#for a gag manga it really packs some punches sometimes

[transmasccofee]

imagine being so absurdly cruel to your little brother that u even moving back to the country he lives in terrifies him enough to warrant a shaded closeup shot

[sazorak]

My Hero Academia’s hero and villain are not very good

My Hero Academia,  Kohei Horikoshi’s shounen manga take on Western super hero comics, has been running nearly three years now. I am something of a binge-reader when it comes to media; I don’t care for the drawn-out schedule that comes from following serialized releases. But My Hero Academia (alongside One Piece, Berserk, and One Punch Man) is one of the few that I actively follow. Lately though, I’ve been wondering why.

It’s not that the comic has taken a particularly egregious downturn in quality or pacing – it’s been fairly consistent all in all. The current arc about the class becoming intern sidekicks has been interesting, and it’s been moving at a rather brisk pace. The issue I’m struggling with is more fundamental. It’s a problem My Hero Academia has had since the beginning, and it’s done little to ameliorate over time.

The main protagonist and antagonist of My Hero Academia are just not very good.

The lead of My Hero Academia, Izuku Midoriya, isn’t a bad character per se. The angle of an ordinary kid born into a society of supermen finding himself entrusted with power by his world’s urhero is a pretty good one. It’s an underdog story with tons of good karma built in as Midoriya is forced to struggle to surpass those who had mocked his lack of abilities. It’s also good for hitting those power-fantasy notes that are so crucial to making the shounen genre work. He’s earnest and likeable. It’s easy to root for Midoriya and put yourself in his shoes as he is manages to pull himself to the front of the pack by sheer heart and willpower alone. These are all good attributes for a protagonist in a heroic work!

But as time has gone on and as his powers have developed, he has ceased to be the underdog. Where he was once only keeping up with his classmates’ inborn genius by hard work and determination, now he’s not only the most driven but also the most talented. Midoriya’s climbed what should have been the first foothill on his journey to the top, and we’ve found that there is actually nothing else on the horizon— the foothill was the mountain. Midoriya’s journey of growth being essentially complete is dire, because it’s all Midoriya actually has: It turns out he’s REALLY boring.

Midoriya’s character revolves entirely around his desire to become a hero and imitate the super hero paragon, All Might. That’s it. This is literally all there is to him. He has no other interests. No particular ambitions beyond the dream to be The Best Hero. The only real struggles remaining for him are narrative happenstance and the gradual power-ups that are practically prescribed at this point. There’s nothing else to his story.

Here’s an example: In order to convince All Might’s former side kick to give him an internship, Midoriya has to make him laugh. This isn’t going to be easy; the sidekick is a straight-laced nerd, AND he has the ability to see the future. This concept has a lot of good goof-potential. You could conceive Midoriya in all his earnestness constructing an elaborate comedic scenario that, while perhaps falling on its face, would at least show off his good qualities. Maybe he’d screw up and it’d result in the kind of unplanned comedic pratfall that would be easy for the sidekick to laugh at. 

Instead, what does Midoriya actually do? He does a bad impression of All Might of course, because “I want to be like All Might!” is his entire character! It pisses off the sidekick so much that the whole laughing angle is completely abandoned, and instead a scenario is contrived where Midoriya has to steal the approval stamp from the future-seeing sidekicks hand. Ultimately? He gets the internship because he didn’t damage any of the All Might memorabilia in the room. Midoriya’s All Might-mania would be a funny gag if it wasn’t the crux of who he is.

The only other aspects to Midoriya’s character beyond his hero-crush is his very typical shounen budding romance with Ochako Uraraka (that has not and will not ever be developed until the very end of the story, as is the staid shounen manga way), his willingness to occasionally break the rules in order to save lives (and then let McGruff the Crime Dog unironically say that he should have let his friend be murdered in front of him), and a mostly one-sided rivalry with his childhood bully Katsuki Bakugo. Only the rivalry actually feels that impactful to the story, and that has more to do with Katsuki’s personal arc than Midoriya’s.

The issue isn’t that Midoriya doesn’t have any major flaws necessarily – though that certainly doesn’t help – it’s more that there’s not much else to his personal story at this point beyond the narrative events unfolding before him. He fundamentally lacks agency and meaningful personal struggles. Things happen, and he reacts to them; his arc is essentially complete. It’s a foregone conclusion. His single-mindedness makes the story flat in a way that it really need not be.

Narratives revolving around villains doing nefarious things tend to lead to reactionary heroes, but the best heroes are ones who are more than just the mask—they’re also people. Peter Parker has a day job, has to deal with people trying to constantly hunt him down and kill him, and has to fight to balance his romantic dalliances with the responsibilities of being Spider-Man. Bruce Banner may fight the occasional radiation monster, but the Hulk’s story is more about his struggle with his own inner demons than him punching real ones. Hell even Superman, the poster Generic Nice Boy, tries to have a personal life beyond the cape and liven up his Fortress of Solitude.

There’s more to good stories than Good Man Beats Up Bad Guy. While personal struggles can be completely ancillary to the action at hand, they can also be far more challenging for the hero to surmount and far more engaging. Even if the are trivial, that doesn’t make them unimportant. Diversions may not matter much to the ongoing “plot” always, but they give the characters character. Something as inconsequential as the heroes going out to get Italian food can be huge as far as characterization goes; it speaks volumes to the interests of the characters, it humanizes them, and makes their situation more relatable.

The tragic thing is that there are major characters in My Hero Academia who would make for far better protagonist material than the actual lead if the story had been built differently. The frog-girl Tsuyu Asui is a good example. She’s been raising her siblings on her own while going to hero school due to her parents being constantly away at work. Her powers seemingly have low potential (she does whatever a frog can do), but she rises to the top by being smart with them. She wants to become a hero to help people— but seemingly doesn’t have too much of an interest in getting into the bad-guy fighting side of things. Throughout the story, she’s also wrestled with the whole legality / morality of saving people without a license, which frankly the most under explored aspect of the narrative by far given how weird and complicated the subject matter is. These are all interesting angles that easily have been built out to create a different, more engaging My Hero Academia.

Not having an engaging protagonist for your narrative puts a greater onus of the villain being interesting. For My Hero Academia, this is a BIG problem. If the hero Izuku Midoriya is uninteresting, the main villain Tomura Shigaraki is outright lame.

As is the super hero convention, Shigaraki is dark mirror of Midoriya— where Midoriya is a child who looks up to heroes and wants to grow up to be like All Might, Shigaraki is a man child who never grew up, doesn’t like heroes, and wants to murder All Might. And just like Midoriya that’s literally all there is to him. He has some kind of tragic past due to heroes not saving him when his parents died, but even that’s paper thin. Ultimately, he’s just a petulant kid who never grew up; he occasionally sends mutants his spooky adopted dad made for him to punch trucks. Because that’ll show ‘em.

The narrative openly acknowledges the fact that he doesn’t have any particular beliefs beyond disliking heroes. Other villains with actual raisons d’etre confront him about it,  and he no joke throws a tantrum over the fact that they have views. Like Midoriya, the single-note nature of the character comes across as borderline comical. (Also: his character design looks stupid.)

Villains, like protagonists, need motivations to be compelling. That motivation can be as small as being a crazy mofo or just plain greedy, but it should at least be understandable. Shigaraki isn’t a revolutionary— he’s a child with a gun. An inordinate amount of power has been thrust into his hands for no particular reason. That doesn’t actually make him feel like that great of a threat to society as a whole; it just makes him a deadly nuisance if anything. Earthquakes are unpredictable and can hurt a lot of people but that doesn’t make them particularly compelling villains.

Villains need to be likeable. Not necessarily as a people— far from it in most cases, really. But they need to have some trait that is inherently admirable to make them work as the foil for the protagonist. In X-Men, Magneto is a fantastic villain because he’s ultimately a flawed idealist; his charisma and the fact that his views sometimes seem attractive is what makes him so compelling. He’s complex. Single-mindedness too can be admirable if it’s portrayed well. Kira Yoshikage, despite being an outright serial killer still has admirable traits in just how ruthlessly efficient he is at maintaining his “ordinary life”. That doesn’t make him less reprehensible— if anything those traits are what makes him so potent a threat, far more than his murderous tendencies.

Totally uncharismatic antagonists can work as small-bit villains – but there’s a limited lifetime for which their existence is tolerable. Past that point, their continued position as a central part of the narrative just becomes annoying, if not totally implausible. How are we the audience supposed to believe that Shigaraki can amass followers and inspire loyalty in them when we cannot muster the slightest bit of admiration for him ourselves? He’s not even shitty enough for it to be played up for comical effect!

This situation is all the more crazy when you remember that My Hero Academia serializes alongside One Piece.  One Piece’s Oda Eiichiro has writing good bad guys down to a science. His bad guys range across the whole spectrum, from the immeasurably bad at their job to the point where you’re actively rooting for them (who the hell doesn’t like Buggy the Clown?) to the dark-mirror of the lead that you just love to hate (Blackbeard you monstrous son of a bitch), to a whole heap of over-zealous enforcers of law and order (go to hell Akainu). Oda’s a master at manipulating the audience’s feelings and creating characters that work in both short and large doses. Characters with short-lived appeal are dealt with appropriately, while those more sweeping interest and unexplored complexities are kept around for years. Oda will occasionally even turn past arc’s main-villains into bit-players in ongoing ones. Knowing when and how to subvert expectations like this speaks a lot to Oda’s abilities at constructing characters and narratives.

The sad thing is that I just can’t see Kohei pivoting with My Hero Academia. The trajectory My Hero Academia is on looks to be the one it’ll stick to for the future. The foregone conclusion of Midoriya’s journey is in plain sight; while I’m sure the ongoing story will take some amount of twists and turns, there’s not a lot of mystery left in how Midoriya fits into it. Shigaraki taking his place as the main villain is outright uninteresting and unappealing at this point. While the actual writing of characters and the flow of the chapters is good, the broader sweep of the work viewed from a weekly-perspective now leaves something to be desired.

I suppose there’s nothing left for me to do at this point than to let it fall to the wayside and just read at my own pace when more of the material is built up. Actively following a work as it releases requires considerably more personal investment, and I’m not sure I can muster that for this story anymore.

Oh well!

[recentanimenews]

Something's Fishy in the World of Magical Girls

  Looking for Something Enchanting.

  The world of online anime streaming has always been a strange and sorcerous place, and sometimes it's difficult to tell whether an unknown title will be bewitching or bewildering. Allow “Cruising the Crunchy-Catalog” to be your helpful familiar in this metaphor. Each week we provide additional info and cultural context for a title in Crunchyroll's library in order to help fans decide whether or not they'd like to try it out.

    What's Magical Play?

  Magical Play is an original web animation from 2001 – 2002 with direction by Hiroki Hayashi and animation by AIC. Crunchyroll describes the story of Magical Play as follows:

    Little Padudu is a girl trying to become a renowned magical warrior.

    That description's a bit sparse, isn't it? An absurdist comedy and a parody of the magical girls subgenre, Magical Play follows the misadventures of Padudu, an apprentice fish witch from the enchanted land of Sea Heaven, as she attempts to collect enough “hanamaru” stamps to earn her a tour on Earth as a fully-fledged magical girl. Along the way she meets friends and earns rivals, including the hot-headed bunny girl Pipin and the duplicitous cat girl MyuMyu.

    Familiar Faces?

  If the art style in Magical Play rings a bell, that's because the character designs are by Kiyohiko Azuma, the author of such beloved manga as Yotsuba&! and Azumanga Daioh. As a result, the series has a strong “goofy face” game, with characters that deliver rubbery reactions and exaggerated expressions that stretch and squish for comic effect.

    General Weirdness.

  Magical Play packs a lot of weirdness into its five episode run time, because each episode except the 3D special is further divided into six mini-stories in which Padudu and friends tackle challenges such as endless shopping districts, over-eager police officers, and sumo wrestler-induced natural disasters in an effort to earn hanamaru. Living mascot characters who double as clothing (and food sources) and inept henchmen add to the bizarre atmosphere.

    In additional to all the oddball comedy, there's a genuinely sentimental segment that explores what it would be like to be a magical girl during the height of the Showa era, and there's a recurring subplot chronicling the fall-out for Queen Purilun, the current ruler and a former magical girl, who betrayed her best friend in a callous bid for power. Magical Play can be surprisingly emotional in places.

    Committing to the Joke.

  Some of the humor in Magical Play plays to broad stereotypes and thus hasn't aged very well, but when the series really commits to certain gags, it punches way above its weight class. There's an entire segment that pokes fun at the techniques used in producing 3DCG animation, and other segments that lean into dark comedy (such as when the girls bombard Earth with shooting stars intended to grant wishes) can be both disturbing and hilarious.

    The Play's the Thing.

  Crunchyroll currently streams Magical Play in the United States, Canada, American Samoa, the United States Minor Outlying Islands, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands. The series is available in the original Japanese language with English subtitles. Magical Play is also released on DVD in North America by Sentai Filmworks, and this version also features an English language dub.

    A historical oddity from the dawn of Internet streaming, Magical Play presages both the dark deconstructions of shows like Puella Magi Magoka Magica as well as the utter absurdity of shows like Magical Girl Ore. It's the magical girl equivalent of dipping potato chips in wasabi sauce. If you're in the mood for some light entertainment with a decidedly weird edge and the series is available in your area, please consider taking a look at Magical Play.

    Special thanks go to Alan Zabaro (@azabaro) for suggesting the subject for this week's "Cruising the Crunchy-Catalog." Is there a series in Crunchyroll's catalog that you think needs some more love and attention? Please send in your suggestions via e-mail to cruisingcrunchy@gmail.com or post a Tweet to @gooberzilla. Your pick could inspire the next installment of “Cruising the Crunchy-Catalog”!

---

Paul Chapman is the host of The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast and GME! Anime Fun Time.

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[recentanimenews]

Something's Fishy in the World of Magical Girls

  Looking for Something Enchanting.

  The world of online anime streaming has always been a strange and sorcerous place, and sometimes it's difficult to tell whether an unknown title will be bewitching or bewildering. Allow “Cruising the Crunchy-Catalog” to be your helpful familiar in this metaphor. Each week we provide additional info and cultural context for a title in Crunchyroll's library in order to help fans decide whether or not they'd like to try it out.

    What's Magical Play?

  Magical Play is an original web animation from 2001 – 2002 with direction by Hiroki Hayashi and animation by AIC. Crunchyroll describes the story of Magical Play as follows:

    Little Padudu is a girl trying to become a renowned magical warrior.

    That description's a bit sparse, isn't it? An absurdist comedy and a parody of the magical girls subgenre, Magical Play follows the misadventures of Padudu, an apprentice fish witch from the enchanted land of Sea Heaven, as she attempts to collect enough “hanamaru” stamps to earn her a tour on Earth as a fully-fledged magical girl. Along the way she meets friends and earns rivals, including the hot-headed bunny girl Pipin and the duplicitous cat girl MyuMyu.

    Familiar Faces?

  If the art style in Magical Play rings a bell, that's because the character designs are by Kiyohiko Azuma, the author of such beloved manga as Yotsuba&! and Azumanga Daioh. As a result, the series has a strong “goofy face” game, with characters that deliver rubbery reactions and exaggerated expressions that stretch and squish for comic effect.

    General Weirdness.

  Magical Play packs a lot of weirdness into its five episode run time, because each episode except the 3D special is further divided into six mini-stories in which Padudu and friends tackle challenges such as endless shopping districts, over-eager police officers, and sumo wrestler-induced natural disasters in an effort to earn hanamaru. Living mascot characters who double as clothing (and food sources) and inept henchmen add to the bizarre atmosphere.

    In additional to all the oddball comedy, there's a genuinely sentimental segment that explores what it would be like to be a magical girl during the height of the Showa era, and there's a recurring subplot chronicling the fall-out for Queen Purilun, the current ruler and a former magical girl, who betrayed her best friend in a callous bid for power. Magical Play can be surprisingly emotional in places.

    Committing to the Joke.

  Some of the humor in Magical Play plays to broad stereotypes and thus hasn't aged very well, but when the series really commits to certain gags, it punches way above its weight class. There's an entire segment that pokes fun at the techniques used in producing 3DCG animation, and other segments that lean into dark comedy (such as when the girls bombard Earth with shooting stars intended to grant wishes) can be both disturbing and hilarious.

    The Play's the Thing.

  Crunchyroll currently streams Magical Play in the United States, Canada, American Samoa, the United States Minor Outlying Islands, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands. The series is available in the original Japanese language with English subtitles. Magical Play is also released on DVD in North America by Sentai Filmworks, and this version also features an English language dub.

    A historical oddity from the dawn of Internet streaming, Magical Play presages both the dark deconstructions of shows like Puella Magi Magoka Magica as well as the utter absurdity of shows like Magical Girl Ore. It's the magical girl equivalent of dipping potato chips in wasabi sauce. If you're in the mood for some light entertainment with a decidedly weird edge and the series is available in your area, please consider taking a look at Magical Play.

    Special thanks go to Alan Zabaro (@azabaro) for suggesting the subject for this week's "Cruising the Crunchy-Catalog." Is there a series in Crunchyroll's catalog that you think needs some more love and attention? Please send in your suggestions via e-mail to cruisingcrunchy@gmail.com or post a Tweet to @gooberzilla. Your pick could inspire the next installment of “Cruising the Crunchy-Catalog”!

---

Paul Chapman is the host of The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast and GME! Anime Fun Time.

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[recentanimenews]

Take A Lesson in Delinquency with "Cromartie High School"

  Welcome to the Jungle.

  The world of anime streaming is a battle without honor or humanity, where only the strongest and toughest survive. Well, not really, but sometimes its difficult to tell at a glance whether you'll enjoy an unknown title. Let “Cruising the Crunchy-Catalog” be your mentor in this hard-knock world. Each week we provide additional info and cultural context to help anime fans decide what they want to watch, because we're bad to the bone, baby.

    What's Cromartie High School?

  Cromartie High School is a 2003 – 2004 TV anime with direction by Hiroaki Sakurai and animation by Production I.G. The series is based off of the Sakigake!! Cromartie Kōkō manga by Eiji Nonaka, which was serialized from 2001 – 2006 in Kodansha's Weekly Shōnen Magazine. Crunchyroll describes the series as follows:

    Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? The only thing for certain is that for Kamiyama, Cromartie High School is his reality. And what a surreal reality it is. Because this is where the toughest, meanest (and, often dumbest) students are sent to do time. At Cromartie, purple-mohawked bruisers and pencil-chomping street thugs are just part of every day life. And so is a 400-pound gorilla.

    On the surface, Cromartie High School is a spoof of the hard-boiled, “school delinquent” manga that reached peak popularity in the Seventies and Eighties, but the comedy of the show drills much, much deeper than simply parodying the conventions of that subgenre.

    Of Baseball, Rock Music, and Other References.

  Cromartie High School is absolutely littered with pop culture references. All of the delinquent-filled high schools (Cromartie, Destrade, Manuel, etc.) are named after foreign baseball players who spent time in Japan, for example, and there are constant visual and narrative allusions to rock musicians such as Queen, David Bowie, and KISS, just to name a few.

    Some of the references cut even deeper. The manga's original title is a nod to Sakigake! Otokojuku, a gag / action manga about students who fight constantly. Freddie's horse is a Fist of the North Star reference. Even having progressive rock band Bi Kyo Ran perform the ending theme and insert music for the show feels like an inside joke.

    “What a Sober Voice...”

  One reason the comedy in Cromartie High School works is because the show features talented voice actors at the top of their game. Takahiro Sakurai voices the main character / goody-two-shoes, Takashi Kamiyama, while Tetsu Inada voices the inadvertent straight man / perpetually kidnapped delinquent Akira Maeda. Norio Wakamoto is gloriously unchained as ordinary student / occasional motorcycle Shinichi Mechazawa. The show even features one of the most prolific and respected female voice actors in anime history, Megumi Hayashibara, in an entirely non-verbal role as Maeda's mom.

    Manzai and Beyond.

  In Japan, manzai is a style of stand up comedy usually performed with two people: a tsukommi (“straight man”) and a boke (“buffoon”). Cromartie High School capitalizes on this form, but in any scene, a given character can end up being a tsukommi or a boke, or sometimes even both in quick succession, for the sake of a joke.

    Manzai isn't the only comedic style in Cromartie High School's repertoire. The show averages at least one sight gag per animation cut, ranging from wacky continuity editing "errors" to pure visual absurdity. Incongruity is also a major factor. There are tough-looking characters with a soft spot for classical Japanese architecture like Yutaka Takenouchi, and Shinjiro Hayashida secretly sports a conservative haircut under his purple mohawk because he comes from a family of social elites.

    Cromartie High School also explores the nature of comic timing through the character of Noboru Yamaguchi, a gang leader who dreams of being a stand-up comedian. Despite its outlandish style, some of the best gags in the show deal with ordinary situations, such as coping with boredom during class, forgetting someone's name, or dealing with the awkwardness that results when one's public image and one's true self don't align.

    Remedial Lessons.

  Crunchyroll currently streams Cromartie High School in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the United States Minor Outlying Islands. The series is available in the original Japanese with English subtitles and also dubbed in English.

    Originally released on DVD in North America by ADV Films, Cromartie High School is now published by Discotek Media. An English language version of the original Cromartie High School manga was released by ADV Manga, but this release is now out-of-print. There is also a 2005 live-action film that was released on DVD in North America by Media Blasters under their Tokyo Shock label, but this release is also (you guessed it) out-of-print.

    Packing a huge comedic punch into a 13 minute run-time, each episode of Cromartie High School is filled with puns, wordplay, absurdity, slapstick, situational comedy, and more. If you're inclined to take a trip with the baddest kids in town and the series is available in your area, please consider giving Cromartie High School a try.

    Is there a series in Crunchyroll's catalog that you think needs some more love and attention? Please send in your suggestions via e-mail to cruisingcrunchy@gmail.com or post a Tweet to @gooberzilla. Your pick could inspire the next installment of “Cruising the Crunchy-Catalog”!

  Paul Chapman is the host of The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast and GME! Anime Fun Time.

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com