I love that show but it really was the right show in the right place at the right time. Bebop still holds up and I highly recommend to this day, but the reasons it’s so beloved for what it is is that it was essentially what kicked off the broader American interest in anime outside of the niche little community it had up to that point.
So Farnese's only reason to be in the plot is to tard wrangle Casca when Guts is busy
. Poor girl may be out of a job now then unless she steps up her magical girl repertoire.I can buy Isidro, though I also see him as a in story representation of Mirua chilling the fuck down and winding down on the VIOLENCE, RAPE that was a lot more present in early Berserk. But Serpico has honest to god is just "there" and if Farnese wasn't needed to wrangle Casca, it would be a similar situation for her. There are slow burns, but they've been traveling with Guts for... what, 20 years in real time? Anyway, we'll never know, but I just think world building and art were Miura's strengths, setting up secondary characters with parallel goals to the main cast not so much.
And my god is it simple to do a "satisfying ending" for shounen. I love that slop. Give me an epilogue with the survivors having achieved something, close off some pairings and show me a 10 years later that their legacy is intact and I'm a happy camper. That this simple formula absolutely baffles a lot of creators is fascinating. Specially when both JJK and MHA had MULTIPLE epilogue chapters, I would have murdered for half that page count being dedicated to an epilogue in Full Metal Alchemist, Golden Kamui, Vigilantes or Nagatoro and looks like Oshi No Ko is on it's merry way to join the clan of shit with 3 chapters to go that feel like meandering.
Yeah, and I remember when I believed it... but "Batman knockoff" Deku onward is when the manga slammed into the ground and it kept digging underground ever since.
Very true. In my corner of the world anime wasn't as esoteric in those times like in the US. I had already watched a good number of OVAs like Dominion Tank Police, Macross, Patlabor or El Hazard as well as series like Dragon Ball, Evangelion, Slayers, Magic Knight Rayearth, Saint Seiya, Rurouni Kenshin, Berserk or Trigun and movies like Ghost in the Shell, Akira and multiple of the earlier Ghibli films (Laputa, Porco Rosso, Totoro) before I was even aware that Bebop was a thing . When I did watch it, I had already watched other shows of the time with long running narratives, so Cowboy Bebop basically being episodic except for like 3 episodes completely caught me of guard and I honestly never understood the veneration it gets. It's dripping with style, but I can only surmise that the veneration it gets is from "you had to be there".
Is it just tone though? I think it's purpose in a lot of ways. Look past the stereotypes and you can see these guys integrate very well into Guts' arc. Corkus is pretty much a dark mirror of Guts (by the way, I meant Corkus in my first post, not Gaston). He clearly had dreams and got squished and accepted his place as a commoner, that's why he's so pissed at Guts and that's why he said these things to him (even though he clearly didn't mean them). Judeau could just be "nice second best guy" but look past that and you can see that he provides much needed balance in Guts' relationship to the Hawks. Without Judeau, Guts leaving the Hawks just wouldn't be as heartbreaking, and the Eclipse events were a LOT more tragic thanks to his involvement. Hell, Pippin, the Big Mute Guy, the guy you don't expect to get development for... Well, he did this:
No relation to the late Brandon Lee
This is a big component to most of Berserk's issues. In my opinion Miura was building up these relatively lighthearted characters to establish stakes. The fairy island getting destroyed by Griffith establishes that there is no longer a safe harbor, meaning the only way forward is to confront Griffith and his entire evil empire head on. Whether or not this means the new cast starts getting killed off remains to be seen but at bare minimum they will all be in mortal peril. I expect at least one of them to die. Miura was clearly playing the long game on this and to be honest most long running works tend to sag in the middle act, whether or not it ultimately sets up a satisfying ending full of proper payoffs. The glacially slow release schedule made it stand out much more than it otherwise would have.
It's weird that Farnese seemed like the start of a new Band of Hawks that are way more dysfunctional and broken. However it never really turned out that way.
Really? Because the escort mission starts around chapter 190 and ends around 360. 170 whole chapters.
I never said anything about whether or not Guts himself develops. I'm treating everything post-Eclipse as the middle act, where Griffith rises to power, his primary opposition is established (The Kushan), and Guts gains a new band of compatriots so he has something to lose again. Not just that, it establishes a point of constant frustration; he gets Casca back but she's a broken shell of her former self and fears him. The fairy island in particular establishes a sharp contrast as Guts is surrounded by friendly faces and looks like he's on the brink of reconciling with Casca, only to have it all suddenly ripped away from him again. Now he has to fight in the face of overwhelming odds if he wants to preserve that faint hope. This is most assuredly the setup for the final showdown.
Yeah I can see how it works as a middle act, just saying it's more the raw amount of pages that's way too high, not the release pace.
I'm always frustrated when I see people defending it on the basis of good looking art even if only two volumes worth of plot happen in it and the rest is just Miura flexing by drawing big monsters and landscapes.
The pace makes it stand out more but I otherwise agree. At this point I'm just hoping they stick the landing with the finale. I can easily forgive a less than great middle act if all that setup is ultimately put to good use.
Okay, that sounds pretty gross, but it is interesting that fujo writers always tend to be really good. Stuff like Terra E, Rose of Versailles, Please Save My Earth, Jyu-Oh-Sei, and most Moto Hagio stuff transcend manga and deserve to sit next to normal YA books, while the appeal of most manga is the "real Japanese manga" label. It's especially interesting because yaoibait stuff is usually good, while yuri is absolutely autistic and cringe even compared to other manga.
Vinland Saga I'll warn you now that the first big arc does a tremendous 180 after that and completely changes it's tone.
What others are saying and I agree with them is that he was more than capable of setting things up in a fraction of the page count. I've alluded to this a few times already, but Berserk got a shit ton of goodwill with it's first few arcs so people "forgive it" for being a grand total of nothing for 170 chapters which could have perfectly been 30 for all that really happened there. The characters have barely developed in that time frame, so it's not like those chapters made them absolutely lovable entities that I would cry if a second eclipse happened, far from it. It feels a lot more that he honestly didn't know where he wanted to take things and prefered just to meander for a while to get a feel for things, it just so happens he meandered for like 10 years.
How rare is it for a western author to not only get a manga out in public but also an anime/merchandise? The only examples I can think of are Afro Samurai, Radiant, and Scott Pilgrim to an extent.
I saw that (just in case the internet is snitching on pirate sites) animez.org apparently cloned the majority of Aniwave's library, and it's pretty nice. Just make sure you do have a VPN.
