This character is voiced by Sumire Uesaka. Who also speaks fluent Russian irl and loves Russian culture. I cant think of a better voice actress for this character than her. She is best suited for this role and I cant wait to see this anime this summer.
Please do tell. I remember reading D Gray man thinking it was alrightish at best, then it dropped out of weekly Shounen Jump, went into a hiatus then came back on monthly and I completely lost track of it. From what I heard the thing basically changed it's genre outright.
Negi created the story around the ending, not the kind of work that writes until the end to come up with an ending. Issue is, Negi was so obsessed with making it a mystery that he pretty much had to leave things regarding how the MC felt as ambiguous as possible.
Sometimes writers need to learn that making things coherent and organic is a lot more important than keeping everyone guessing. Specially since the grand majority of harem series basically follow the first gal rule for the most part anyway so it makes the harem an excuse to have a retarded protagonist. If he really wanted this Yotsuba gal which was made around his wife to be the chosen one, go all in on it and fuck it and just make it an enjoyable trip.
Aka I'm kind of aware of how much of a sped he is and how he blew through the ending of Kaguya sama between his divorce and being more interested with Oshi No Ko which meant mucking up the ending a lot (the whole final family mafia arc is absolutely retarded and I'm still pissed at no proper closure for Ishigami and Miko), though I'd love to hear more stories of him being a sped. But the Vinland Saga guy I was not aware.
As far as I'm concerned Vinland dropped off a cliff the moment Askechad died and Thorfin became a retard pacifist which is the archetype of heroe I hate the most. The we can all totes get along and nobody needs a sword! without accounting for how the only reason the main character can even operate like this is due to how overpowered he is compared to everything else. Only time I've seen the OP pacifist done properly is Vash and that poor guy ate tremendous amounts of shit to stick with his convictions and never told anybody to drop their guns. Then they added the tranny bastard child of Thorkell and I was fully out by that point. Anyway, tangents aside at how much Vinland lost me when it decided to just do a genre change from "viking brutality" to "we can all be fwiends" in a fucking seinen, what is the story behind the author?
I'm just curious, I'm a sucker for romance manga, so aside as taking this as a "do not read warning", very curious about how this relates to the whole pattern your wife as the love interest discussion.
Has anyone actually read it? I loved Assassination Classroom to bits, but then I tried reading a chapter of Elusive Samurai and just... didn't have enough interest to give it a proper go. Be there gold here or is it just a reflection of it's lower sales?
I dont know if this belongs in the tranny memes thread or it belongs here but this is just extremely funny to me
Also Ive been noticing, one piece's art is getting real bad, like actual school kid sketch levels of trash. Its even worse than my drawings which is baffling to me. Why is that, I can clearly see its still being done on paper but is Oda scuffed for time or something?
I recently heard of a 90s mecha anime OVA called Power Dolls (sometimes written Power DoLLs), but a web search later reveals it was a series of hex based games with anime FMV?
So I started looking for something else, and decided on Cross Ange, which is later vintage, but might be good?
He has the movie project A-ko on there which is another fun one. He actually has a TON of old school shit on his site.
He's all a out the old school, late 80s and early 90s anime that usually came out on LaserDisc. He has a lot of stuff on there and you don't even have to download it. I mean you can but there are links to watch it on archive.org
I'm enjoying the character-centric nature of the second half so far. Normally I wouldn't like this kind of shift but the characters are strong enough to make it work, and work well, at least for me.
Not necessarily pointing at you I'm still trying to figure out why people are acting like they got baited and switched out of their battle shonen anime by the the wizard exam arc when out of 28 episodes there were like 4 or 5 that were wizard battle centric. The Aura arc was really off formula, the rest of the anime was slow and character driven. Wizard exam arc was just a return to normal if anything, and I ended up liking most of the characters in it.
Anyway, tangents aside at how much Vinland lost me when it decided to just do a genre change from "viking brutality" to "we can all be fwiends" in a fucking seinen, what is the story behind the author?
I'd say that Farmland saga is still good. I wholeheartedly enjoy narratives told from the "lesser" viewpoint, and Thorfinn having to deal with the farming struggle instead of being a viking ninja, even with the misery porn, was interesting. The anime adaptation was coherent, even if they dialed up the useless misery porn even further and robbed me of the theoretical half episode about Snake's backstory as a Varangian, something I will never pardon.
For its evolution, it's rather clear Yukimura wasn't a viking weeb and it's merely ambience for terminal naive pacifist post-WW2 Japanese ideology. Entire story arcs and characters afterward struggle against the setting itself in a desperate attempt to shoehorn even more shonen tropes and build a pacifist narrative, with results that apparently please no one. From the afterwords it's clear the man has no appreciation or even interest in the early medieval nordic culture, considering its values regarding glory, violence and societal standing "toxic". It is how it is. He struck gold almost randomly and he tries to keep up.
I know it was was discussed in this thread a year or so back but is there Still intrest for a Mangadex thread and its related groups? I had a partial OP written with alot of the stuff htey have done various scanlation group drama.
I think that's the biggest issue, some genres run so heavy on tropes and "buy-in" you can't really deconstruct it or need to be really, really careful. most people also already know what's up, so what expectations are there to subvert?
I mean harem rom-coms already gets people riled up when the "wrong girl" wins, you can't have the MC end up with a "third party" because that feels like waste of time etc.
there's a reason most just leave it open and everybody can live with it's own headcanon (and h-doujinshi).
Not necessarily pointing at you I'm still trying to figure out why people are acting like they got baited and switched out of their battle shonen anime by the the wizard exam arc when out of 28 episodes there were like 4 or 5 that were wizard battle centric. The Aura arc was really off formula, the rest of the anime was slow and character driven. Wizard exam arc was just a return to normal if anything, and I ended up liking most of the characters in it.
Agreed. Hell, I was worried that the mage exam arc would mean that the slower more introspective and slice of life moments would be lost by "shounening" the series. Thankfully they are just a way to add color add some stakes intersperced with those slower moments. And yes, I did not expect to end up liking so many characters from the mage exam, special mention to Denken "I cast fist".
I did binge the manga and am up to date and if madhouse keeps the quality, there should be something to satisfy everyone in the next season.
I'd say that Farmland saga is still good. I wholeheartedly enjoy narratives told from the "lesser" viewpoint, and Thorfinn having to deal with the farming struggle instead of being a viking ninja, even with the misery porn, was interesting. The anime adaptation was coherent, even if they dialed up the useless misery porn even further and robbed me of the theoretical half episode about Snake's backstory as a Varangian, something I will never pardon.
For its evolution, it's rather clear Yukimura wasn't a viking weeb and it's merely ambience for terminal naive pacifist post-WW2 Japanese ideology. Entire story arcs and characters afterward struggle against the setting itself in a desperate attempt to shoehorn even more shonen tropes and build a pacifist narrative, with results that apparently please no one. From the afterwords it's clear the man has no appreciation or even interest in the early medieval nordic culture, considering its values regarding glory, violence and societal standing "toxic". It is how it is. He struck gold almost randomly and he tries to keep up.
You are definitely not selling it to me much, hahaha. But I'm one of those that despised the genre switch. I was invested in Askelads story, I was never that invested in Thorfin.
Pacifist messaging is always a fucking copout in these stories since they never have the balls to tackle the "what if they fucking hate you, it's not rational and there is no middle ground?" Or "maybe you can get you ass kicked for hours to 'prove a point' (and get lucky they didn't just get bored from kicking you and just decapitate you, since they don't see a badass with convictions, they just see a faggot being a faggot) but what about your little girlfriend?". People always will wet their pants at how honorublu the pacifist is when anybody paying attention can tell you that almost never actually happens.
It's another thing I really liked about Frieren, Demons are fucking demoms, they are completely alien to you and trying to play nice usually ends in disaster.
I am curious on perception after the series completely flipped the script. Did it go up, down or kind of stay the same in popularity?
Has anyone actually read it? I loved Assassination Classroom to bits, but then I tried reading a chapter of Elusive Samurai and just... didn't have enough interest to give it a proper go. Be there gold here or is it just a reflection of it's lower sales?
It has moments but my problem with it is the first dozen or so chapters are dense with historical information about a time period that not even the most die hard Japanese history weeboos know a lot about, it got a little better when it started to lighten up a bit, but koro-sensei carried a large part of Assclass and the crazy priest isn't as effective. It's getting an anime this summer so maybe it'll be more playable assuming it gets a half decent adaptation.
For its evolution, it's rather clear Yukimura wasn't a viking weeb and it's merely ambience for terminal naive pacifist post-WW2 Japanese ideology. Entire story arcs and characters afterward struggle against the setting itself in a desperate attempt to shoehorn even more shonen tropes and build a pacifist narrative, with results that apparently please no one. From the afterwords it's clear the man has no appreciation or even interest in the early medieval nordic culture, considering its values regarding glory, violence and societal standing "toxic". It is how it is. He struck gold almost randomly and he tries to keep up.
Everything after the farm is missed opportunity after missed opportunity.
Hild, good in concept as Thorfin doesn't get to run away scott free from his years as a murder hobo. Bad in execution because Hild is an insufferable bitch that actually takes away most tension to whether or not Thorfin can stick to being a pacifist
Baltic war arc where Thorfin finds out Floki is the one who ordered his father's death. Had a genuinely good moment or two where Thorfin struggles to stay with his new pacifist stick, but the Baltic war was kinda ass and the above point about Hild stands true. Etc. etc.
Please do tell. I remember reading D Gray man thinking it was alrightish at best, then it dropped out of weekly Shounen Jump, went into a hiatus then came back on monthly and I completely lost track of it. From what I heard the thing basically changed it's genre outright.
Well the first thing is that it's still on-going, it's not Blue Exorcist levels of slow, but that's long for a series, almost stretched thin. The issue however is that it hasn't gone anywhere either. If you can remember the status quo in 2009 you'll almost easily be able to follow what's happening, with one or two minor issues.
(From here on, I'm just posting things I read somewhere else, I procrastinated on getting into DGM since 2012, now I'm happy I did)
However, the real issue is that the mangaka, Katsura Hoshino, is a woman & now she has a crush on a bit-character, Johnny. Now there are other examples of authors getting weird crushes on bit-characters. But nothing as aggressive as Johnny. What's worse is, she's even shameless about it too, this was from an interview last year:
"Interviewer: Is there any character that developed outside expectations?"
"Katsura Hoshino: Probably Johnny. At first I treated him as a minor character, but he & the Science Division became my support so they began to stand out. D. Gray-man is a heart-breaking story, but there are normal people such as the Science Division who acts as a saving grace. Even for the superpowered exorcists, they are able to remain human-like because of characters like Johnny."
But who the fuck is Johnny & what makes him so fucking annoying?
Well, remember the swirly glasses dude Johnny from the science team? This guy:
See, out of nowhere he becomes a main character whose entire purpose is to swoon around Allen constantly. Him becoming a main character is such a fever dream, that you'll feel like you missed an volume or something.
Meanwhile, at the same time Lenalee, the main fucking heroine of the series, is "coincidentally" written out of the story (forced to stay with the Black Order while Allen runs away with his 3 boyfriends & the Noah inside him). Last time I've heard, they have been trapped in a flashback arc
(Explaining the origins of Mana & Allen/Red, back at the circus) for in real life years. Also, Lavi, another main character of the series, has been tied to a folding chair in a coma since the last decade in IRL years. Also, Mana Walker is the Earl now, cause retcons.
Seriously, I've never seen a crush for a random side character turn into outright replacing your heroine, doubly so when it changes your heroine from a woman to a man.
TL;DR - The mangaka's inner fujofag kicked in & the main heroine has been replaced by a fucking borderline NPC character, turning the manga into Yaoibait, since the last decade.
Sometimes writers need to learn that making things coherent and organic is a lot more important than keeping everyone guessing. Specially since the grand majority of harem series basically follow the first gal rule for the most part anyway so it makes the harem an excuse to have a retarded protagonist. If he really wanted this Yotsuba gal which was made around his wife to be the chosen one, go all in on it and fuck it and just make it an enjoyable trip.
Aka I'm kind of aware of how much of a sped he is and how he blew through the ending of Kaguya sama between his divorce and being more interested with Oshi No Ko which meant mucking up the ending a lot (the whole final family mafia arc is absolutely retarded and I'm still pissed at no proper closure for Ishigami and Miko), though I'd love to hear more stories of him being a sped. But the Vinland Saga guy I was not aware.
I need an entire new comment on Aka honestly, but I will say one thing is that his divorce is rumored to be due to his spergy attitude & that said attitude might have led his wife to cheat on him, due to an interview later on where someone asked him casually what kind of girls he's into, & he said "the ones who are honest".
As far as I'm concerned Vinland dropped off a cliff the moment Askechad died and Thorfin became a retard pacifist which is the archetype of heroe I hate the most. The we can all totes get along and nobody needs a sword! without accounting for how the only reason the main character can even operate like this is due to how overpowered he is compared to everything else. Only time I've seen the OP pacifist done properly is Vash and that poor guy ate tremendous amounts of shit to stick with his convictions and never told anybody to drop their guns. Then they added the tranny bastard child of Thorkell and I was fully out by that point. Anyway, tangents aside at how much Vinland lost me when it decided to just do a genre change from "viking brutality" to "we can all be fwiends" in a fucking seinen, what is the story behind the author?
I kinda hate half-assed pacifists in general due to the lack of nuance that goes into writing them, but some are very well written. Thorfinn is not one of those, probably the worst one I've read.
The whole "I have no enemies" thing itself is retarded, the message comes from the most sheltered mindset possible. The type of writer who pushes this dense ideology in most cases, never experienced any real hardships or was never confronted with a society that valued individualism over conformity. This type of message only gets preached in works where the protagonist just so happens to be the strongest & just like the author, never has to come face to face with the harsh reality of barbaric & feral enemies trying to rape & murder their loved ones.
More than that, it's just very boring, not from a story perspective, but from a human one. It makes one look too privileged or sheltered, which Yukimura is.
In fact, Yukimura basically forgets what he's writing about later on, he doesn't realise that he's writing a story about actual barbarians, who were also victims at times too (he actually shows that part). He's writing a story about Vikings, but he hates them & European culture in general, this isn't even including the troons in Nordic land, the mary-sue that shouldn't exist to begin with, feminist shit happening that doesn't make sense neither in the era nor even from a logical perspective in context, etc. Post-Farmland Saga is just shit due to shit he believes in infecting the manga.
Mind you, this is the same guy who went to Sweden to "learn more about vikings", a country that hates vikings with a passion. It's like visiting Israel to learn about Germany.
As an anime only, I've read the spoilers to some things, but the real issue is, it started after Yukimura had a daughter, he suddenly became an egalitarian cuck of sorts, trying to moralfag his readers out of nowhere. What's worse is that his takes are so naive, childish, retarded, yet so deranged that even your most progressive leftist soyboy might eye-roll at it. Some examples of his moralfagging on his end volume notes:
We have a guy who's smugly admitted about his IRL utilisation of Joestar special technique, lecturing us how pride worked.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well."
Matthew 5:38-40
Bible-thumping aside, in some cases it wasn't about pride so much as honouring your ancestors & building on their achievements, & it's not like that 'pride' didn't come with responsibility. If you failed in any way your name lost credibility & you would literally damn your ancestors to Hell.
Here's him exposing "toxic masculinity" inherent to the Viking society & oppression of women in his magnum opus.
Here's him embracing feminism & being a borderline misandrist:
He's basically ignoring/ignorant of the environmental & socio-economic pressures that cause this sort of behavior throughout all societies, & blames it on toxic masculinity or some shit. You call it barbaric chimping all you want, the men who raided & pillaged, did it in direct or indirect benefit to their tribe/clan/etc, this holier-than-thou gay modern attitude be damned. Also, those mothers? who does he think they spreaded their legs for?
This was the one that made me the most MATI, due to how his sons would be in the future, so I apologise for any tard rage here.
Here's him being a fucking Karen & pulling the Jack "Jack The Bitcher" Thompson (guy who tried to ban GTA) to his own children, & saying they shouldn't play with toys & have mock fights cause "violence is le bad", & how you should be a pussy-ass, all cock, no cum coward who should run away from any & all confrontation.
It's like the nip equivalent of trooning your kid, with the same emasculation tactics & all, it reminds me of the soy dad who dilated over his adolescent son liking tractors in a motor show.
I imagine he just goes "Sons, just back yourself into a corner & hope the rat attacking a cat myth is real when even if the rat bites the cat it dies in the end...", at times of any problems.
TL;DR - He believes that Men deaths rising, women most affected.
This one is straight up mental, here's him embracing gynocentricism, while saying all men in history were being chest-thumping niggers, chimping out at each other. And that it's the men who wield violence & the women who suffer on account of it.
There are a lot of hilarities in this one. It's like a liberal white hag wrote this.
>Roughly speaking, history is a chronicle of wars, and war is when a bunch of hotheaded men get together and blow off steam.
Apparently the wars fought in the annals of history for things like necessary resources, self-defense, freedom, the greater good, etc. apparently don't exist in his version of history at all. It's all just due to a couple of bros being Goku-tier fightfags of their era wanting to blow off steam in the only way they know how or something.
1: I think I know what test he is talking about here, it's possibly this one, Stockholm University made a video on it:
There was some tabloid talk about this at the time too, I remember seeing another video about this test which showed how that study was controversial, they wanted the body to be female from the start because they were feminists. There is a video explaining all of it by Thomas Riley, that video's description has the link to the original study:
2: There's another issue of women who actually did fight in history. This faggot wrote a story about Vikings, but doesn't know about Shield Maidens, or even the Onna-Mushas from his own culture.
Now to that whole "it's the men who wield violence and the women who soffur on account of it" part.
1: There are studies that have shown women in power did more wars in general compared to men so the whole woman = le good pure = peace is bullshit and the author' bias on pacifism & goodness only hinders the story after the farm land. There are ancient texts like the ancient Greek epic poet Homer saying that the Trojan War was caused by Paris, son of the Trojan king, & Helen, wife of the Greek king Menelaus, when they went off together to Troy. Or the White Feather, women shaming young men to step into the meat grinder that was part of the WWI.
2: What's even more hilarious about this one is that he somehow looks even worse here, cause it looks like he actually respects women less than many straight up misogynists as he believes they can only ever be tools for men to abuse & can't have thoughts and desires complex enough to power for themselves. This is very old fashioned sexism, the idea that girls are princesses with no complex motives & who should never leave the home & are intrinsically good for some reason. A quote like this wouldn’t be out of place in like the 1800s. It's like he tried so hard to be a male feminist, that he almost became a misogynist.
In fact, he goes against his own message here of women being victims in all wars: >Says women can do no wrong
>Thinks there is a female warrior grave
>Instead of admiting women love violence too he goes "WHAT FORCED HER?!"
Here's possibly the biggest piece of hypocrisy on it, him bitching about the face/honor based culture, An Eastern Asian is the last person who should criticize a face/honor-centered culture. Combine this with the fact that he makes it look like literally nothing is worth fighting for in his view. He'd do literally anything just to save his own skin and think of himself as morally superior for his utter cowardice. It's beneath contempt, it's just pathetic & sad.
I genuinely thought at first these were localisations by some troonslator, but he actually believes this shit. His Twitter is proof of it. Here the mangaka has said that violence should be gone from (I think his?) manga & he's embarrassed that it took him 10 years to realize that.
He's a fucking insult to the noble ideology of pacifism.
Constantinople being skipped was reason enough to drop the series. I've heard that the Vinland part proper is a complete mess of half-baked ideas (there was a memetic image of a native shaman having visions of Evil Whites Colonizing, bloody hilarious).
I was going to sperg a bit more, but @Xenomorphs Are Cute did a better job than me. Yukimura was essentially lucky in forging a good first act (I'm still fond of Askeladd despite how stupid his Roman memery is, but it's the good kind of stupid) and a decent second, but he pretty much started going off the rails and showing he had no clue afterwards.
I got the pet theory that Constantinople was skipped not only because he fucked around useless arcs and cringe characters for too long, but also because it was goddamn difficult to contextualize it in his retarded ideology (and from what I saw second-hand from the Americas part he isn't doing too well even with the injuns). The Eastern Romans were living in a constant state of never-ending intrigue and warfare fighting essentially everyone, from imperialist religions that demanded submission or death to marauding slavs to the vikings themselves, and let's see how long "let's all be friends" works when the entire world plans for your destruction. I wonder.
It is stopping me this time tho, because I can barely remember this one whatsoever. All I, vaguely, if at all, remember is that after the finale chapter, He dedicated the Quints' VA some sort of victory, but I can't remember what the context was.
All I have from then is this shitpost picture, left is Ayaneru (the seiyuu Ayane Sakura's nickname) & right is Negi, the mangaka.
So it is too retarded for me to tell, cause the lore is deep yet forgotten (by me).
All you need to know about Vinland saga dropping off is that eventually it introduces a character that can Accurately Be Described As - Transvestite Thorkell. No, that isn't hyperbole from me for the sake of a comedic joke. There's a buff bastard son of Thorkell introduced (out of nowhere) who dresses in drag in the Viking age because, representation? I don't know, and I don't need to know.
This character is voiced by Sumire Uesaka. Who also speaks fluent Russian irl and loves Russian culture. I cant think of a better voice actress for this character than her. She is best suited for this role and I cant wait to see this anime this summer.
As an anime only, I've read the spoilers to some things, but the real issue is, it started after Yukimura had a daughter, he suddenly became an egalitarian cuck of sorts, trying to moralfag his readers out of nowhere. What's worse is that his takes are so naive, childish, retarded, yet so deranged that even your most progressive leftist soyboy might eye-roll at it.
holy shit that's a prime example what I was taking about in another thread. at lot of dudes get outright weird after becoming a father, like attack of the body snatchers.
the english dance is actually why I prefer the dub
nothing against jpop, it just fits the striptease better imo.
EDIT: also remember liking the ED more, it's just peak 90's
To be honest I always saw it as a manga for girls, considering the Gothic emo artstyle and chuuni edginess. Similiar vibes early 00s shoujo like Godchild, Black Butler, or Vampire Knight.
Shit, thinking about it made me sad. Shoujo is so fucking boring and dead now.
