Anime/Manga - Discuss Japanese cartoons and comics here; NO CULTURE WAR DOOMPOSTING!

[McMitch]

That's an odd way to spell Zatch Bell.

Zatch Bell remains the only piece of media to employ the “useless comic relief is the last holdout against the bad guys” trope i so dearly love five times, three within the same arc and three with the same character, and it is hype every single time.

The sequel has been coasting for the last two years on reintroducing old characters and I’ve been eating it up the entire time.

 

[PeruvianPerun]

Bleach is still the best shonen for character designs. The guys are badasses and the girls are hot, as it should be.

We all know the best Shonen is Fairy Tail

Mashima consistently makes pure sex characters both male and female, even if he reuses them from story to story. I think between FT and EZ you can find almost every fetish imaginable

The worst part is nobody fucking dies ever, so there is no fucking stakes. Literally nothing in this world matters because Nasu and the good guys will always win.

Well Simon and Lucy's dad died (and bunch of villains). I think Mashima got broken by Rave, he was pretty trigger happy until last chapter. I think he got tired of killing his creations and asspulled happy end. FT is logical continuation of RM last chapter's refusal to kill heroes. If anything in Edens Zero he got edgier and more brutal. Even if story has timetravel and universe hopping original characters in universes got killed and shit. Speaking of edge, EZ has character which got abused and anally raped by bomb into Stockholm syndrome and another implied to beraped to death

 

[Professor Donger]

 

[Retarded Weeb]

Shonen talk. I watched Bleach till the end of the Soul Society arc when I was young, and it was my favorite of the "big 3" at the time. Why? I don't know, it's just cool, and has cool characters with cool powers fighting each other. I fell off of watching in the middle of that filler arc afterwords because it was filler arc quality, and things I heard about the later arc made it sound unfocused and stretched out so I never felt a desire to pick it up again or read the manga. I ended up watching the last stretch of the anime from Ichigo vs. Ulquiorra to the end while it was on TV, and it didn't leave much impression except that the character designs and fight ideas were still cool, but the pacing was wack and Ichigo's victories relied too much on asspulls. Not sure how much the former issue was there in the manga vs. being because of anime padding.

I watched the early parts of Naruto up to the big fight with Gaara plus some episodes after when it was on TV way back, but I never really cared for it. It was entertaining to watch while it was on, but I never had any desire to seek it out, and I was turned-off by how it turned into the "default" popular anime among kids/teens my age at the time since it didn't really seem good enough for that. To be kind of insulting. Naruto always struck me as the most basic bitch shonen anime. Like if I hypothetically read every shonen battle manga and ranked them then Naruto would probably be good enough to above average, but it feels like the most mediocre of the good, if that makes any sense.

I watched One Piece up to the end of Enies Lobby at one point, and I think it's definitely the most consistently good of the three, but the anime started getting way too padded out, and I hear it only got worse from there. I'm mildly interested in reading the manga at some point, but it's hard to get the motivation when it's over 100 volumes and still going for who knows how much longer. And although I think it's good, it's not really something fit my aesthetic senses enough for me to love, if that makes sense. Kind of like Dragon Ball, but DB is a lot more nostalgic since I watching that shit since I was like 6 years old.

As far as other Shonen Jump stuff goes, I liked Rurouni Kenshin and YuYu Hakusho. Though I've never really attempted to read the manga for the latter, I was probably more motivated for Kenshin because there was a whole third of the manga that was never animated. For less traditional stuff, I like Yu-Gi-Oh!, Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro, and Muhyo & Roji. The former two in particular I would call two of my favorite manga. The anime in both cases have issues. Y'know, Muhyo & Roji got an some time ago, but it must of had problems because I literally never saw anyone ever talk about it.

 

[Blazeuser56]

I will give Bleach one thing: it wasn't Jujutsu Kaisen

Is JJK really that bad? I've finished the manga a few months ago and currently reading Modulo (it's pretty good so far). The only problem I have is the ending being a little rushed. In case you want to talk about the lack of worldbuilding, I don't really have a problem with the lack of worldbuilding because I don't think Gege ever wanted to create an expansive world, the school setting got dropped after one arc (unless you count JJK 0) and the clans were just tools to develop characters like Maki. The story of JJK is about Yuji overcoming Sukuna, the worldbuilding would've played no role in the plot whatsoever.

 

[Professor Donger]

Finished the first episode of Cinderella Gray. Shit is peak

 

[Fount of BadSpeak]

Sometimes I feel like the only guy who doesn't care for shounen. In theory, I should like it since I like cool dudes, pretty women, fighting, heroes, adventures, etc., but I really have not been gripped by any of them yet. A lot start cool, but they do a few spinning backflips over the shark to keep themselves going, and inevitably lose me. Or they forget about what made them cool, engaging, or unique to begin with by taking power creep to utterly retarded levels. Even when I was a teen, I found myself much more drawn to seinen, not because it's smarter or something like that, but because it seems much more capable of telling a coherent story start to finish, instead of artificially prolonging itself because it's popular.

 

[Gentlebastard]

I watched One Piece up to the end of Enies Lobby at one point, and I think it's definitely the most consistently good of the three, but the anime started getting way too padded out, and I hear it only got worse from there.

You heard it right. Wano was particularly atrocious towards the end. There was a 6-month break that lasted from October 24 to April 25 just to let it get some distance from the manga and sort some stuff out, which helped reduce padding, but it's still dragging itself a bit and resorting to "special episodes" now and then.

 

[Professor Donger]

Her greed knows no bounds

 

[Professor Donger]

You heard it right. Wano was particularly atrocious towards the end. There was a 6-month break that lasted from October 24 to April 25 just to let it get some distance from the manga and sort some stuff out, which helped reduce padding, but it's still dragging itself a bit and resorting to "special episodes" now and then.

Dude you posted this like 4 times

 

[Namekian George Floyd]

Dude you posted this like 4 times

You heard it right. Wano was particularly atrocious towards the end. There was a 6-month break that lasted from October 24 to April 25 just to let it get some distance from the manga and sort some stuff out, which helped reduce padding, but it's still dragging itself a bit and resorting to "special episodes" now and then.

 

[Gentlebastard]

Dude you posted this like 4 times

Sorry about that, my Internet is violently shitting itself and kept throwing errors every time I tried to post. The duplicates should be deleted now.

 

[Professor Donger]

You can just see her dreams get crushed image by image

I love this stupid horse oh my God.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

TorrentFreak: Rampant U.S. Piracy is a Multibillion-Dollar Concern for Japanese Manga Publishers (archive) (mega)

The majority of this traffic goes to English web reading portals, and of all English-speaking countries, the United States is the top consumer of pirated manga, with 317 million monthly visits. That puts the U.S. in third place in terms of global manga piracy consumption, just behind Japan and Indonesia.

I kneel

Specifically, the report calculates financial “damage” by taking the time spent on pirate (reading) sites, and multiplying that by the number of mangas that can be read per hour. This figure is then multiplied by the average cost of a manga book: 500 yen (~$3.25).

How much have you "stolen"? I've started thousands of titles.

Not coincidentally, the ABJ report also looked at the domain registrars used by pirate sites. The American company Namecheap came out on top as it’s used by 27% of the sites, followed at a distance by two other U.S. businesses: Namesilo (5%) and GoDaddy (5%).

Looking at the front-facing IP-addresses of these sites, Cloudflare was linked to 73% of the sites. While the California company doesn’t necessarily host these sites, it is commonly used as a CDN.

The report doesn’t explicitly state that these intermediaries are liable for pirate sites, but that is ultimately what many rightsholders want.

You can read Japanese, right? You read those Japanese comics every day. (mega)

 

[God of Nothing]

TorrentFreak: Rampant U.S. Piracy is a Multibillion-Dollar Concern for Japanese Manga Publishers (archive) (mega)

ごめんください

 

[Another Random]

Sometimes I feel like the only guy who doesn't care for shounen. In theory, I should like it since I like cool dudes, pretty women, fighting, heroes, adventures, etc., but I really have not been gripped by any of them yet. A lot start cool, but they do a few spinning backflips over the shark to keep themselves going, and inevitably lose me. Or they forget about what made them cool, engaging, or unique to begin with by taking power creep to utterly retarded levels. Even when I was a teen, I found myself much more drawn to seinen, not because it's smarter or something like that, but because it seems much more capable of telling a coherent story start to finish, instead of artificially prolonging itself because it's popular.

Well, what is "shounen" to you?

 

[Fount of BadSpeak]

I kneel
How much have you "stolen"? I've started thousands of titles.
You can read Japanese, right? You read those Japanese comics every day. (mega)

This lawsuit really bodes poorly for anime and manga availability online, especially at a time where an already small internet is being censored and quashed even harder. I thought the Trump admin would do something about that, but I thought a lot of things so I can only assume this will keep getting worse. Even learning moonrunes may not be enough, if people are scared out of even uploading raws anymore.

Also, with Amazon now pushing absolutely atrocious AI dubs, and Crunchyroll's increasingly nonsensical and worthless translations, I think that weebs are in for some hard times ahead.

Well, what is "shounen" to you?

Naruto, My Hero Academia, Bleach, Dragonball Z, Fire Force, Yu Yu Hakashu, Black Clover, Doctor Stone, Gurren Lagan, that kind of thing.

I did really like Fullmetal Alchemist, but that's a notable outlier.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

This lawsuit really bodes poorly for anime and manga availability online, especially at a time where an already small internet is being censored and quashed even harder. I thought the Trump admin would do something about that, but I thought a lot of things so I can only assume this will keep getting worse. Even learning moonrunes may not be enough, if people are scared out of even uploading raws anymore.

Also, with Amazon now pushing absolutely atrocious AI dubs, and Crunchyroll's increasingly nonsensical and worthless translations, I think that weebs are in for some hard times ahead.

It'll be a mixed bag, I think. Convenient sites like MangaDex could be nuked or neutered into becoming unusable (it's not dead yet, I still use it). If you respect DMCA, eventually your ass will be grass. Other mangakaaakkaakklot sites can continue to play the cat-and-mouse game, and they'll probably be at least as successful as the pirate streaming sites continue to be. I can watch almost any movie/TV show for free in seconds on the clearnet. If that's not solved, I don't see why manga/manhwa/manhua piracy would be.

Even minor barriers to entry could reduce the readership, and thus the cash flow for groups that collect donations or do the paywall shit. There could be less interest in translation, but AI is moving in to take the place of TLs. A lot of groups are already using it, and quality is generally high if you are English-proficient enough to fix mistakes. Bad TLs have always been with us; 20 years ago folx must have been plugging words into Japanese dictionaries and barely editing the results.

Obviously, you need the raws, and that's where the Japanese corporations/government can likely do the most damage, since going after the scanners fights both domestic and foreign piracy at the source.

We're not even close to tapping all of the available options. Make a MangaDex clone into an onion site and you could be virtually untouchable. Server costs should be well under those needed for movie/TV streaming. There are a lot of technically proficient weeb freetards who could take on the challenge. We don't see sites as advanced as what Anna's Archive offers (a front-end accessing over 1 petabyte of scanned books, probably some comics but it's not a major focus).

 

[Imam Shamil]

This lawsuit really bodes poorly for anime and manga availability online,

If they touch my beloved nyaa.si, I will commit heinous acts

 

[vern]

t'll be a mixed bag, I think. Convenient sites like MangaDex could be nuked or neutered into becoming unusable (it's not dead yet, I still use it). If you respect DMCA, eventually your ass will be grass. Other mangakaaakkaakklot sites can continue to play the cat-and-mouse game, and they'll probably be at least as successful as the pirate streaming sites continue to be. I can watch almost any movie/TV show for free in seconds on the clearnet. If that's not solved, I don't see why manga/manhwa/manhua piracy would be.

Even minor barriers to entry could reduce the readership, and thus the cash flow for groups that collect donations or do the paywall shit. There could be less interest in translation, but AI is moving in to take the place of TLs. A lot of groups are already using it, and quality is generally high if you are English-proficient enough to fix mistakes. Bad TLs have always been with us; 20 years ago folx must have been plugging words into Japanese dictionaries and barely editing the results.

Obviously, you need the raws, and that's where the Japanese corporations/government can likely do the most damage, since going after the scanners fights both domestic and foreign piracy at the source.

We're not even close to tapping all of the available options. Make a MangaDex clone into an onion site and you could be virtually untouchable. Server costs should be well under those needed for movie/TV streaming. There are a lot of technically proficient weeb freetards who could take on the challenge. We don't see sites as advanced as what Anna's Archive offers (a front-end accessing over 1 petabyte of scanned books, probably some comics but it's not a major focus).

Manga sites might be a little more shacky since unlike with anime and western tv series where you can just scrape the episode from the big streamers, fix one or two lines in the subs, then upload them on nyaa or aggregator sites, manga is still 90% translated by scan groups and its usually up to said group to spread it around, and right now a lot seem to be retreating to private discord groups with no intention of sharing it elsewhere online.
Off course these scans will always eventually show up on the rest of the Internet eventually, but there's not really a major hub where their being uploaded too and I don't think there's anyone trying to coax the groups to upload scans to their site first, Comick tried but that got hit harder then mangadex did.. What seems to be happening is a bout a dozen different aggregators sites monitoring each other with a handful of bots and power users going back and forth trying uploading any new scans they found while blocking the others from scrapping it.