Rottcodd
Ahh… this brings back memories.
Relena Peacecraft was my very first anime crush.
Another couple of older completed series that I especially enjoyed and wanted to share:
Shoujo Fujuubun (Imperfect Girl) - written by Nisio Isin (which IMO should be sufficient recommendation all by itself), it’s quite short at only six chapters and is frankly astonishing. It’s more a coming-of-age drama than anything else, but really defies description. Just read the first chapter and I can pretty much guarantee you’ll be hooked.
ETA - I screwed that up entirely.
I thought six chapters seemed short, but I haven’t actually read it in a couple of years, and I was going by what Mangadex has.
It’s actually 27 chapters (I know - that’s a pretty significant difference). Apparently Mangadex just doesn’t have the rest (and the original version of this post linked to them, but obviously that was a waste of time).
But everything else I said about it still holds (I’m sure of that because I discovered my screw up when I set out to reread it).
The full run is available at least on MangaSee, under the English title, but I don’t know if I can, or should even if I can, directly link it here. I still strongly recommend it.
My apologies to anyone who was misled or confused by my utter failure.
A Methed to Make the Gentle World (Yasashii Sekai no Tsukurikata) - a very well done coming-of-age romance comedy/drama with an emphasis on character development. Fairly short at 31 chapters, and with a very satisfying ending. And for what it’s worth (it’s not really significant but does amuse me), while most current manga sites changed the spelling and phrasing of the English title or even substituted the Japanese title (as Mangadex has done), that English title, with that exact phrasing and spelling, is actually the title it was originally published under in Japan.
Well done.
As I said when the end was announced, all I really wanted was an indication that they were going to live happily ever after. And that’s just what we got.
And the afterword from Nanashi was touching and heartfelt, and a great way to wrap it all up.
Huh. That was actually sort of disappointing. With all of the build-up, I guess I just expected something more.
Ah well - it was still a good run.
I think every single person on the planet should read Yotsuba&! It’s a world treasure.
It’s not my personal favorite though - that would be The Voynich Hotel. I just love everything about it - great characters, funny as hell, great stories and even a great ending.
Some honorable mentions:
Yura’s awesome - I hope she becomes a regular.
You’re faulting a series for a problem that exists because of assholes.
Every medium has its instances that are provocatice or scatological or otherwise offensive.
The difference with anime is that there’s a group of assholes who base part of their identities on their purported superior taste as evidenced by the fact that they hate anime, and there’s enough of them that they’ve formed a fairly significant circlejerk. And they latch onto things like this to which to point as supposed examples of the medium as a whole, while self-servingly ignoring the other 99.9% of stuff out there.
So yes, in a sense, there is a problem with the fact that things like this exist, but the problem isn’t really simply that they exist, but that there’s a fairly significant group of assholes who can and will dogpile on that fact.
If you want to blame someone or something for the problem, don’t blame the series - blame the assholes.
When this was announced, I read part of the manga, then part of the LN original, and thought it might be good. I don’t normally watch currently airing anime, but I was keeping an eye on this. And I finally dove in and caught up on it last week.
This episode highlighted pretty much everything I loved about the series as a whole.
Anna is awesome. Let’s get that out of the way first. She’s easily my favorite FMC in years. And she was especially good in this episode. It’s just been so pleasant to watch her and Nukumizu get so comfortable with each other, and it was nice to see that in full flower in this episode. And I couldn’t help but laugh when she lost her imaginary boyfriend to an imaginary rival.
Kaju is awesome too, and it was great to see a lot of her in this episode.
And the senseis. I would’ve liked to see more of them all the way through, but at least they got a bit of extra screen time in this episode. They’re both interesting characters in their own right, and they have a great dynamic.
Chihaya was especially good in this episode too, even though she only got a few seconds. She’s been a pleasant surprise - she just looks so sweet and naive, and she’s so very much not.
Overall, the only criticisms I might have of the series are that a couple of character quirks were a bit too exaggerated (Komari’s stutter and Yumeko pretty much as a whole) and that it seems like very little was really settled. The pacing wasn’t really a problem in and of itself - I actually quite liked it - but it means that we need at least another season, and preferably a few more.
Overall, I was very impressed, and this was a good cap to the season, assuming another season is coming. Without another season, it’ll be a bit disappointingly incomplete, but even then, it was a good slice of life.
I didn’t know that the author of that godawful trainwreck even had another series.
I was curious to see if he could actually write something good, so I looked it up, then tracked it down and read the first dozen chapters or so, and I’d say the answer is no.
Well - it is better than Rent a Girlfriend, but only insofar as it couldn’t possibly be worse.
The basic setup is seven siblings - two boys and five girls (five girls - where have I seen that before?) - who are suddenly told by their fabulously wealthy and conveniently absent father that they’re not actually blood related.
The mc is the eldest son, who’s actually the middle child. The other son is virtually non-existent, which is necessary because he actually knows how to talk to girls and actually does it, so if he was interacting with the sisters at all, the story would instantly turn into NTR, since the mc is predictably pathetic and the bulk of every chapter, just like Rent a Girlfriend, is his endlessly droning thought stream of insecurity, confusion, doubting and second-guessing. He’s marginally better than Kazuya, but that’s not really an accomplishment.
The girls are decidedly better than any of the ones in RaG, but again - they couldn’t hardly be worse. They’re really just animated tropes though - the teasingly provocative oldest sister, the emotionlessly provocative meganekko, the twin-tailed tsundere, the cute sporty girl and the painfully shy but secretly aggressive youngest.
And… that seems to be about it.
When I got bored with it, I skipped forward to the latest chapter (27), which is one of the sisters basically overtly confessing to him then kissing him, believing that he’s asleep, which of course then leads to him revealing, after she leaves, that he’s been awake the whole time. And what does he do? He shout/thinks to himself, “What the hell was that?!”
It’s probably safe to assume that if this goes 300 chapters, that’s what he’ll still be doing.
