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Japanese manga and novels - General Discussion

Lessthanyouthink said:
Currently catching up on One Piece. I really liked Whole Cake Island. That last sequence that was basically a musical number where Big Mom eats a wedding cake and she and the animated objects sing about the magical paradise she's created juxtaposed by panels of the Strawhats' allies getting wrecked and the Strawhats themselves getting cornered was just brilliant.

And I'm digging Stormbloo-I mean Wano.
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Whole Cake and Wano were both steps up from the prior arcs.
 
Naraku no Ko (One-shot)

It's a manga about sword hunters. The swords they hunt are called hellswords. They are swords that spilled the blood of the gods and emboldened with the wrath of the gods. The swords become more powerful than the gods and came to be known as hellswords.

It's one-shot, but I hope they greenlit it. It's pretty interesting so far.
 
Currently reading Kengan Omega, the sequel to Kengan Ashura.

If you are, on any level, into the art of barefisted murder and manga, Kengan Ashura is something close to a must read. It's that good.
 
Devoured the newest translated volume of Bookworm. Want more pls. Am trying to work through Google translate of the original WN, that's how desperate I am. Recs for similar series?
 
TenMoreMiles said:
Devoured the newest translated volume of Bookworm. Want more pls. Am trying to work through Google translate of the original WN, that's how desperate I am. Recs for similar series?
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Well...

I have no idea, sorry.

I'm more into meathead martial arts manga.

I guess I could recommend Oyotemonogatari and the Woodland Spirit anime.
 
Caught up with the Machikado Mazoku Manga! I'm not sure about one or two plot points but overall it's pretty great.
 
Stumbled upon Sousou no Frieren.

It starts after the party defeated the demon king and returned to their normal lifes. It follows Frieren, the elf mage, on her travels to collect unusual magic. For her the ten year long journey was a relatively short trip due to her longevity and she only really starts to realize what the adventure actually meant to her decades later at the funeral of the former party leader Himmel after he dies of old age.

Melancholic and bittersweet.
 
Guilop said:
Stumbled upon Sousou no Frieren.

It starts after the party defeated the demon king and returned to their normal lifes. It follows Frieren, the elf mage, on her travels to collect unusual magic. For her the ten year long journey was a relatively short trip due to her longevity and she only really starts to realize what the adventure actually meant to her decades later at the funeral of the former party leader Himmel after he dies of old age.

Melancholic and bittersweet.
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I just checked this out on your recommendation and I can confirm that it's amazing. It's a fairly standard "melancholy of longevity" story, but with the additional aspect of Frieren only realizing it after the death of the Hero, and she's trying to work out how she's supposed to feel about it, and how she does feel about it.
 
That's what you get when you rely on a bunch of bland teenagers with no personality. All they ever end up doing is running around with an increasingly improbable number of women lusting after them despite them often displaying little to no awareness of what sex even is, never actually moving around anything that could even charitably called a plot forward, just making it look like there's one long enough for them to get an anime adaption and then coasting after that.

The Demon Lord population has gotten completely out of control with no actual natural predators.
 
tankdrop24 said:
That's what you get when you rely on a bunch of bland teenagers with no personality. All they ever end up doing is running around with an increasingly improbable number of women lusting after them despite them often displaying little to no awareness of what sex even is, never actually moving around anything that could even charitably called a plot forward, just making it look like there's one long enough for them to get an anime adaption and then coasting after that.

The Demon Lord population has gotten completely out of control with no actual natural predators.
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Tfw you find out Shadow of the Demon Lord is unknown to Japan.

A SotDL anime would be amazing.
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
Because DragonQuest is really fucking popular. Pretty much all the cliches of the fantasy settings in these come from there. Including the standard "blue slime" enemies that turn up everywhere, the Hero/Demon Lord thing, the Adventurer Guild thing, etc...
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Enix was a non-entity in my circles compared to whatever Square was doing at the time (late 90s-late 00s), so I couldn't see how unique the worlds in (ex.) FFs 4-6 and Chrono Trigger actually were - to say nothing of FF7 and later. The endless flood of DQ-copycat fantasy works and isekais makes that a lot clearer.
 
SwiftRosenthal said:
Enix was a non-entity in my circles compared to whatever Square was doing at the time (late 90s-late 00s), so I couldn't see how unique the worlds in (ex.) FFs 4-6 and Chrono Trigger actually were - to say nothing of FF7 and later. The endless flood of DQ-copycat fantasy works and isekais makes that a lot clearer.
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The various FF games are more different from each other primarily because they are unconnected stories and settings while DQ is all connected. So of course it keeps the same creatures and tropes, it's just different times/parts of the same World.
 
A reaction channel I watch recently started Yu Yu Hakusho, and since I own all the manga volumes I started flipping through them to compare with the anime. That is actually a pretty interesting topic in itself as anime cuts a lot of early content from before the series actually settled on what it was going to be, and changes or adds other things to make the early stuff more consistent with the rest of the series. But I also started skimming ahead and I remember not really liking or getting the ending back in the day. On rereading the last arc and kind of liking it, I had two realizations. One is that I've gotten old. The other is that I think the reason for my opinion then and now is that Yu Yu Hakusho did something that may be almost unique for a shounen series. It grew up.

That may seem like a strange assertion given how many shounen action series are fundamentally coming of age stories, or how DBZ is DragonBall but now everyone is grown up. But it seems to me that in the former case when the main characters finally take that last step out of adolescence, is when the series ends. Cut to credits, everyone lives happily ever after. FMA seems to me like a good example of this. DBZ on the other hand... look the fact is Goku just remains a manchild. Like, that is over half the joke most of the time. Krillin has what is actually a pretty complete arc, but that arc also kind of basically sidelines him for big chunks? And I haven't really paid any attention to Boruto but I would assume that it is explicitly at least in principle moving the focus to a new adolescent protagonist.

But Yu Yu Hakusho I think goes over the top, at some possibly unidentifiable moment, and then just keeps going for another dozen or so chapters. Which I think probably contributes to some the weird pacing and feel of the last bit. After the big climax of the Chapter Black arc, the entire last arc ends up with a series of anticlimaxes and arguably a complete collapse of the whole shounen formula. It's like the series isn't a shounen battle manga anymore, but rather a seinen series with the trappings of a battle manga. Everyone is settling down. Yusuke gets a job, Hiei gets a girlfriend, etc. Also kind of unusual for this kind of story instead of the fantastical element becoming lost or cut off forcing the protagonist to go back and stay in the mundane world, the fantastical just becomes part of the mundane. Yusuke I think in particular as the protagonist has become mature, both in terms of how he handles the problems in his life and his certainty in what he wants out of life, long before the final chapter.

And it basically has the Return of the King problem of hitting what you would expect to be an ending, and then it just keeps going and has another ending, and then another, and so on. It dies with a whimper, not a bang. Which I guess is to say that the ending of Yu Yu Hakusho feels as rough and unplanned as the beginning did.

The end result is strange and frankly awkward from a storytelling point of view but also fascinating both in comparing where the series began to where it ended, and a comparison to other manga.
 
MinorGryph said:
Shit, that's bad news for Act Age. Hopefully the artist can move on to a new writer/project while the turd of a writer goes straight to jail.
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NMR-3 said:
www.animenewsnetwork.com

NHK: act-age Story Writer Tatsuya Matsuki Arrested on Suspicion of Committing Indecent Act with Minor (Update 2)

Middle school student alleges Matsuki touched her inappropriately while walking in Nakano ward of Tokyo
www.animenewsnetwork.com www.animenewsnetwork.com

Well. Suppose that'll get cancelled.
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Already did, it is such a shame good manga get cancelled because of the mangaka's rl fuckups. Well the artist didn't had a good working relationship with him either.

Hot take from someone else commenting on the cancellation Act Age in another anime board

It is always the author of the most tame ones. It is you know, always those ones. I'm not saying it's all of them but I'm saying the predator wears the skin of a sheep to hide. It's now weird to look at posts of chaste, neo-moralist people reacting positively to hearing Act Age had no fanservice.

You can call me a fool if this ever happens to an ecchi writer.
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It is always the author of the most tame ones. It is you know, always those ones. I'm not saying it's all of them but I'm saying the predator wears the skin of a sheep to hide. It's now weird to look at posts of chaste, neo-moralist people reacting positively to hearing Act Age had no fanservice.

You can call me a fool if this ever happens to an ecchi writer.
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...Leaving aside all the other problems with that take, the artist wasn't the one who got arrested, and in the absence of the editor or mangaka demanding they draw things a certain way, they're the one who decides how much fanservice goes into the panels.
 
gyrobot said:
Already did, it is such a shame good manga get cancelled because of the mangaka's rl fuckups. Well the artist didn't had a good working relationship with him either.

Hot take from someone else commenting on the cancellation Act Age in another anime board
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And why did you feel the need to share this bad take from another board entirely?
 
Send my Regards to Kenshiro is about a man who wishes for revenge on the yakuza, trains in a mystical martial art for years, and then finally finds his target. Then he gets beaten to a pulp. And then, because the mystical martial art is literally just the Fist of the North Star / Hokuto no Ken, he decides he didn't research the acupoints deep enough and accidentally becomes a hypercompetent masseur.

Excellent comedy manga, IMO. Requires no knowledge of HnK.
 
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