Rottcodd
Thanks for the heads up - fixed.
Ah - and yes, it was almost certainly taken down and put back up. When I posted, it was listed under the Romaji title, and I used the English one instead just because that’s what it’s been posted under all along. Now it’s back to the English title.
Part of it is that there are neat little details slipped in along the way that provide context and add to the characters and the story. Like it’s not just that she happens to have twintails - there’s an actual cute story behind it.
The art is impressive too - especially the expressions.
I think there’s more to it than that though. I don’t understand how it works well enough to analyze it, but there’s something to the timing and the viewpoint shifts - like everything unfolds just right.
If I was an aspiring mangaka, I’d be studying this carefully, panel-by-panel. Because whatever they’re doing, it’s working.
How is this so good?
I mean - this was a chapter about a twin-tailed tsundere getting caught in the rain and getting rescued by her crush, who offers her a folding umbrella that they eventually end up sharing, much to her dismay (and secret pleaaure).
In another situation, I could actually pan a romcom just by sneeringly noting that that was the plot outline of the latest chapter - with just those details, a reader would get that my point was it was just another tedious, cheesy, tropish nothing.
But that’s not what this is, and reading it didn’t feel that way. I don’t get why it works, but it does. I was completely swept up in it from start to finish, and satisfied and impressed by it when it was over, and I can’t even quite pin down why. It’s just… really good. Somehow.
I think I’m going to have to drop this.
With nearly every new chapter, I dislike Mitsumi more.
Poor Kouhei - he’s got it bad.
Since Makeine ended and nothing caught my attention this season, I’m back to browsing and binging the past, and just finished up one of the best series I’ve watched in a long time - Heike Monogatari.
I just happened to come across it on a stack and thought it looked interesting, so I watched the first episode and was immediately hooked. It wasn’t until I saw the Science SARU logo in the closing credits that I realized it was Yuasa (though in retrospect, I probably should have from Biwa’s character design).
The art design is astonishing - a perfect fit for a Japanese historical epic - with backgrounds that look like tapestries and foreground details that look like woodblock prints. It’s easily one of the most visually satisfying anime I’ve ever seen.
The story and characters are sort of underdeveloped, as should be expected from trying to condense a sprawling historical epic into 11 anime episodes, but it doesn’t feel incomplete. It’s as if all of the missing content from the much larger and more detailed original epic are spread so evenly throughout the adaptation that everything that’s there fits neatly together and manages to tell the story anyway.
And the way it’s framed - having the narrator of an epic story of a clan brought down by their own arrogance and cruelty that was popularized by biwa singers be a biwa singer who started off with every reason to hate the Heike but who slowly came to love them in spite of their significant flaws - is brilliant. Biwa is perfectly placed to witness the story as it unfolds, and perfectly suited to recognize both their flaws and their virtues, and the inevitability of their fall.
I don’t know how popular it was with westerners when it was released, so I don’t know if I’m just stating the obvious, but my impression is that it’s one of those that’s not so much underrated as underappreciated - that it’s well regarded by those who have watched it, but that that’s fewer people than it deserves. Thus this post.
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: