jordangreywolf | [Shows] Beastars is Incredibly Messed Up

Entry tags:

anime

[Shows] Beastars is Incredibly Messed Up

I remember hearing all this buzz about how Beastars is, like, this award-winning amazing thing that absolutely must be seen ... except, of course, it's only on Netflix in Japan and not in the US. Until now.

By the way -- I'm not going to say "whodunnit," or give away major plot twists (such as they may pretend to be) but in order to express my problems with the direction this story takes, I'm still hinting at a few things, and this might be considered spoiler-ish.

So ... possible spoiler warnings. Your mileage may vary. Also, standard disclaimers apply: If somehow you've found my stupid journal ramblings and have mistaken this for a serious CRITICAL REVIEW of an anime, please move along. I am nobody. I'm only ranting here because I can. Yay, internet!

...

Well, after seeing all these YouTube reviews (the reviewers presumably checking out bootlegs or something?), it seems that Google figured out that I was interested in the show, and on my smartphone, it popped up, in my daily "Google news" feed, a link to an online comic site with the Beastars MANGA.

So, hey, if Google is offering this to me on my phone, then it must be worth checking out. So I did, and ... well ... I didn't make it all the way to get current on the manga.

BEASTARS IS SERIOUSLY MESSED UP. I can't get how someone thought this was "award-winning." Rather, it feels like someone's furry vore fetish given life. I've read/viewed some reviews of the first episode that make this claim that the carnivore-herbivore thing is somehow "allegorical," but I suppose the same could be said of every manga/anime that has the fate of the universe being decided by teenagers in HIGH SCHOOL. At some point, I doubt it's so much a concern about allegory as it is a certain lack of imagination or slavish devotion to established trope.

Trying to articulate exactly how it's messed up, and not just in the same ways that countless "serious" anthropomorphic-animals series are "messed up" is hard to do. "Furry vore fetish" isn't quite spot-on ... but go too far into the manga, and I think it's getting pretty close.

As the story starts off, it looks like there's the potential for some interesting dynamics. It looks like, hey, this could be setting up to be a murder mystery where we have the twist that our "detective" protagonist is wrestling with the potential to become a murderer himself, because this is a warped world where ALL higher-order animals (mammals, reptiles, avians) are intelligent. Therefore, MEAT IS MURDER. (But it's okay to drink milk and eat eggs. Oh, and to eat bugs. And APPARENTLY, fish. I think. I'm not sure on that, actually.)

First off, the setting is a bit awkward in that there are no humans to be found -- no hint that there ever WERE any humans -- and yet our characters recognize themselves as "beasts," and there are domestic breeds (dogs, chickens, etc.). The title of the series comes from this vague "ideal" that some student at this academy wants to become the next "Beastar" -- this horrible portmanteau of English words is not just a clumsy translation of some Japanese term, but slapped right into the story.

There's this tension between carnivores and herbivores, though the dividing line is a bit vague at times. (Some creatures I would think of as omnivores somehow seem to be grouped on the "herbivore" side.)

Violence works strangely in this world. Sometimes characters can take an amazing amount of damage and still keep pressing on ... and at other times, their bodies seem to have all the consistency of Play-Doh (as one character -- not particularly imposing-looking, but he's a carnivore -- accidentally RIPS THE ARM OFF OF ANOTHER CHARACTER his own size while rough-housing, in a scene that comes off as almost being hilarious in its ridiculousness, yet it's played for "drama" in the manga).

Oh, and the power of food is positively anime-esque and mystic, despite the laughable attempts to be sensible and "realistic" in the world-building elsewhere (all that detail on how diets are carefully maintained for all our carnivores to live vegetarian lives). I'm reminded of this weird trope I remember seeing in Lupin III, where our hero is bandaged, in bed, presumably with broken bones and bullet holes, but he needs to get into action, so what must he do? FORCE-FEED HIMSELF MASSIVE QUANTITIES OF MEAT! Because that's what every hospital does to get its trauma victims out of the emergency ward in short order, of course? Well, that sort of logic apparently works here, too. Getting thrashed about in a fight? Surely it's because you've been denying yourself meat, Mister Carnivore, so HERE, EAT ONE OF MY LIMBS TO GAIN THE STRENGTH YOU NEED TO FIGHT! (What the heck *is* the message behind this series, anyway?)

(Also, forget the notion of conservation of mass. Never mind that in the real world, a carnivore who takes down prey his own size does not INSTANTLY CONSUME THE BODY IN ITS ENTIRETY, but rather takes a while to finish that meat, or has "friends" to help dispose of it. Nope-nope, NOM NOM NOM it's all gone now!)

And then there's the "erotic" angle. Okay, this is "for adults" (or something) so I'm not going to gasp in shock that naughty things happen. But ... eh ... it's one thing to have carnivores who can be attracted to and simultaneously want to devour a pretty herbivore. It's another to have an herbivore who "subconsciously wants to be eaten" and ... eh, if you read that part, you'd know what I mean, but I hope you don't bother. It just makes me feel as if the author had some serious ISSUES to work out, and it's all just quite the train-wreck once it gets that far along.

Oh, and that murder mystery? Forget that. This story meanders all over in all kinds of directions, and by the time we get to find WHODUNNIT, it's like ... WHO?!? Who's this guy? Was he here at the beginning as a suspect? Does he look at all like the hulking murderer we saw in silhouette early on? Were there really any clues at all to help us sort this out on our own?

NO. No, not really.

And I just started watching the anime (second episode in), and it's looking like it isn't going to improve upon this at all. Maybe in the original manga, the original writer either didn't know or care "whodunnit," or changed her mind partway through the writing ("Oh, that would be too obvious!"), and one trouble with releasing a story in a serialized format is that you can't just skip back to the beginning and slip in some foreshadowing or clues to make it all retroactively make sense. You can end up writing yourself into a corner. But here they're remaking it as an anime. THEY COULD FIX THAT. A second chance!

But no, it doesn't look like they're bothering with that.

If you find something you like in Beastars, well ... good for you? This is, of course, purely my OPINION, and I'm just some randomly-ranting person writing in an online pseudo-journal, not some "serious" critic.

Season 1 is on Netflix now. I don't THINK they can possibly get to the serious "train-wreck" portions of the story I'm referencing in just a single anime season. Maybe they'll work a miracle and do some major plot revisions and salvage it, but so far they seem to be pretty faithful to the manga (for better or MUCH WORSE).

(I'm still perplexed by comments I heard from some that, "This is NOT furry!" This is one reason I usually avoid using such a term; it seems to have no useful, generally-agreed-upon meaning. If Beastars isn't "furry," I have no idea what is.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I saw a Beastar or two in the comic store, in manga form, but it didn't really grab me. After I finish watching DS9 (it's my exercise amusement for the time being) I'll have to consider if I want to see it, or mewve on to Voyager or something else.

Your review kind of confirms my impression that the story was a bit all over the place and the art was a little grotesque in 'mood'.

I've run into this sort of thing a lot with manga-turned-into-anime. My theory regards this is that it has something to do with how many of these manga projects are pretty much driven by artist-writers, and the artist might be really talented and driven to churn out material (and that is going to be very attractive to a publisher even if the story isn't stellar -- BECAUSE WE NEED MATERIAL, AND WE NEED IT ON TIME), but being a great artist with a vision and a pressure to get stuff DONE means that the content is going to be heavily dependent upon the first thing that pops into your mind and what motivates you RIGHT NOW.

It's not like a novel, where in theory the writer may do an outline, then fill in the gaps in any particular order, then go back and edit things when your "vision" evolves a bit along the way and you need to put in a bit of foreshadowing in that opening scene, or maybe you need to tweak a few clues when you changed your mind about "whodunnit."

Or, like a movie, where presumably someone is going to have directorial control who can try to make sure that the thing has a cohesive mood and/or message (if that's a concern).

I basically went on a binge-roll through bunches of pages of the manga on my phone because I was stuck in a hotel having to get in my daily 5-6 miles of walking (and I'm terrible at that if I have to pace back and forth or go on a treadmill if I don't have something to occupy my mind other than constantly checking how much time/distance remains) ... and the tenor of the story changed so markedly, repeatedly, to the point of feeling seriously unhinged.

(Not that I think the WRITER is "unhinged" because of this. If I were to look back on anything I ran for Sinai as one cohesive story, I think I could say the same exact thing -- what motivated me, and the "mood" that dominated my games from session to session could vary violently. I am especially mindful of the dark turn that my GMing for Francisco took -- I still haven't forgiven myself for that debacle -- or how the adventures of Jynx bounced so much between "light-hearted silly slapstick antics" and dark horror. "At the time" it seemed to be the thing to do, but taken as a whole, it was hard to reconcile how all this could be part of the same story thread.)

Interesting observation... I'd have figured they'd have introduced some editorial rearranging for the anime but evidently not?

I've pretty much lost track of where Sinai has gotten to these days-- Envoy is just running stuff for a couple people and I don't worry about it anymore. If I had to revisit the Sinai thing, I'd probably aim for a more compact campaign style with arcs than 'sure, ALL the characters in ALL the places.' Having a plot outline in mind seems to help keep things on track, and I much prefer a regularly scheduled campaign over trying to run stuff whenever people happen to pop online.

I'd have figured they'd have introduced some editorial rearranging for the anime but evidently not?

Huh. I thought I had made a comment along those lines. But I have a bad habit of typing gobs of text (even more than what you see here!) and deleting it several times over, to the point where something might be lost in the mix.

Anyway ... yeah, that was one of my thoughts. In the manga, there were certain things about the setup sequence -- the murder that sets things off -- that strike me as rather failing for the "murder mystery" aspect. Basically, there are details shown that might be mistaken for *clues* about the killer's identity (but only clues that we, the viewers have, because we get to witness the victim's murder), and later on, when we get introduced to what might pass for the cast of possible suspects, there's really only one realistic candidate based on what information WE as viewers know ... but he didn't do it.

It feels to me as if the author intended a particular character to be the "baddie," but spent a little too much time developing his conflict with the protagonist, to the point where if he were "revealed" to be the killer, the readers would probably yawn and think, "Well, DUH." But instead there's this other character who shows up several chapters into the story, and suddenly we're seeing a lot of him, and in short order, BOOM -- reveal! He's the killer! I can flip back and ... hey, why isn't he in the background in any of the previous scenes? (I did a quick Wiki check, and in the manga he doesn't even first appear until Volume 6 -- the "murder solution" story arc -- and in the anime he doesn't appear until the 8th episode.)

What's really annoying is that there is NO GOOD REASON for him to not appear until then. I think it's pretty clear that he wasn't even conjured up for the story until late into the manga ... but for whatever reason for the anime, they didn't decide to fix that by at least having him in the background earlier on.

This story fails as "murder mystery." As soon as we are introduced to him, it's time to show that he's the killer. There's no "aha, it all makes sense now!" at all. There's no PRETENSE that, "If you had been paying attention, dear viewer, you would notice these CLUES that pointed to the true culprit!" No, if anything, those clues CONTRADICT it ... and yet they didn't bother to fix them in the anime.

So far as I can tell, two episodes in, the anime adaptation is pretty faithful to the manga -- and in this case, that's (IMHO) not a good thing in all respects.

RE: SINAI:
Oh boy. 20/20 hindsight and all that. There are so many things that if I could go back in time and lecture my younger self, I would advise to do. The trouble is that I wouldn't want to end up SQUASHING everything in the process.

1) Let Others Have Their Fun. I got way too into criticizing and picking apart what others were doing with their own plot-lines, what I perceived as self-GMing, power-tripping, and whatnot. Eventually, over time, I started getting my way a bit too much, and I think it squashed a lot of the creative energy that was otherwise contributing to the project.

2) Keep the Plots Modest. I have a real problem with ESCALATION. Sure, we can start with tea parties and trips to the bazaar, but eventually my mind turns to ratcheting things up until we're dealing with world-threatening events, and/or uncovering the entire history of Sinai.
I think that by dangling the prospect of "rags-to-riches" "slave-to-queen-of-all-Savanites" right in front of Kaela in her very first adventure, I was setting things up for DOOM. It was a dumb idea. (Sure, some interesting things came out of it, but that doesn't erase the initial TRAIN WRECK I caused.)

3) Establish the Mood and Threat-Level with the Player. My job as GM is (a) to entertain you, the on-camera players; (b) not to ruin the fun of other GMs and their players in the process; and (c) to have some fun myself (I hope) doing so. If someone is playing with a "personal furry," I shouldn't put him in life-or-death situations (not even when the "death" choice should be, IMHO, really easy not to make -- DO NOT PUT THE RED SHINY CANDY-LIKE SELF-DESTRUCT BUTTON IN FRONT OF A GOOFBALL PC IF IT'S REALLY GOING TO KILL HIM.

4) Play Nicely in the Sandbox. Don't stomp all over others' creations. Don't drop a bomb on the Himaat. Don't bait Chiaroscuro the snake-killing mongoose into a Naga-murdering mongoose cult. Don't use someone else's hero faction as your villain.

5) Don't Try to Cram EVERYTHING You Like into One Universe. There are far too many instances where I had an itch to run something Mutant Chronicles-esque, or more horror, or more whatever, and I really shouldn't have tried to force it all into Sinai. I should have gotten permission to run a limited-run mini-adventure in a Holodeck with anyone who was interested, rather than creating new potential for mood-whiplash and other messes in the main shared-universe timeline.

6) Don't Break the World for Drama. The 5-year leap forward and off-camera death of lots of NPCs caused a lot of hard feelings. I don't think the setting really needed that much "shaking up."

Honestly, I think a lot of it could have been avoided if I'd just spent more time trying to get a feel for what the players hoped and wanted. Maybe some more time spent OOCly checking in with the player for his or her opinions could have enlightened me. A character might *in-character* be friendly given a given NPC, but privately the player loathes having to interact with that character. (E.g., "My character is polite and trusting, but this NPC seriously creeps me out, and I wish he'd go away! Just because my character smiles and greets him doesn't mean I'm having fun!")

I can't say that would solve everything by any means. I mean, I had to learn things somehow, right? And even now, I'm not exactly a grand success as a GM. But, eh, I can still wish.

Don't worry about it, learning experience! It would have been truly amazing and remarkable to know and understand all this without making the mistakes first. We were coming to Sinai off of the trials and tribulations of Genesis back when after all, and a lot of it was imitating what we'd already seen done, except with our own setting. It's totally reasonable that we'd try to do some grand arcs as well as the day-to-day slice-of-life things.

That said I wouldn't try to do it again mostly because of the number one thing-- our own circumstances have changed and we no longer have the kind of free time it takes to do random RP all over the place. I'd sooner try writing a book or an adventure game.

Well, yeah. There's just no way I could manage that again today. It pretty much dominated my free time for a good chunk of my younger life. And, good grief, if only I'd spent less time on the MUCKs, who knows how much better I could have done in college? ;) But at least it helped me improve my typing speed.

I'm happy with my B-average in college. ^.^ It's part of our formative experiences, we had fun, even the not-so-good parts were educational, I wouldn't worry about it. It's all in what we do meow!

... is it bad that my suspicion is the lesson being learned here is not to get too heavily invested in Gwendel's RP guild antics? -.-

Heh, heh. Mayyyyybe. :)

For now, I'm just playing a "Reynard" clone, coming up with silly poems to praise the heroes and their grand schemes, and maybe do a few sketches to entertain Gwendel. I'm holding out the possibility that maybe, possibly, I'll try to "run" something, if that interests Gwendel at all, but I'm getting mixed signals even on that. I think Gwendel mostly benefits from having a sounding board. (I mean, I could be that to a limited extent anyway -- but only so much, if I'm not at all involved personally.)

Man, I think #1 is something people always struggle with in a creative setting. FWIW, I thought you did a great job with encouraging me and offering advice for story arcs, by the time I came on board.

"Talk to your players about what they're enjoying/not enjoying" is some of the best advice for any game, though.

I don't miss the time-sink or the stress, but I sure do miss all the fun of roleplaying. :D

Thanks for the kind words! I don't think I had absolutely *everything* wrong. I had at least learned a few things from a few previous mistakes, and some advice I'd been given. By the time you showed up on Sinai, I think a lot of the worst of what I regret had already happened.

It's really peculiar, I suppose, for me to hold up something like "talk to your players" as some really big bit of advice ... but once upon a time, it just wasn't something I thought about. Somehow, I had this notion that the GM conjures up an Adventure, and it has Puzzles and Mysteries to be Solved, and there is a Right Way of doing things, and a Wrong Way of doing things, and ... well, I think I pretty much thought of the GM's job as being a somewhat more interactive moderator of a slightly higher-order version of a Zork-like computer adventure game. I mean, I don't think I would have DESCRIBED it as such, but I was heavily influenced by such games as a standard against which to measure what an adventure "ought" to be.

And in any case, the GM does his job, and it shouldn't be that the GM is going to tweak or change anything in response to whether the players are enjoying it or not. Or something.

On the one hand, I guess I had this notion that things must happen as they happen, and if the GM tweaks it because the player is having a hard time or whatnot, then it's going to feel like a "cheat." I mean, I suppose that there *is* a way to do that badly.

For instance, way back early in college (my freshman year, I'm pretty sure), I was in a Hero System campaign (Champions superheroes), and my character had a couple of followers (I'm pretty sure I was abusing the Follower rules), and a situation arose in which one of my Followers got killed, and I was helpless to stop it. And even though it was /just a game/, I felt "emotionally wrecked" by it, and my lip was getting quivery, and -- good grief -- I felt like I was going to *cry* over it. It was not a shining moment for me. Well, the GM obviously felt bad for me, or awkward or whatever, and immediately backtracked and -- oh, she's not really *dead*. Just really badly hurt ... hospitalized, but you got there in time, okay? And a few other concessions.

And the thing is ... I felt *worse*. For the GM to make such an obvious retreat from the original position felt like I had *cheated* by making sad puppy dog eyes. I wasn't happy with the outcome, but for it to be amended for the sake of my feelings felt wrong somehow.

I really don't know what I think I should have done, were I in the GM's position. I don't want to break whatever "willful suspension of disbelief" the players have that somehow this game "reality" has any substance to it -- that there are mysteries to solve (and the GM isn't going to just arbitrarily change "whodunnit" to string you along), and that good or bad things might come about because of player decisions, not just because of the whim of the GM. But I *am* going to have to make some course-corrections and decisions on the way, because (especially in "sandbox" campaigns), the PCs are going to do unexpected things, go unexpected ways, and I'm going to have to generate new encounters, new characters, etc. I might as well have player interests in mind when I work on that.

Having a plot outline in mind seems to help keep things
on track, and I much prefer a regularly scheduled campaign over trying to
run stuff whenever people happen to pop online.

And this is one reason I really dread the idea of being roped into doing some roleplay with Gwendel on World of Warcraft. The whole situation has every downside of running plots on Sinai, with none of the upsides. Really, it would be easier to just run roleplay in Discord (the chat program of choice it seems for Gwendel's guilds), rather than trying to do everything in World of Warcraft with all the narrative and dialogue going into those little corner chat windows ... but then, that might beg the question, "Why bother with World of Warcraft at all?" (And I suppose that would be a grand question ... and the answer would just be that there are people who play this game who want to roleplay, and it would be GREAT if the game accommodated us with appropriate tools, but it doesn't.)

Every roleplay session is a pickup group, and good luck getting any continuity. Gwendel's pretty regular because, frankly, she doesn't have much competing for her time, other than her own odd sleep patterns.

Nobody who runs adventures seems to have any sense of pacing. It's pretty routine that we'll head out to some location, they'll set up raid markers to represent the locations of NPCs and the GM will try to narrate their dialogue, be overwhelmed by input (frequently doesn't reply to whispered questions or even stated ones from some of the NPCs), combat will go on for a very long time (I can get up and do some pacing to get toward my miles across the house before I hear the "ding!" that lets me know that it's time to look at the screen again), and then when it's getting close to the projected end time, suddenly the villain will surprisingly roll over and die even though it sure looked like his health bar was hardly taking a beating.

A big deal is made of campaigns where "characters can actually die." I suppose the stakes in many ways are even higher than at a typical tabletop D&D session, because: a) It takes so much longer for the story to develop; b) Players might well be playing their characters multiple nights a week; c) It takes months upon months of "grinding" to get your character up to a high enough level to be able to go to the locations where these RP sessions are often held. If your character were to "die," then I *suppose* you might be able to just come up with a new nickname for your character, much like a campaign where you recycle the same mini at the table but bring in a new sheet (e.g., "That last character was JIM Blackstone. This new one is JERRY Blackstone. Same surname, same species, same profession, same look ... but totally different character!").

I just intend to keep the stakes small. I have no intent of wading into the drama with "PC perma-death." If I want to run something with "high stakes," I might as well have the players create new "red-shirt" PCs specifically for that adventure. There's a mod called TRP that allows you to see "poses" and dialogue from characters that substitute their "in-character" name instead of the actual WoW character name. (This can of course lead to some confusion if you want to send a /whisper to a particular character, when it's not immediately clear what the character's "real" name is ... but so be it. As it is, there are so many umlauts and accents and other oddball characters in names that it's a challenge to type them in anyway.)

Goodness gracious. o.o

Yeah, it's always more impressive when someone manages an actual character name in WoW that doesn't have the silly accent characters.

And I can't picture trying to RP *combat* in a WoW setting. There's... uh... an actual combat engine and all that, even if it means basically either only one-on-one duels or fighting against dungeon mobs and bosses. Shoehorning in a faux combat on top of that... Well, yikes. I'd imagined they were doing more soap-opera style RPing, I'm surprised they're doing the roll-playing as well as role-playing.

Yeah, it's perplexing. There are so many better ways to do this. If you want to do "Virtual Tabletop," Fantasy Grounds et al. could open up so many more opportunities ... but on Sunday nights and the occasional Friday night, a big thing with the "Mead Hall" (a loose collection of associated guilds, into a sort of "mega-guild") is that they'll have "pub nights" where anyone can wander in and RP, and it seems to be a sparse enough server that it's fairly rare that some lunatic comes bouncing in randomly with no intent of playing along. (I couldn't imagine trying something like that in Ironforge back during the days of WoW Classic. I mean ... if you wanted to do any "serious roleplay" without constant interruptions, you had to get pretty far off the beaten path.)

Anyway, I digress. The attempts to handle combat are pretty awkward. Combat is seriously abstracted. Attack, offense ... whether you're at range or in melee, fighting with a battleaxe or a coffee mug, it's almost immaterial. Pretty much everyone has generic offensive and defensive capability, with some slight variation for very generalized classes (warrior, spellcaster, healer). More experienced characters have cooler stuff they've been awarded by "GMs," but I have very little sense at how they manage to moderate it all.

(What happens if you have one "Monty Haul" GM who gives his players too much cool stuff? Well ... it just seems to be that the GM, if he doesn't like it, *could* theoretically nerf your stuff in his particular adventure some way or another, but nobody likes doing that, so the cheesy folks who invent all sorts of new powers for themselves tend to dominate things, just like they would on GenesisMUCK, because the GMs don't appear to say "no" very much to the regulars.)

It's a bit of a mess, but Gwendel is heavily invested in it, so ... eh, that's how it is, and I'm trying to participate a bit (especially since I'm not GMing anything at home for the foreseeable future).

Oh, one thing I *would* recommend: "Hands Off My Eizouken." It's yet another anime taking place in high school (which seems to be the high point of all Japanese cultural life, if I am to believe anime), but it's a fairly lively "slice-of-life" anime that has a focus on art (in that the primary characters want to make their own animated short films).

I've only watched a couple of episodes with Gwendel, but so far they've been quite charming. We haven't gotten further simply because any time I have free time to do/watch stuff with Gwendel, she wants to play Warcraft -- and since she's still at least nominally interested in this anime, I'm not going to go and watch the rest without her. (I've done that sometimes in the past -- like, when we haven't watched another episode of a given series for MONTHS, so I assume she's just not interested -- but then if I let slip that I've done so, she gets very upset. So ... as much as I want to watch more, I'm just going to have to wait a bit.)

I haven't watched a lot of anime lately. Currently looking at (every now and then) https://www.crunchyroll.com/anti-magic-academy-the-35th-test-platoon - I wouldn't say it's super-original or anything but I wanted to watch something more science fiction than fantasy or modern.

Huh. Somehow I'd never heard of that. I'll have to give it a try. Anymore, I'm not so concerned about anime being "super-original" just so long as I don't hate the protagonists. (Yeah, it sounds like I'm setting the bar low, but there's an awful lot of hate or at least utter disdain I have for the protagonists of so many anime series.)

Oh. And for a quasi-recommendation: "Dr. Stone" has its moments. It's stupid and ludicrous -- all the more ridiculous for its pretense of "SCIENCE!" -- but it has these brief moments of novelty that kept it amusing. At the very least, it made for a good "something to watch while on the treadmill" show.

I've been reading the Dr. Stone manga on Crunchyroll! It's very silly yes, but fun.

Yeah, that hard-to-quantify "fun" bit is what makes it worthwhile. :)

Like ... you would THINK that "One Punch Man" would check all the boxes for the sort of anime I would *hate*, what with the ridiculously overpowered protagonist and all that ... and yet it's somehow funny and entertaining.

Well, it's likely the "funny" part that's critical here. If One Punch Man took itself seriously, it would be unbearable.

"High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even in Another World" would seem at the surface with a name like that to be intended to be "funny," but at least for me it doesn't qualify (and I utterly DETEST that show). The NAME may seem tongue-in-cheek, and the "story" such as it is, has protagonists who are ridiculously "OP" without any serious challenges or reasons for me to care about them at all -- to the point where if I described it the right way, maybe I could sell it as "satire" -- but it's played pretty much "straight." It comes across to me as being pretty much of the same type as "Knight's and Magic" {sic}: over-the-top wish-fulfillment that is so focused on the hero prevailing at anything, that we can't stand the slightest of obstacles or challenges for longer than a few seconds, tops (if even that).

Dr. Stone grants its protagonist RIDICULOUS abilities: I mean, he KNOWS EVERYTHING REMOTELY SCIENCE, it seems, with an encyclopedic memory -- he's well into "super-skilled" territory in comic book terms ... but he also somehow accurately counted the seconds of his imprisonment and constant consciousness for THREE THOUSAND YEARS without going insane.

But ... sometimes he actually makes mistakes ... and then tries again. These days that's positively remarkable in anime for a main character who isn't intended to be the target of all jokes. :D It's surprisingly watchable. (I was going to pass it over, but for a recommendation from someone that I should give it another try.)

Oh gads, yeah, I didn't even *start* looking at the manga for High School Prodigies after looking at the summary. Knights and Magic is kind of amusing for the engineer wish fulfillment, and hey, it's part of my Crunchyroll package.

One Punch Man is great because it explores that space where OPM is both ignored by the majority of folks because he doesn't *look* special, and OPM is longing to find a real challenge. That and a lot of lampshading the classic tropes.

Re: One Punch Man: I find it kind of hilarious that all the cities are just given letters, and massive trashing of city blocks isn't considered that big of a deal, nor are almost daily global threats, because it happens all the time in this world. It's not all that far off from the kind of craziness that seems par-for-the-course in superhero comics, to the point where one has to wonder at the sanity level of anyone actually trying to live there. (Given how Earth is such a magnet for trouble, and given all the ways in which one might visit parallel dimensions, how many other habitable planets there are, how many superhero teams have their own private spaceships, et al., I would pretty much expect that by some point, anyone with MEANS is going to relocate off-world.)

I dunno, look how often superheroes out in space run across isolated bazillionaires, they might figure the odds are *worse* offworld, or the same wherever they go. Sooner or later, the Plot will set its eyes upon them.

A lot of the characters in One Punch Man are genuinely likable, too. Like Mumen Rider! n_n

Poor Mumen Rider! :D I've got to admire his spirit, even though it seems kind of hopeless against some of those monsters.

That makes me think about a wild tangent trope in superheroic comics (and related genres): the wildly varying power levels. I mean, you can have some robber whose "superpower" is "I have a gun pointed at you," or you can have someone whose ostensible power is "I make shiny light beams that cut through steel" -- but presumably that has NOTHING to do with how much punishment said person can actually take from a super-punch -- and then there's some guy who can chew steel girders like bubblegum, etc. It's all over the place, yet the go-to action for any super-strong hero is just to dish out a haymaker.

It's the same punch that could knock over a building, and somehow our hero doesn't over-judge the resilience of any given baddie and simply turn him into a fine red mist. (At least, unless it's one of THOSE sorts of comics.)

I mean, seriously, one of Superman's super-powers has to be the one to accurately gauge just how much PUNCH a given bad guy needs, and to finely tune his "raw brute force" so as not to splatter lesser villains into goo. (I mean, I'm pretty sure I've seen comics where it's made obvious that Superman hardly needs to use his full force to deal with a "mere mortal" bad guy, but there are just so many degrees in between "squishy mere mortal human" and "uber-being who smashes planets.")

Anyway, it's probably something I'm "over-thinking" considering all the other absurd tropes of superheroic comics, but it can be a bit jarring at times to see, say, a character I don't expect to be particularly super-human get knocked through a wall by a "good guy" and then wonder -- how did Mr. Good Guy *know* that "wall-smashing" was the proper level of punchitude to use?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Shows] Beastars is Incredibly Messed Up

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject