If we're really quiet, maybe they won't notice that we're talking about ANIME

[Cleretic]

The original Gundam's three compilation movies are up on the official Gundam Youtube channel, and are a really solid, interesting watch. There's this weird, uncanny feeling to its animation that I kinda dig; it's a cheap, late 70s anime and it looks like it, so you're immediately transported to that era of animation both in the US and Japan, until people just start fucking dying on-screen and sometimes en masse. It's a weird vibe that I think helps the original Gundam drive its point a lot more than all the many, many, many other pieces of media about Teens Fighting Evil, including the other Gundam shows. It looks like a kid's show, and all these young characters thrust into war actually look like children, so even the really cool parts of the show feel distinctly kinda wrong, like it just shouldn't be happening.


Meanwhile, another iconic show about Teens Fighting Evil that you can watch for free: I've discovered that Yu-Gi-Oh (most of which you can watch on the official website) is the perfect show for watching in the background while doing something else, because not much happens in any given episode, but everyone is very excited about it. So you can zone in and out at your leisure and not feel like you missed much, because the level of dramatic tension is so constant and the rate of Things Happening is so slow that you never feel like you miss anything you'd need to rewind for. Turn to the screen whenever someone starts yelling a noun, and you're probably good.

[Cleretic]

Meanwhile, another iconic show about Teens Fighting Evil that you can watch for free: I've discovered that Yu-Gi-Oh (most of which you can watch on the official website) is the perfect show for watching in the background while doing something else, because not much happens in any given episode, but everyone is very excited about it. So you can zone in and out at your leisure and not feel like you missed much, because the level of dramatic tension is so constant and the rate of Things Happening is so slow that you never feel like you miss anything you'd need to rewind for. Turn to the screen whenever someone starts yelling a noun, and you're probably good.

Even without knowing which arcs in the original series were filler while they waited for the manga, you can tell them apart immediately because they're the arcs that give female characters something to do besides 'lose'.

Also, the people writing the filler arcs were way better at writing actual duels, it's absolutely what carries the show in those arcs. You can see actual strategies that would work, and tension from things that aren't just absurd super-cards.

[Diploskull]

There's a ridiculous rap battle anime coming out now. If that sounds interesting at all you should watch Hypnosis Mic.

[Shell Game]

Hey wait a minute...

These people are talking about anime in here!!!!

[Dr. Buttplug]

Hey wait a minute...

These people are talking about anime in here!!!!

Oh no they're here guys! Grab your Narutos and cheese it!

[Cleretic]

Yu-GI-Oh GX spends the first half of its first season constructing a really pointless 'dueling school' premise to do nothing but pointless enemy-of-the-week stuff, and then a season and a half digging itself out of that hole and trying to recapture what made the original series work. Fortunately it has two more seasons after that, with which it goes COMPLETELY bonkers in the best possible way. The final season is also the only time that 4kids straight-up gave up on, so you have to watch the final season in Japanese, during which you will completely understand why 4kids didn't try with that one.

Weirdly consistent trends in GX include 'doing Professor Snape better than Harry Potter did', 'doing Harry Potter better than Harry Potter did', 'giving Joey's deck more respect than the original series did', and 'every time a character gets a big-story-deal upgrade to their deck, the resulting deck is worse than their last one'. Seriously, Neos is a dumptruck of a plan for Jaden, Cyberdark Dragon doesn't help Zane at all in-show and would actually be even worse out of it, all the Society of Light decks suck, and the big dramatic season three reveal that a side character sold his soul for Exodia just gives him a worthless Exodia engine that doesn't work for his deck.

But now I've moved on to 5D's, A.K.A. the 'Card Games On Motorcycles' series. And the motorcycles are a FEINT, because it turns out the series is actually Cowboy Bebop with card games and class warfare.

[Hoffgod]

There's a couple of good shows this season, but none of that matters because of EX-ARM. Holy shit, EX-ARM. That show is a glorious trainwreck of the highest grade. It's a 3D CGI sci-fi action anime made by people with huge ambitions and zero competence. The first trailer for it ended by stating it was "Declaring war against all of the SF series around the world!!" Which is especially hilarious given the contents of the trailer.

The show looks even worse. The characters have no real expressions, they never blink unless its purposeful, and they talk by flapping their mouths open on a single point like a CGI version of Canadians from South Park. And then there are bizarre moments where you have CGI characters sharing scenes with traditionally 2D animated characters. Without the amazing visuals, it would be a fairly stupid cyberpunk police procedural show. But the terrible presentation puts it over the top. Just look at this scene transition, or this action sequence.

What makes it extra baffling is that this isn't some small time operation. This was bankrolled by Crunchyroll and is an adaptation of a 14 volume manga series, and for some reason they put a director in charge who had only ever done live action work and hired a studio whose biggest work was a Unity dance demo that they didn't even do the dance animation for.

Anyways, EX-ARM is wonderful and you should all watch it.

[KingKalamari]

So, I've been watching through that Jojo anime everyone's always talking about and, while I've been enjoying it thus far, I has some questions. First and foremost: How is this series? How does it exist?

Everything about this series, from broad concepts to individual details, sounds like it's a parody of shonen fighting animes if you try to explain it to someone else; and yet the series takes everything deathly seriously. Even from the first season, which I know is not indicative of what the rest of the series becomes, the narrative seems to run on this bizarre dream logic where every fight or obstacle the heroes face is presented like a puzzle to be solved, but the solutions are completely incongruous with reality?

I'm midway through the third season, and just recently finished the episode where Kakyoin and Polnareff are fighting J. Geils and The Hanged Man and the duo make a big deal about how "How can we fight an opponent that only exists in a mirror?" and the show clearly establishes that attacking the mirror The Hanged Man is in with their Stands only breaks the mirror while leaving their opponent unharmed. So I'm thinking I've picked up on what the show is setting up: The puzzle they'll have to solve to defeat him is that they have to use their own reflections to fight The Hanged Man, that's very clearly the solution the show is setting up...

Imagine my surprise when the solution turns out to be "Realize The Hanged Man is actually a mote of light that jumps from one mirror to another and once they realize that they can just attack it while it's jumping between mirrors at the speed of light?!

The fact that these solutions are always presented as being simple and common sense just makes me feel like this show was created in a strange alternate universe with different laws of reality?

[A Meat]

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, it's in the name. Also it gets a bit better regarding dream logic in part 4. Not that it stops being weird, but it's weird in a more entertaining way that's not as baffling

[sambair]

None of these are big spoilers, but I'll spoil anything that I think could be one.

Part 8 is an alternate reality part 4, where the Jojo is Josuke and good alternate universe Kira who's maybe also this world's Jotaro fused together into one guy with four balls and one dick (this is the mystery hook at the end of the first chapter) and his sidekick is genderswapped Koichi. It's been running for like 10 years and just now getting to the fight with the main villain and I have no fucking idea what is going on half the time.

My guess for part 9 is that Josuke's four balls is hinting that we'll get twin Jojos next time. Some people on Reddit have speculated that at some point Giorno is going to show up because he had a stand strong enough to survive whatever the fuck happened at the end of part 6.


And if I can get anyone to become Jojo manga readers, part 7 is an alternate reality/reboot of part one, except Jonathan is Johnny Joestar, a paraplegic jockey, and instead of becoming a vampire partway through, Dio becomes a dinosaur. Johnny has to stop the president from getting Jesus' mummified corpse.

[sambair]

Just learned about the "Naruto Kai" fanedit that cuts out all the filler, so it's only a series of  70-ish 60-90 minute episodes instead of 700+ episodes. This is some grade A getting stoned on your day off entertainment. Only have like 30 hours of this to go until I get to where I gave up on Naruto Shippuden, because holy hell is it long.

[Great Joe]

Just learned about the "Naruto Kai" fanedit that cuts out all the filler, so it's only a series of  70-ish 60-90 minute episodes instead of 700+ episodes. This is some grade A getting stoned on your day off entertainment. Only have like 30 hours of this to go until I get to where I gave up on Naruto Shippuden, because holy hell is it long.

What, you don't want 40 hours of CGI trees?

[Salubrious Rex]

I started watching Planetes last night and so far it is extremely my shit. My favourite kind of sci-fi is the stuff that reduces something like the grand majesty of space and space travel down to mundane workaday bullshit and Planetes has that in spades, being about space garbage collectors who are mostly pathetic schlubs.

It's funny and charming, the characters are all pretty good, it looks nice and the way that all the space scenes are done is so good. I'm only 4 episodes in but I'm really digging it so far, but unless it throws some kind of curveball at me that completely turns me off I feel like this is going to be one I come back to often.

[Salubrious Rex]

I finished Planetes last night. It's very good.

I really was not ready for the plot to start happening more than half way into the series, so when it did and the show starts getting really heavy every little thing felt like a punch in the heart. Every episode up to that point did such an excellent job at making me love these characters, so every hardship or good thing that happened to them really got to me. The last few episodes I was constantly on the verge of weeping and was having bursts of hyperventilation regularly.

I don't want to sound dumb and pretentious or like I'm talking this show up too much but I feel like it had a pretty big impact on me. I'm not sure if it's because I'm so used to seeing especially grim and cynical media about things on a grand scale that seeing something that feels personal and sincere and optimistic caught me off guard, or because I'm at a point in my life where the themes and personalities of the characters especially resonated with me, or just both at once. Either way, Planetes struck a huge chord in me and I feel had an impact on me that no piece of media has had in a long while, especially on such a scale, and it's kind of special to me now.

Tl;dr Anime about space garbage people makes me cry and changed my outlook on a lot of things, unless I get over it in the next few days at least. It's real good though.

[One Of The Crappy Pokemon That Nobody Likes]

Heaven's Design Team is surprisingly funny. The premise is that God has outsourced the creation of animals to a company staffed by Roman deities and he's always giving them frustratingly vague and weird notes about what sort of creatures he wants. It then falls to the designers to come up with an animal that satisfies whatever silly requirements "The Client" wants while still being biologically viable.

It combines actual zoological facts with wacky jokes about office culture and what it's like to work with a strange client, which doesn't sound like it'd mesh and yet it totally does. So for example, things like polyps being inspired by Voltron, or hallucigenia being based on a kid's scribbles. It's a good time.

Just uh... mute the theme song. It's This-Is-What-All-Anime-Sounds-Like-To-Your-Grandpa level bad.