AlwaysSearching

On 6/30/2022 at 8:23 AM, RZ. said:

Amber in the centre where she belongs

Yo, we got Sango in here?! Maaaad respect

32 minutes ago, viruxx said:

Just finished watching the second episode..... that marriage proposal was the most BADASS proposal I've ever seen in my life!

YOOOOOO! That's what I'm saying! I'm so jealous that you get to experience the next few episodes for the first time lol

2 hours ago, viruxx said:

IMHO it's worth a look. Hope you enjoy it if you decide to.

52 minutes ago, Ohayotaku said:

By the time the season was over I actually felt they were a cute couple, even though a certain level of lewdness persists throughout. So depending on how sensitive you are to that sort of thing, it may not be for you.

All this considered it kinda feels like something I might end up watching... but like STRICTLY in private lol. I dont wanna have to answer to people that think I'm legit watching hentai, its just easier that way

14 minutes ago, viruxx said:

Just finished watching Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro.

Might give Spy x Family a go next.

High recommend on Spy x Family

Good fun, surprisingly good comedy, watching the characters react to different situations is great

However... would you recommend DTWM Nagatoro? It looks kinda... fetishy/fan servicey at a glance

@AnimedragonIdk man, I think it says a lot about the teachers if physical harm is all they can think of to effectively punish students. Not to mention how many kids just come from bad homes and only act out because they lost the "Parent Lottery", getting smacked around at school isn't gonna make them better people.

Physical punishment is just a detterant, it doesn't usually teach any lessons besides "it hurts to get hit by a thing".

@AnimedragonDamn I guess that's the difference in our schools then, I went to a run-of-the-mill High School in the middle of the 2010s. Saw people sleeping all the time, not every day but often enough that it wasn't ever surprising.

The general understanding was that if you were asleep, that's your choice. They aren't gonna stop class for a kid that clearly decided they dont really care, they can just miss out. Not every teacher thought this way but enough of them did that I never got in any real trouble for it.

This education system ain't shit anyway, I got good grades in school despite always being sleepy and taking naps. Most of the teachers are no good at passing their knowledge onto their students so missing the actual lessons didn't usually produce much difference unless it was like, Algebra.

5 minutes ago, Kit said:

Acknowledged in career.

 

Loved. 

Congratulations man! You're doing things right to be able to feel that way, hope you're able to soak it all in!

1 hour ago, Soramee_ said:

While going to school I nearly slept, while in class in nearly slept and when I got out of school I nearly slept… guess I’m a little bit tired.

Sleeping in school is a right of passage lol, some of the best naps I ever took were at a desk

1 hour ago, Ohayotaku said:

@AlwaysSearching  for Mei Hawht-sume 

Mei is underrated waifu full-stop, ambitious and PACKED with energy

I havent read the manga but I hope she has more to do in the anime soon

Edit: Blue Rose wasn't there when I sent the reply lol. I'm not familiar with Blue Rose, so maybe I have some studying to do

10 minutes ago, MediaConsumesMe said:

I swear I know who bottom right is. But I can't place the face with a name. 

I'll give you a hint, the show is "Bleach" and her name rhymes with "Nokia"

I feel like I see a "type" here, idk but here it is

9 hours ago, MediaConsumesMe said:

Well Steins Gate, Death Note are good places to start. After that Ergo Proxy, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Monster are definitely the next step up.

It probably says a lot about me that I forgot about Evangelion technically being a "psychological" anime

I only ever saw the original run of the show and "End of Evangelion", but when it comes to the other movies and the actual ending I've never gotten around to it

Great show of course, but the original "ending" really frustrated me so I'm uncertain about giving it a 2nd chance

Cool Guy!

4 hours ago, MediaConsumesMe said:

Well I guess if I had to pick one series that stands out to me I feel Halo. The original trilogy to the newest game Infinite really shows how what producers and developers alongside casual consumers value in there product which is shallow, low effort online life service games which is lacking features and core content games with the most functioning part of the game being the in game store. 

Also to clarify, I had enjoyed the anime I had seen prior to Apocrypha. I was interested in continuing those shows but there was no driving force pushing me to delve further in anime. Nothing pushing me to hunt down the next show. 

Why it was Fate? Not sure, I'd guess because I watched Apocrypha I was inspired to watch Zero. After watching Zero I wanted somthing like Zero but not another Fate show as watching two Date shows back to back even I wanted somthing different. 

Yet still anime. 

So I choose Steins Gate. And that was also awesome. And it pinwheels from there. 

For the first few months I watched some really good shows (Ergo Proxy, Psycho Pass, Monster) as well and I think that period shaped my taste for both action and phycological anime.

It was also interesting, and proberbly worth a mention but I remember when choosing to watch Psycho Pass it was down to it sharing the same writer as Fate Zero, Gen Urobuchi, and I think that's definitely an important milestone as like Games and Film before it where I eventually grew to try and learn about the people behind what I enjoyed and sought out there other works I was now doing the same with anime.

I mean by my second year as a anime weeb I sat down and watched a Magical Girl show just cause I found out Gen was involved in its production. 

I liked Halo from 2 through Reach, but after that nothing of the little bits I played felt quite as good. Honestly it's a series that I only ever play for local multiplayer with friends, so as long as I've got one of the Halo games I already like I really dont need any more.

And I'm still waiting to mature to the point where I can latch onto a creator like that and give their other work a chance. Like it would make sense that if I like one of their "mind-babies" then I'll probably like the others. I just get hooked by concepts and visual style and when neither of those can hook me before I've actually watched an epsiode... I have a hard time giving the show a chance

I consume anime really slowly and really take care to only wwtch something if I have a REAAAALLY good feeling I'm gonna like it, I don't take many chances when it comes to diving into new stuff.

I also haven't seen much (if any?) psychological anime. As someone that's developed a taste for it already, where would you say is a good place to start?

1 hour ago, MediaConsumesMe said:

Well I guess I'm reasonable new to anime, I've only been watching anime seriously for about 2 years, before that I'd watched four shows (from the best of my recollection), the first was Yamato remake this was around 2015 as I know I'd just seen the Force Awakens with my Brother when it released and we both left feeling pretty deflated from how generic and unoriginal it had been. He'd later stumbled on Yamato 2199 and watched the series and suggested I'd like it. We watched the show, and I enjoyed Yamato, however I did remember thinking there was a little too much fanservice at times. So skip a few months later and my brother was telling me about a show he'd seen clips off online called Legend of the Galactic Heroes. I decided to check it out and after four episodes found myself really enjoying the show and so me and my brother sat through and watched LOTGHs the new thesis. 

But it was a few months after that when my brother suggested we watch a show he binged in one night called Goblin Slayer. We watched the show, I enjoyed it and that was it for about two years. I ended up re-watching those three shows maybe another time, as we caught rumour that a new series for both the Yamato and LOTGH series was scheduled to air soon. 

Eventually my brother suggested we watch Neon Genesis Evangelion. So we watched the show, then the movie End of Evangelion. 

At this point anime went on the back burner as at the time I was in the middle of college and I was also doing some play throughs of some PC games like Fallout, KOTOR and I think Halo MCC had just released on PC. 

Eventually however I came back to anime, and this time for a pink haired anime girl I'd seen all over the internet...

For some reason, Apocrypha had gripped me like no other anime series before. I wasn't even mad when Astolfo turned out to be a guy. Now I just wanted more anime. So I watched Fate/Zero, Steins Gate and then Ergo Proxy, Fate Unlimited Blade Works and then watched Psycho Pass, Wolfs Rain, the first two Heaven Feel movies, Parasyte the Maxim, Monster and so, so many more. At this point now I've watched 90 + shows, and most of those were in the last two years. I guess the way I got into Anime is pretty unusual (it was a real crawl and then a sudden sprint) and Fate is certainly the series that defines me most as an Anime fan.  

As for why I love Anime, I just think the stories in the shows and the characters are compelling. Plus the characters often look really good (I mean Fate packed with stellar character designs) and the action and animation flow in most the shows I've sat down to watch are super enjoyable. Also as my former primary passion of Games and Films have become too casual and commercialised for me to personally enjoy much anymore, (for films I say I began losing interest in the late 2000s, and as for games the late 2010s) Anime and all the decades of content were an easy medium to fall into. 

I do worry that one day I'd have watched all the good anime, as I've been working my way back through the years and sooner or later I'll run out, as I've yet to find a seasonal anime I'd really want to sit down and watch with only a few ongoing series that interest me, such as Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Madoka Magica and the Fate franchise. Also I do hold out hope that the Hunter X Hunter anime may return as I'm currently about to embark on the Greed Island arc and well at that point I only have the Chimera Ant arc and the Election arc to watch. I know there's the Dark Continent arc and the Succession arc so I hold unreasonable hope that it may one day be adapted up to the newest arc. 

A man can dream. 

Well I'm glad we both have siblings that kept finding anime for us to get into, or else neither of us would even be here lol

It really is interesting how you got reintroduced to anime SO many times before you found something that really "stuck" with you. Goes to show I guess that we should be more willing to withhold judgement on certain things until we've more thoroughly given them a chance, because we could really easily miss connecting with something that we would end up loving for life.

The commercialism side of things is really a bummer though, you're right on about that. Is there a game series that comes to mind to you as something that really got ruined by the modern landscape of things?

I'd have to say sports games stand out to me in that regard, the yearly release thing really hasnt been kind to the genre lol

5 minutes ago, Animedragon said:

The anime merchandise available at conventions 17 to 20 years ago largely consisted of art books for various series which had some really beautiful pictures in them, all the text was in Japanese but that didn't matter the books were worth buying just to look at the pictures. Other items were original soundtrack CDs with most of the track lists in Japanese (sometimes I could find translations on the 'Net), enamel pin badges were also a common item. There was usually a small collection of character figures and model kits, the the size of the packaging meant that the dealers couldn't get many of them in their cars. One year there was a stall selling anime plush toys and I got a rather nice Totoro who stands about a foot high to the tip of his ears.
17 to 10 years ago the rot started to set in with more and more dealers selling locally produced stuff and not all of it was properly licenced, and some of the soundtrack CDs were pirate copies, some of which were really professionally produced and not easy to spot.

I get the impression practicallity of what you can find at conventions has sharply fallen, based on what you just said. Like having official soundtracks of shows you love is incredibly practical, as are whole ass books devoted to the visual designs of those shows. It all centers around a love for the show and provides some sort of benefit to you for buying it.

Now don't get me wrong, you can technically get use out of a mouse pad with titties or a body pillow with a waifu on it, but they almost seem more like "gag gifts" than something someone would honestly want to use.

What was the coolest thing you ever bought at a con?

23 minutes ago, Animedragon said:

A while back I read somewhere that some anime studios produce series just to sell merchandise, they're not really bothered about the story just as long as its got cute girls they can sell models and other stuff of. The trouble is that if they keep doing that eventually people will get fed up with generic series and stop buying them.

About 10 years a go I used to regularly atend anime conventions and I saw the contents of the dealer's rooms slowly change from quality original Japanese merchandise to items produced by Western companies who were jumping on the merch bandwagon. Some of the stuff was good, but most wasn't.

That's just awful man...

Anime at its best is such a wholesome, spiritually enriching and thought provoking thing. Its a medium that built on emotion, the human condition, teaches life lessons that actively help the viewer on their own day to day lives.

It sucks so hard to see how much of it ends up commercialised to hell and back for a quick buck. And honestly I feel like streaming didn't help the problem one bit because the rate at which anime is being churned out is so blindingly fast now that you can just feel how little soul actually makes its way into most shows.

Animators should be paid more to work less, produce a lower quantity of anime and take longer on each individual project.

How well do you remember the kind of merchandise you could find at conventions say... 10 years ago?

7 hours ago, Animedragon said:

If you read a book by, for example, J.K.Rowling, J.R.R.Tolkien or Agatha Christie they go to great lengths to create the character's personalities and situations for their stories so it's easy to believe that Harry Potter, Gandalf and Miss Marple etc are real people and when you reach the last page and close the book you know that somewhere those people are carrying on with their lives and I get the same feeling at the end of an anime series.

That's actually a fantastic point, there's so many stories and shows that miss the mark with their characters because they tried to write them AS CHARACTERS first, and as PEOPLE second. So the result is often that you cant take anyone in the story seriously and none of whats happening feels like it really matters just because no one is acting in a believeable way.

Unfortunately the more saturated the market gets, I feel like more and more anime are getting made that way. Fewer stories about people, and more stories about characters that exist to sell figures and posters You can really feel it when you go to Artist Alley at an anime convention, it's the biggest draw at nearly every convention and it's just looooooaded with fan-service and the whatnot. Anything that can have a characters face slapped on it, and bonus points if they've got massive titties

2 hours ago, Animedragon said:

In 1996 I discovered anime by accident while channel hopping on my TV. One of the channels was showing what I took to be a cartoon of some sort, but after a few minutes I realised that it was nothing like any of the cartoons I'd seen before, the artwork and animation were far better and it was obviously part of a long running story so when the episode ended I took to the Internet, or the World Wide Web as it was known then, it wasn't as big as it is today and it was a lot slower.

And just imagine if you didn't manage to catch that show when it was still being broadcast on that channel, and you weren't introduced to anime for another 2, 3, 4 years. There's a chance by then you could have already been given a bad impression either from heresay or from talking to friends and you wouldnt have been able to view it in such a curious unbiased way.

But because all the stars aligned you're here with us today. That's just the fucking coolest

4 minutes ago, Metro said:

Honestly for me, I saw something I thought looked cool, I watched it, got hooked and continued watching things like that (aka anime). 

Is it cool if I ask what hooked you? By all means you dont have to dive into it but I AM curious lol

2 hours ago, Otaking66lives said:

What pulled me in was the fact that the art was so different, so much more crisp. Also, none of the shows were just episodic. The episodes built on a grand story that the show was trying to tell. American cartoons were not doing that at the time.

And even putting the show structure aside, there's a lot to say about the power of a show that can draw people in with nothing more than pure fuckin' style. Outlaw Star is a perfect example, I have almost zero clue what's going on in that show, but I really dont care because the world and characters are just so easy on the eyes and really capture your imagination. So when you say the art was a good hook for you, I totally relate to that lol

40 minutes ago, Otaking66lives said:

It was at this moment that I realized that some of my favorite "cartoons" from my childhood were anime. Robotech, Voltron and Thundercats just to name a few.

So you were into anime before you even knew it, it's funny how many people end up loving anime almost on accident like that lol. What about those shows really pulled you in?

36 minutes ago, Ohayotaku said:

 

My own anime journey spans 4 decades

it all started for me in the late 70’s/early 80’s when I saw Star Blazers

I think the most interesting part of your story to me at least is that for a long long time, it seems like your connection to anime was like the connection people have with a hobby that they typically use to just have a nice relaxing time. But more recently even though you recognize a sort of creative exhaustion within anime as a whole, you've found more ressonance with and a deeper personal connection to anime since you got back into it 5 years ago. So you were kind of on both sides where for a while it was just a nice hobby, but these days it sounds as though you feel anime is more a part of your identity than ever before. Is that right, or kind of a stretch on my part?

Lately I've felt that none of the popular discussion on here really grabs my attention just because a lot of it is... mundane I guess?

So I figured it'd be a good idea to make this new topic because I feel like it's something that EVERYONE here has some deep connection to, and it'll really help us understand each other better! (I think)

I got into anime when I was about 7 years old (2004) when my sister stumbled across Toonami for the first time. She showed me a few epsiodes of Inuyasha and all I could really tell about it was that as far as cartoons went, this one was WAY MORE DETAILED and intense than anything else I'd seen!

I didnt immediately fall in love though, it wasn't until I stumbled upon "Naruto" the very next year that I found any sort of "love" for anime. My life wasn't very rough, but at the time I was starting to get bullied a bit at school, so seeing Naruto being treated like an outcast for something he couldnt control felt... familiar to me.

Seeing someone I could relate to like that was already eye-opening enough ESPECIALLY with how emotional the show can be in softer moments, but watching Naruto stare his problems in the face without backing down and becoming someone people admired and looked up to after being a silly goofball his whole life really gave me confidence that I could do the same things with my own life!

And I guess that's both how I got into anime AND why I love it. I got into it through pure chance really, but what keeps me around is the emotion, the inspiration, the messages to not back down and to make the most of your life.

That's what I love about anime

11 hours ago, notEli said:

Outlaw Star is one of my favorites! Definitely a classic.

Oh that's great to hear! Cool, cool...

How THE F did Hilda only last 4 episodes?!

The coolest character on that ship AND voiced by the woman that plays "Major" in Ghost in the Shell, and she just EXPLODES IN SPACE? Not fair man...

Me and my sister just started "Outlaw Star" on a whim last night and HOLY SHIT! Talk about a show with a sense of style! I can't believe I'd passed it up for so long, really feels like I'm gonna be watching all the way through this thing

I'm only 3 episodes in, what do ya'll think? Am I in for a good time?

4 hours ago, notEli said:

I think being guilt-ed into doubt was my biggest hurdle out of this mentality. Naturally when you want to separate yourself from stressful situations it can be seen as running away or not putting up a fight for someone you care about. I had some people try to push guilt my way over wanting healthier connections and friendships. It was nice to break out of that cycle and learn a lot from the process.

It sounds like a test of your strength that you passed with flying colors. Not a test I'd ever purposely give to someone but hey... results I guess? It really hurts when people start questioning who you are at your core when a relationship is at the heart of it, it feels like so much is on the line and the stress can feel towering.

I'm glad you're on the other side of your struggle, it's good to remember how things like this don't last forever and they're just a time in your life.

38 minutes ago, notEli said:

A sentiment I can't agree more with. Not particularly over a partner (my ex was a wonderful companion), overall with general relationships. I feel like I gave a lot of my time and energy to people that hardly ever appreciated it in the past. Breaking away from those kinds of bad habits is absolutely liberating. 

Yep, that right there is something I've struggled with for most of my life now. Friends or relationships, I've had issues with both where I'm often made to feel the desparate one that always has to reach out. Frankly I'm tired of that dynamic. Luckily I have friendships that dont always go that way, but when I meet new people and almost immediately get made to feel like I care way more than they do... really fucks with my head.

I'd like to feel a bit more appreciated, that's all. I'm glad you can relate... except the fact you can relate means you had to deal with a lot of hurt yourself so maybe it's not such good news