so maybe i'll be kinder to this. that is how i remember feeling the first time as well though. admittedly i thought the first half was all really cool and epic, whereas now i'll be looking for funny bits, but i wouldn't be surprised if i felt the same after rewatching it

  • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    As soon as Suletta Mercury recovers from the emotional devastation of being left out, she's gonna fuck y'all up.

  • Ram_The_Manparts [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Great review of BTR, I really enjoyed it too and agree with basically everything you wrote.

    While I can't really put my finger on exactly why, I did feel like it lost some steam in the last two or three episodes though. But it's still a show that I know I will go back and watch again, and that's rare to me as a very casual anime viewer.

    • CriticalOtaku [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      Apparently the School Festival arc is a mini-arc in the manga between major arcs, which is why the story kinda ends in an awkward way, but Cloverworks does a lot of heavy lifting by showing Hitori's growth with all the callbacks, and anyway it kinda works to hammer home the theme that growing as a person is a continuous process that doesn't stop just because we have to end the show for now, and I kinda liked that about the ending.

  • CanYouFeelItMrKrabs [any, he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Bocchi The Rock has such refreshing creativity in its animation! Just in the first episode I knew we had something special on our hands

    • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Bocchi really goes above and beyond with the medium of animation. Claymation, stop motion, black and white, weird scribbles, it does it all!

  • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Bocchi the Rock was my favorite anime of the season. I gave up on Chainsaw Man partway through because the CG with that color grading just looks bad (also I'm not a big fan of gore). Any thoughts on Akiba Maid War?

  • very_poggers_gay [they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    before this year, the only anime i ever really watched was one punch man and devilman crybaby, which i both really enjoyed. this year, i watched neon genesis for the first time and it was amazing. end of evangelion is really something special, imo. i also watched perfect blue and paprika, and both were awesome, but hard to recommend on account of some content :/

    i also started reading berserk, which i've been loving. the art is awe-inspiring, and the world is so rich and mysterious and cool. i think i'm about 20 volumes deep, and i can't wait to see where the story goes. i'll be really sad once i reach the end, lol.

    i'm planning on reading 'Blame!' after that. I'm really drawn to stylish media with rich world-building and big themes of dystopia, doomerism, depression, humanity, etc.. Love spooky and mystic stuff too. If anyone has any recs based on that, they would be so deeply appreciated 🥺

    and thank you @CriticalOtaku for the write-up on chainsaw man! i was flip-flopping on if i should check it out, but you make both the manga and anime sound pretty great. :)

    • CriticalOtaku [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      'Knights of Sidonia' is written by the same guy who did 'Blame!', so it nails that kinda dystopian doomer aesthetic, altho I will say halfway thru it kinda descends into weird anime bullshit territory.

      Jujutsu Kaisen is a pretty good action series about mystic and spooky stuff.

      Edit: I guess those would be my recs haha, although honestly so far you've only seen the really, really good stuff, so you might as well continue and just finish up all Satoshi Kon's stuff (Paranoia Agent will probably be up your alley) and Masaaki Yuasa's stuff (director of Devilman Crybaby, go watch The Tatami Galaxy and Ping-Pong the Animation) and you'll probably be better off.

      More The Good Stuff recs: Mushishi, and Serial Experiments Lain

  • GVAGUY3 [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Everyone on this site should watch Gundam Witch from Mercury. It's good. Also watch the original Mobile Suit Gundam

  • jkfjfhkdfgdfb [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The main character has crippling social anxiety. She constantly catastrophizes the worst possible outcomes over the simplest things.

    she just like me

    she just like me

    • Comp4 [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I expected Akiba Maid War to be utter trash....but I kind of liked it ? Like im not saying it was amazing or anything but I was entertained. No idea if its currently overrated

  • Cromalin [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    aoty for me is probably g-witch. i'm risking a lot here, since the last original anime i watched week to week was wonder egg priority, but i have faith in this team. 12 episodes is enough that i don't think it's likely they'll shit the bed, unless they get a second season and they didn't plan for it.

    chainsaw man was disappointing as an adaptation for a lot of reasons, most of which you discussed, though it was still excellent. bocchi was great, but i don't feel like i have much to say about it. other than that. stone ocean was very good, but netflix fucked it badly. birdie wing was fun, spy x family was fun, i can't remember anything else i watched

    also g-witch got me into the rest of the franchise, and that's a big point in its favor, since 0079 is now one of my favorite shows of all time

    • CriticalOtaku [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      G-witch letting ppl rediscover OG Gundam :soviet-heart:

      Funny enough imo I think all Gundam stands on its own well enough, minus the continuity. But the 90s -2000s run (Wing, Seed, 00) which were the mainline shows most available to the west are also the weakest and where Gundam as a franchise got it's angsty anime bullshit reputation from... Which is a shame.

      (I'd go on a rant about how Gundam 00 is peak War on Terror brainworms but that's a story for another time)

      • GVAGUY3 [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Same with G-Witch causing me to check out OG Gundam. Almost done with Zeta which I have liked so far (asides from the sexism)

        • CriticalOtaku [he/him]
          hexagon
          ·
          2 years ago

          I'm honestly so glad G-Witch has made new fans. You've got a pretty clear run of good shows all the way till Turn A and late UC (Unicorn and Hathaway are :quagsire-pog: )

          • GVAGUY3 [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            2 years ago

            I'm almost done with Zeta and I am going to go through ZZ. I know it is more comedic at first. I might take a bit of a break before I start ZZ to catch up on some other stuff. I might check out some of the AU stuff, but I know that they definitely aren't as good. Hopefully G-Witch keeps this quality. I do think that IBO sounds really cool.

      • Cromalin [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        i'll get there eventually. i'm listening to the great gundam project and though i'm only on zeta i've read a bunch of the later episodes descriptions, and they've sound completely miserable for most of the last few years, minus when they covered turn a and some of the spinoffs from that timeframe

        so at least i'll have that to look forward to

        • CriticalOtaku [he/him]
          hexagon
          ·
          2 years ago

          Thank god Iron Blooded Orphans course corrected enough that we got G-Witch.

          • Cromalin [she/her]
            ·
            2 years ago

            yeah, i'm not looking forward to that nadir, i might just skip a bunch of the non uc stuff tbh

            • CriticalOtaku [he/him]
              hexagon
              ·
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              After Turn A you might as well just skip to IBO, unless you really have a lot of nostalgia for the 90's. Quick AU rundown:

              Turn A - Tomino's masterpiece. Culmination of everything he, as a director, was working towards. Peak Sci-fi.

              G-Gundam - Even more goofy fun, but it's basically "Super Robot Tournament Arc" the anime. If you came to Gundam for the political commentary, it doesn't have much of that beyond the world-building.

              Wing - Goofy fun, but incoherent and melodramatic. Basically the protagonists are the IRA. Yeah that's about it.

              Seed - Mid. It's just a remake of the OG, except it needs to pander to 2000's animation sensibilities (so lots of fanservice, the bad kind) and the politics become this liberal mishmash of "war is bad, pacifism good" that misses the point. They try to Zeta Gundam it with a sequel (Seed Destiny) and fail miserably.

              00 - Ok, so 00 is kinda fascinating. Production-wise it's probably one of the most beautiful Gundams ever made. Writing-wise..... well, basically it starts from the premise "What if 9/11 was justified?" which has potential for a really interesting story in something that seriously examines that premise. 00 does not. So, yeah, it kinda unfolds in a slow-motion trainwreck lol. This is the only piece of media I'd ever let myself hate-watch.

              Age - Overly ambitious, with different creative impetuses clashing to make something pretty incoherent. I couldn't get past the first episode because I kept feeling like my intelligence was being insulted.

              G-Reco - (Technically this is supposed to be UC buuuuuuuuut) Incoherent. Tomino doubles down on his worst directorial tendencies, and it's very clear his style of storytelling doesn't jive with modern sensibilities, so this show basically amounts to being a sci-fi mood piece about living in space that's very weird and hard to follow. Apparently the theatrical re-cut is better, but I haven't seen that.

              IBO - Really good, would recommend. A return to form.

              Edit: Huh, I realized my main negative criticism is incoherency, so I better explain that. One of the pitfalls the AU series run into is that they start to riff on the OG UC series, so they start incorporating tropes (cyber-newtypes, Char, etc.) with no regard for how they fit into their respective narratives and the sometimes very different themes or politics those series discuss. To use Seed as an example, the main conflict is framed as one between two near peer super-powers (e.g. US vs China), and not so much a WW2 analogue. So when they inject tropes from the OG series divorced from it's anti-fascist context, the resulting narrative tends to be, well, incoherent.

              • Cromalin [she/her]
                ·
                2 years ago

                hm. g gundam and wing i plan on checking out, seed i might depending on how good i feel the podcasting is. 00, age, and g-reco i'll probably give an episode or 2 to see how i feel at least

                and i definitely see how your complaint about incoherence could be a problem. i really like prospera as a char (the only non-char char i've seen unless you count jerid, though i know every series has its char) because she feels like a clear riff on the trope while doing something new. she's got plans and revenge and all that, but she's going at it from a completely different angle than char aznable did in 0079, so that's super interesting to me. being a women helps too.

                but i'm imagining some of these have chars that are just like, surface level copies who are blond and have masks and are mysterious enemies without putting in the work because it's a char, you know what a char is

  • CommunistDirtbag [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Edgerunners started off good and then eventually shat the bed

    It begins with a great anti-capitalist framing and then skews it completely into a condemnation of transhumanism as the story enters a weird and predictable loop. It's also depressing as hell.

  • CriticalOtaku [he/him]
    hexagon
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Oh man I totally forgot that I watched JoJo Part 6: Stone Ocean too. Shit now I need to come up with a quick hot-take- ok, overall I liked it but that last 3rd of the show was the most unrelenting string of Araki generated Stand bullshit I've ever experienced so far in JoJo, and I can't say that that completely ungrounded absolute weirdness didn't take me out of it for a bit. :pucci-pose: Part 5 is still my absolute favourite part so far, but I'm anime only and everyone says part 7 is the best so I'm looking forward to that (provided that it doesn't get stuck in Netflix jail again).

    • Cromalin [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      part 7 is basically perfect, but it's full of horses so you should definitely read the manga. it also has genuinely really interesting and compelling politics in a way that i can't discuss without absurd amounts of horses

      also anyone who doesn't love the snails i have no respect for. the plane fight is also great. bohemian rhapsody and sky high are only ok though

      • CriticalOtaku [he/him]
        hexagon
        ·
        2 years ago

        The snails are great, my problem was all that stand bullshit together with no breaks until Cape Canaveral, and then arguably the most stand bullshit ever.

        Like any 1 of these fights as the climax of an arc would be amazing, but to me JoJo is best when everything is slightly grounded by the stand fights reflecting characters, and I didn't get that sense with the sons lol