Ahh… this brings back memories.

Relena Peacecraft was my very first anime crush.

Since Makeine ended and nothing caught my attention this season, I’m back to browsing and binging the past, and just finished up one of the best series I’ve watched in a long time - Heike Monogatari.

I just happened to come across it on a stack and thought it looked interesting, so I watched the first episode and was immediately hooked. It wasn’t until I saw the Science SARU logo in the closing credits that I realized it was Yuasa (though in retrospect, I probably should have from Biwa’s character design).

The art design is astonishing - a perfect fit for a Japanese historical epic - with backgrounds that look like tapestries and foreground details that look like woodblock prints. It’s easily one of the most visually satisfying anime I’ve ever seen.

The story and characters are sort of underdeveloped, as should be expected from trying to condense a sprawling historical epic into 11 anime episodes, but it doesn’t feel incomplete. It’s as if all of the missing content from the much larger and more detailed original epic are spread so evenly throughout the adaptation that everything that’s there fits neatly together and manages to tell the story anyway.

And the way it’s framed - having the narrator of an epic story of a clan brought down by their own arrogance and cruelty that was popularized by biwa singers be a biwa singer who started off with every reason to hate the Heike but who slowly came to love them in spite of their significant flaws - is brilliant. Biwa is perfectly placed to witness the story as it unfolds, and perfectly suited to recognize both their flaws and their virtues, and the inevitability of their fall.

I don’t know how popular it was with westerners when it was released, so I don’t know if I’m just stating the obvious, but my impression is that it’s one of those that’s not so much underrated as underappreciated - that it’s well regarded by those who have watched it, but that that’s fewer people than it deserves. Thus this post.

You’re faulting a series for a problem that exists because of assholes.

Every medium has its instances that are provocatice or scatological or otherwise offensive.

The difference with anime is that there’s a group of assholes who base part of their identities on their purported superior taste as evidenced by the fact that they hate anime, and there’s enough of them that they’ve formed a fairly significant circlejerk. And they latch onto things like this to which to point as supposed examples of the medium as a whole, while self-servingly ignoring the other 99.9% of stuff out there.

So yes, in a sense, there is a problem with the fact that things like this exist, but the problem isn’t really simply that they exist, but that there’s a fairly significant group of assholes who can and will dogpile on that fact.

If you want to blame someone or something for the problem, don’t blame the series - blame the assholes.

When this was announced, I read part of the manga, then part of the LN original, and thought it might be good. I don’t normally watch currently airing anime, but I was keeping an eye on this. And I finally dove in and caught up on it last week.

This episode highlighted pretty much everything I loved about the series as a whole.

Anna is awesome. Let’s get that out of the way first. She’s easily my favorite FMC in years. And she was especially good in this episode. It’s just been so pleasant to watch her and Nukumizu get so comfortable with each other, and it was nice to see that in full flower in this episode. And I couldn’t help but laugh when she lost her imaginary boyfriend to an imaginary rival.

Kaju is awesome too, and it was great to see a lot of her in this episode.

And the senseis. I would’ve liked to see more of them all the way through, but at least they got a bit of extra screen time in this episode. They’re both interesting characters in their own right, and they have a great dynamic.

Chihaya was especially good in this episode too, even though she only got a few seconds. She’s been a pleasant surprise - she just looks so sweet and naive, and she’s so very much not.

Overall, the only criticisms I might have of the series are that a couple of character quirks were a bit too exaggerated (Komari’s stutter and Yumeko pretty much as a whole) and that it seems like very little was really settled. The pacing wasn’t really a problem in and of itself - I actually quite liked it - but it means that we need at least another season, and preferably a few more.

Overall, I was very impressed, and this was a good cap to the season, assuming another season is coming. Without another season, it’ll be a bit disappointingly incomplete, but even then, it was a good slice of life.

That was more my impression, but I don’t follow ratings or reviews much, so wasn’t sure. I just know that I rarely see it discussed, but pretty much universally positively when it is.

Is ODDTAXI underrated? If so, then that definitely. It’s just quality all the way through.

And Estab-Life: Great Escape. Yeah - it’s sort of contrived, but it has so much heart and tells a satisfying story. And Equa is wonderful.

…the company’s efforts appear to be yielding results, as evidenced by the successful takedowns and ongoing legal actions against major piracy sites.

I just wonder who they’re trying to convince here.

There have been piracy sites on the internet pretty much from day one.

And the biggest ones have gotten taken down pretty much from day two.

And new ones keep popping up.

I think the closest I’ve ever gotten to that was Rurouni Kenshin, at… let’s see… 95 episodes. That was many years ago.

A few years back, and I honestly have no idea why, I watched about 75 episodes of Fairy Tail (less than half of its run) before I burnt out on it.

There’s a few standard things I’ve watched that clock in at about 50 or 60 episodes - FMA and Brotherhood, DanMachi, SAO, Initial D and the like.

The vast majority of the things I watch seem to only last one season, or occasionally two.

Actually, after I finished that admittedly satisfying screed, I debated whether or not to post it, since from what I saw, this one shares a (somewhat disturbing) quality with Rent a Girlfriend - it’s somehow sort of intriguing and attractive in spite of, or maybe because of, its many and glaring flaws. It wasn’t that it was awful to read - it just got boring and tedious, and I got tired of cringing and rolling my eyes on the mc’s behalf. I suspect that, as I do with RaG, I’ll still read it from time to time, just on the off chance that something satisfying might happen - you know - some sort of character development or progress.

Though I’m not sure in the long run whether that’s a point for or against avoiding it altogether.

I didn’t know that the author of that godawful trainwreck even had another series.

I was curious to see if he could actually write something good, so I looked it up, then tracked it down and read the first dozen chapters or so, and I’d say the answer is no.

Well - it is better than Rent a Girlfriend, but only insofar as it couldn’t possibly be worse.

The basic setup is seven siblings - two boys and five girls (five girls - where have I seen that before?) - who are suddenly told by their fabulously wealthy and conveniently absent father that they’re not actually blood related.

The mc is the eldest son, who’s actually the middle child. The other son is virtually non-existent, which is necessary because he actually knows how to talk to girls and actually does it, so if he was interacting with the sisters at all, the story would instantly turn into NTR, since the mc is predictably pathetic and the bulk of every chapter, just like Rent a Girlfriend, is his endlessly droning thought stream of insecurity, confusion, doubting and second-guessing. He’s marginally better than Kazuya, but that’s not really an accomplishment.

The girls are decidedly better than any of the ones in RaG, but again - they couldn’t hardly be worse. They’re really just animated tropes though - the teasingly provocative oldest sister, the emotionlessly provocative meganekko, the twin-tailed tsundere, the cute sporty girl and the painfully shy but secretly aggressive youngest.

And… that seems to be about it.

When I got bored with it, I skipped forward to the latest chapter (27), which is one of the sisters basically overtly confessing to him then kissing him, believing that he’s asleep, which of course then leads to him revealing, after she leaves, that he’s been awake the whole time. And what does he do? He shout/thinks to himself, “What the hell was that?!”

It’s probably safe to assume that if this goes 300 chapters, that’s what he’ll still be doing.

Hmm… I might have to give this a shot.

I generally don’t watch manga adaptations, since I’m almost always disappointed by them. But I’ve tried to read this manga a few times, and I keep bouncing off of it. I just find the enormous contrast between the public and private versions of the sisters to be too extreme and jarring to be believable, or even reasonable. It’s almost as if there are six different girls, or as if the scenes with the sisters in their public personas are fantasy sequences.

Maybe if I just let it wash over me as an anime, it’ll work.

Awesome clarification - thanks.

Looks to be pretty standard cute girls doing cute things. Between the art style and the setting, it most made me think of GochiUsa with a bit of Kin-iro Mosaic thrown in.

Though that word “lily” leaps right out, since that’s almost certainly a ham-handed localization of “yuri.”

I guess we’ll find out eventually…

You’re conflating two entirely different debates.

Yes - there has been some debate around western publishers overly aggressively “localizing” manga and/or changing details to not just make things more understandable to western readers, but deliberately altering social /political content to accord with their own views. The two broad positions in that debate are to continue to depend on western publishers and their translations, or to keep translation in-house - under the supervision of the Japanese publishers.

This debate starts from the position that translation will be kept in-house, and concerns how it will be done - whether by human translators or AI. The publishers want to use AI for one and only one reason - because it would be cheaper. The JAT’s position is that machine translation is so vastly inferior that it will not work, and that human translators must be used.

As is always the case, all publishers need to do is look at the scanlation community to see how things will or will not work, since the scanlators are already doing, for free, what the publishers hope to do for profit. Whatever problems exist and whatever solutions there are to those problems, the scanlators have already discovered.

And if they would only do that, they would discover, for instance, that MTL, presented as a finished product on its own, is so blatantly crappy that it’s essentislly universally derided, with the only split being between the people who might grudgingly tolerate it in a specific case and the people who reject it outright.

There’s no need for the JAT to argue that case when vivid proof that they’re right already exists in virtually every comment section of every machine translated manga.

But instead, the publishers consistently make choices that any halfway decent scanlator could tell them are going to fail to appeal to the fans, which choices then - surprise surprise - fail to appeal to the fans.

Huh.

I would’ve expected, if I saw news about this series, that it would be to announce that it was being axed. It seems a bit late in the game for an adaptation.

Granted - I dropped it a couple of years ago and it might’ve improved since then, but it just doesn’t seem likely that it actually has.

It was decent enough when it started - if nothing else, the art is charming and the girls are all cute, and all in different (if tropish) ways.

But Medaka and his whole situation always came off a bit vague and contrived, and as it went on, it just got more and more obviously and awkwardly contrived. He didn’t get any sort of character development really - he was just assigned a handful of traits and reactions, given a handwaved backstory that sort of vaguely gave them something that sometimes resembled context, and inserted into the story.

And beyond being cute, the female leads really didn’t bring anything interesting to the mix either. Mona is the class idol, but she’s actually self-conscious and insecure. Asahi is the cute sporty girl, but she’s actually self-conscious and and insecure. And Namba is the cool beauty, but she’s actually - surprise surprise - self-conscious and insecure.

And… that’s about it really - a selection of cute but insecure girls and a guy who cycles back and forth between stoic and awkward because something something monastery.

Again though - maybe it unexpectedly improved after I dropped it. I dunno - it just seems odd to me that it’s getting an adaptation this late in the game.

Spent part of the day checking this out.

It’s a light novel original. There’s a manga adaptation, and that’s where I started. It wasn’t very good though, and I was pretty sure, as is often the case when a lot of the text in the original is the thoughts inside the protagonist’s head, that the manga was just skipping over big chunks of it. I kept plugging away through four chapters (mostly because they were done by Skythewood, and I trust their judgement - our tastes strongly overlap), but then found that 5 and 6 are missing from mangadex, some sort of sniping war has broken out starting with chapter 7, and Skythewood has apparently dropped it.

In sorting all of that out, I discovered that Skythewood has been translating the light novel, so I just read that instead. And discovered that the manga has indeed left out huge chunks of the original.

It’s pretty good all in all. It’s very definitely of the “oddly proud and determined loner finds himself surrounded by pretty girls” subgenre that seemed to really take off with the success of Oregairu. The twist with this one, and to its credit, is that all of the girls are romantic losers who initially turn to the protagonist for a shoulder to cry on (either figuratively or literally), then it expands from there, as they come to appreciate him more broadly and he starts coming out of his self-imposed exile.

And thankfully the anime art appears to be based on the LN illustrations rather than the manga.

So - IMO, the LN is pretty good, the anime is promising, and the manga can be ignored.

I contributed to TVTropes in the early days, and quit after they banned Lotte no Omocha, At the time, it wasn’t so much because of any concern for that or any other specific thing, but just because the way it all went down empowered a regime of prigs and assholes.

I read through the first two volumes of the manga yesterday - through chapter 13 - then went back and reread the first volume, since I unsurprisingly could make no sense of it at all the first time through. That was all my brain could take.

I should get through quite a bit more today, since I have a feel for what’s happening now. And I’m absolutely enjoying it - thanks for the heads-up.

Wow…

Sort of peripheral to your point, but…

Heavenly Delusion was new to me, so I looked it up and discovered the original manga is by Ishiguro Masakazu, the author of one of my all time favorites, SoreMachi. I don’t know how I didn’t know that this existed, but I’m all over it now.

SoreMachi is a sort of breezy SOL with bits of weirdness tucked around the edges and an absolutely stellar cast of characters. I’m looking forward to seeing what he does with the weirdness front and center.

Anyway - Kemurikusa is indeed broadly similar to Usuzumi no Hate, but with the significant difference that the characters themselves know next to nothing about the world - aside from what they’ve gleaned in the time they’ve lived there, it’s as alien and inexplicable to them as it is to us. Actually, in some ways, it’s even more alien to them. We can recognize that they live in a derelict railroad car and travel through city ruins, but to them, it’s just a box with round things that they found and the world is just a place of open spaces and enclosed spaces.

But now I’m off to binge the Heavenly Delusion (Tengoku Daimakyo) manga.