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Comments
But K-On is awesome...
And getting all six volumes of Biomega would cost a ton of money.
And getting who knows how much K-On merch wouldn't?
I don't even buy that much merchandise!
-stands in front of huge bookcase filled with Eureka Seven stuff in his room-
What kind of K-On stuff do they make anyways?
Meh, I like Azumanga Daioh better than K-On. I guess for the heartwarming-ness rather than the mellowness.
Absolutely everything.
I saw some bags and pins on rightstuf and figurines on play-asia, but not much else. Is it Precure levels of merchandise?
I know there are K-ON! dog/cat bowls, and apparently there is K-ON! Movie candy (which comes in a container shaped like a London taxicab, which is kind of cute I guess), and I remember hearing about other weirdish merchandise too though I can't remember any more off the top of my head. Anyway, though, there definitely is a lot.
Feed your pets with K-ON!
I'd like to try some of those movie candies though...
I don't have a huuuge amount of experience with One Piece, but from what I've seen, I think FMA blows it right out of the water (har har). FMA, in both its altered 2003 anime and original manga forms, is wonderfully cohesive and forms itself exceptionally well around its general themes. While it often detours into other topics, it never seems inappropriate or preachy, because everything feels natural in the wider context. On the smallest scale, we have a plot that parallels Frankenstein with two brothers in the lead role, but that quickly expands into a military plot that examines war, imperialism and racism, all within context of the two main leads. Its brand of fantasy is the kind that seamlessly mixes magic with the natural world, lending it a kind of authenticity that most anime, films and video games entirely lack when dealing with the same.
FMA isn't without its flaws, but it succeeds on so many levels as an interesting discussion of its various themes and an action-packed spectacle that I don't think many anime match up. The kind of anime that goes on for hundreds of episodes certainly can't; it'll be too fragmented and padded to compare in terms of artistry. I guess the other thing is that FMA handles everything it touches with such maturity without letting go of humour, and it's not afraid to make its protagonists mess up in ways that have lasting plot repercussions. It's one of the few anime that really establishes the illusion of living, breathing characters without turning them into mouthpieces, and it has both the artistry and technical efficiency to take them beyond archetypes.
In addition, it does away with a lot of things that plague the shounen genre and anime in general; power levels or equivalents, spotless heroes, black-and-white morality, excessive fanservice and more. FMA, I think, sits among giants for all these reasons and more, not to mention its general accessibility.
and i mean, guys, it doesn't even have knights or swords or anything and i still think it's the best thing since pattern-welded steel
FMA is the type of show that can explore grey morality without going all "HEY GUYS AREN"T WE SO EDGY" or "BLACK AND WHITE MORALITY IS SO DUMB YO".
It makes it feel natural. The good guys are the good guys, but that doesn't mean they've never done bad things, it doesn't mean they've never fucked up, and it doesn't mean they're morally impeachable. At the end of the day, though, they're going to do what they can to help everyone. The bad guys are the bad guys, but you can understand we're they're coming from, even though you aren't meant to agree with them, and you can feel bad for them, and they aren't monsters.
Are you saying Lan Fan isn't basically a knight with overtones of ninja?
See I disagree. You know exactly where the bad guys are coming from, and are dealing with a lot of stuff that plagues the good guys, but end up being monsters because of who they choose to be. Granted some of them are tragic and likeable monsters like anime!Lust and anime!Sloth and the various Greeds, but folks like Gluttony and Dante and Father and Envy? Just monsters man.
Um...are you talking about the first anime? Because that isn't really the case in the manga/brotherhood to my knowledge.
I was thinking about Gluttony in Brotherhood and... I think it was Wrath, in the first anime.
Several of them were definitely monsters. Nobody could argue that- Pride, Wrath in Brotherhood, Father.
But they weren't all monsters, and those that were were usually contrasted against others to show why.
Yeah, Gluttony's okay. But Brotherhood's villains definitely tend to be monsters. I can't comment on the first anime, as I haven't seen it.
The 2003 anime made Lust sympathetic because... well she rejected her role as the femme fatale and realized her boss couldn't give her what she wanted. And well... I really loved Lust's character arc in the first anime.
How did you enjoy .hS? I watched it, and the most I got from it was that it was...interesting. Very intruiging. But I didn't feel I enjoyed it, for some reason. I think in part it was just too slow. Like, every scene involving Subaru could have been sped up.
And Angelic Layer. I need to finish watching that. I've seen like six episodes of it (up until Misaki get pwned for the first time). It's quite nice. And it's even got a nice ending theme.
Okay, I'd like K-On crayons, K-On safes, K-On-character-shaped chicken nuggets, and K-On fighter jets.
Lust, Envy, Wrath, and Pride were all monsters. Sloth barely had any screen time, but he seemed pretty pitiable. Gluttony was pitiable, even as he was also a monster. I forget if there were any others.
I guess because the show had a great plot and I found the pacing fitting? I don't really like action but talking and mulling over motivations I love.
Gets replaced halfway through with an even better one though...
I'll have you know I do both. And if we're on the topic of being critical of anime and manga, Biomega is heavily, heavily padded by its art, great though that art may be. It's nice reading (for a certain value of nice, on account of it's an apocalyptic manga), but it's a little too easy to read through each volume. And Kozlov is way out of place. I've read the first three.
And I watched four episodes of Shiki yesterday, after watching three episodes of FMA Brotherhood and realizing that I already knew whay was going to happen from my attempt to watch the first anime. Also, the third episode, with Rose and Cornello, was fucking lame, not gonna lie. Not sure why I watched it through again.
Shiki is incredibly slow so far, but it's done well with its atmosphere. Plus, I dropped some big money on it, expecting something much different, so I have to see it through.
The episodes, uh, diverge after a while.
Did anybody catch Toonami last night/this morning?
Did I miss anything important on Deadman Wonderland and/or Casshern Sins?
@fourteenwings: I'm not exactly a pure action person either--after all, I somehow enjoyed the adorable slice-of-life presentation of Sky Girls (and I don't even like its attempts at fanservice)--but something was odd about .hack//SIGN. It felt very noticeably slow and draggy. Or maybe it was just Subaru, who kinda bugged me.
Alternatively, it may have been because I already read its sequel, .hack//Another Birth, so I kinda knew what was going on.
I still haven't read any of the Tokyopop translated novels. I heard they were really bad at being accurate, or was that fans overblowing things?
I've heard that the first scene where Kite and BlackRose meet each other in the first book was mistranslated but the quality increases a lot as the story progresses.
I enjoyed them quite a bit. Much more than I enjoyed SIGN, oddly.
@Firebert:
I almost put AzuDai as one of my "favourite anime" candidates, but I decided I liked it just a bit less than the others.@Everest:
It may be tempting to skip to episode 14 which is where it diverges, but I'm told that the first anime cut some stuff from the early episodes that ends up being important.However, the show gets noticeably better at the divergence point (and not just because of Ling Yao), so try and stick it out until then.
That might be another one to add to the favorite pile.
AzuDai's probably my favorite slice of life-style comedy because it's legitimately touching.
That's because it was noticeably slow and draggy. I only watched the first 8 episodes, but in that time there was about two or three episodes worth of plot, with most of the rest of the time being filled with characters talking about how mysterious Tsukasa is.
As for slice-of-life comedies, I didn't like Azumanga as much as K-ON! or Ichigo Mashimaro or Kanamemo or (maybe) Hidamari Sketch, but I still did like it a lot.
I'm just relieved noone's said Lucky Star is better, really.