#listen i think that trope on shojo manga is so cute

[darabeatha]

Where do I sign for dynamics where your muse has a crush on mine and/or my muses developing these silly crushes o r obsessions towards other characters-

[risingmoonyue]

Someone write me a ShinRan fic that reads like a stereotypical shojo. Whether this takes place in canon or an au is optional. The only requirement is that Shinichi is cast where there is usually a girl, and Ran where a guy is.

[animeheadspace]

hi! congrats for a hundred <3 for your event could i get a matchup from tokyo revengers? ty in advance :)

i’m female and use she/her pronouns! i have short fluffy black hair that goes down to my shoulders and brown eyes. my mbti type is infj & my sun sign is taurus! some of my likes include dance, k-pop, anime, fashion, late night walks, sweets, cats, rain, and mystery/thriller books! and dislikes would be loud noises, crowded places, bugs, and horror movies. my favorite color is sage and my favorite pass time activity is learning k-pop choreographies or just listening to music and dancing around my room, and i also enjoy writing poems. my favorite food would have to be spicy ramen or if we’re talking dessert then cheesecake! my love language is physical touch! i might be a bit shy to make the first move since i get flustered easily but i love any type of skin ship :’) my favorite romance trope is the classic “there’s only one bed” or enemies to lovers >:)

hii thank you for congratulating me!! 

for you, i think that chifuyu matsuno would be a perfect match :))) chifuyu is so wholesome AH i’m excited to talk about this lol. i think that you and chifuyu first bonded over your love of enemies to lover shojo manga - gushing over it at the library, chifuyu momentarily forgot that he was quite literally a part of a gang that beats up people on the regular, choosing to divulge to you his love for romance. you had found his flustered self quite adorable, asking for his number and going from there. chifuyu absolutely fan girls with you over kpop groups and watches anime with you daily. he too has an aversion for too crowded places, so he’d rather bring you to a small spicy ramen stall he knows to have amazing food for you to enjoy rather than a high end restaurant (he definitely can’t pay to go there anyway haha). the moment chifuyu fell in love with you was when you performed a kpop choreography for him, and he noticed that his eyes felt like they were in a heart shape and was addicted to seeing your cute smile. 

he loves to take you on late-night walks after getting you your favorite cheesecake, holding your hand tightly because he knows how much you like to be touched, swinging your arm back and forth in the slightly foggy, drizzle-rain weather that surrounds you. he practically frames your poems on his wall, admiring them and blushing profusely when he understands your intent at last. when he’s older, he always makes it his goal to ensure that you never do more than you have to, very self-aware about your moods and your own work. after all, as much as you despise violence, you still allow him to partake in gang related stuff, so the least he can do is give you back multiple favors too. his favorite activity to do with you is to read shojo manga and watch shojo anime, something that never really changed about him. and you’d spend the rest of your life doing those two things forever too :) 

i hope you liked it anon!! 

[recentanimenews]

The Definitive Ranking of Bleach OPs

  For many years Bleach ruled the roost in the United States fandom as the coolest comic running in Shonen Jump magazine. For a period of time the anime was similarly successful, inspiring everything from cosplay to fanfiction to a live-action movie. Even more than Naruto, a far more sprawling franchise, Bleach defines a specific period of early 2000s anime fight media that briefly enraptured countless high school students as they illegally pored over multiple-part episode splits on YouTube, crafting AMVs set to Linkin Park while listening to Number One on repeat. And yes, I'm including myself in that crowd.

  The Bleach manga ended years ago, and the anime did too. That's all to the good for our purposes though, because it lets us build a genuine historical record based on the anime's most significant achievement: its range of incredible opening songs and animation. What is the best Bleach opening of them all? To craft this list I used this thorough and objective criteria:

  1. Is the song a banger?

  2. Is this opening at least as cool as Sonic Adventure 2's "Escape from the City?"

  3. How does it stand up as an artifact of its time, and how does it stand up today?

  Let's begin!

  15. "BLUE" (ViViD) 

    I like the attention to scale and space in this opening, with energy blasts blowing through whole rows of buildings and Ichigo knocking enemies over like bowling balls. But there's so much fighting happening here, crammed into such a short space, that it's hard to follow. Not a fan of the song either, so this one's placing at the bottom.

  14. "Anima Rossa" (Porno Graffitti)

Porno Graffitti has a long history composing opening themes for anime, accompanying everything from 2003's Fullmetal Alchemist to My Hero Academia. The song they've contributed here is a bluesy number that I'd rank above several other entries on this list. Then why is this #14? When watching this opening, I couldn't shake the feeling that this sequence could have been servicable for any other shonen anime series. Bleach earned its fame through a certain je ne sais quoi, and if it's not here, no matter how competent the sequence is otherwise, what's the point?

  13. "Chu-Bura" (Kelun)

  When rewatching openings to put this feature together, I was frankly blown away by the first half or so of this opening sequence. The cast being cute together and hanging out at the beach! Some unexpectedly fluid animated hijinks as Ichigo walks to school! A pretty good song! Then the fighting kicks in and the rest of the opening is comparatively boring. Worth a watch, though.

  12. "Harukaze" (SCANDAL)

  This was the last Bleach opening to be featured in the anime series, and features some fun callbacks to earlier episodes like a runthrough of every episode title card (!!). I wouldn't say this is one of the show's best, but it gets stronger as it goes along and features some neat and stylish visual tableaux. The doors opening at the end to reveal the sponsors is a nice touch, too.

  11. "Alones" (Aqua Timez)

  Watching Bleach openings on YouTube as a child, I used to be freaked out by the sight of Kon the stuffed animal very loudly singing the theme song. On rewatch, though, I think I underrated this one: it's a splintered sequence of memory, love and grief that bears the strong iconography Bleach had in its prime. Aqua Timez would later do better, though!

  10. "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight" (Beat Crusaders)

  What makes a Bleach opening? Is it the music? Outrageous poses? Fast-paced fights? This opening doubles down on "style," which is admittedly Bleach's ace in the hole. There are sequences here that refer back to the first opening sequence, but on a grander scale: like the red and black silhouettes of Ichigo and Rukia being mean to each other, but projected on several television screens! Or every character recieving their own cool spinning CD cover. The song isn't really to my taste, but overall it's a good time.

  9. "chAngE" (Miwa)

  This opening makes an immediate statement when we see Ichigo's hometown erupt into an unmistakable mushroom cloud freeze frame. My other favorite bit is when the spooky devil hand reaches towards the other hand, just as the vocals spike. What can I say, I'm a mark for scenes in anime when hands reach out to each other but don't quite connect! I'm an Ikuhara fan, sue me.

  8. "Velonica" (Aqua Timez)

  This is the first great example on this list of a classic trope in Bleach openings: The Pose. It's no secret that Tite Kubo draws not so much to tell stories (though he can do that on occasion) but to showcase characters wearing cool outfits while they do cool things. This opening wrings everything it can out of the cast of the show standing in exaggerated poses while the camera swings from one angle to another. And it works! The bit of the Vizards being swallowed up by darkness, followed by Urahara's hat tip, has been lodged in my brain since seeing this.

  7. "Ichirin no Hana" (High and Mighty Color)

  More poses! The main cast looking very tired and noble as they stand on the battlefield. Shunsui's sword kata. Screaming vocals. When I asked the barista at the coffee shop today for his favorite Bleach opening, this was his answer; the harsh sound of the Soul Society arc's grand finale. It's a great pick, but the effects are a bit dated for me in 2020. Byakuya's special attack in particular screams early 2000s CG.

  6. "Shojo S" (SCANDAL)

  More outrageous poses from your favorite characters, except that you also have Rukia, Orihime and Rangiku doing a choreographed dance! I wasn't sure what to make of this sequence when I first saw it, but it's risen higher and higher in my estimation with each successive watch. Now I'm at the point where I'd say this is the Bleach opening I initially underrated the most (though there's some real classics coming down the pike!)

  5. "After Dark" (Asian Kung-Fu Generation)

  Bleach openings can be maximalist, so I find it fascinating how restrained this one is. Ichigo's friends running in the desert, the repetition of symbols juxtaposed to flaming credits, and a black-and-white super-cool layout of Aizen's war chamber. That's it. But set to the riffs of all-time great Japanese popular rock band Asian Kung-Fu Generation, that's all you really need.

  4. "D-technoLife" (UVERworld)

  This is the Bleach opening that defines the whole series for many folks. The theme song to the start of the Soul Society arc, it harnesses the band UVERworld (still putting out songs for shonen anime even today!) to a carnival of non-stop forward momentum that keeps topping itself with cool characters and fight sequences. Within its specific niche of early 2000s anime openings about shonen heroes determinedly running toward the camera, this one's never been topped. But it's not my personal favorite, so I'm putting it at number 4! The scene where Yourichi takes a bite out of Soi Fon's sword and holds it between their teeth is outrageously good, though.

  3. "*~Asterisk~" (Orange Range) 

    It's fascinating in retrospect how little Bleach's first opening actually has to do with what happens in Bleach. We don't see much in the way of hollows or shinigami, and the only swordfighting we're given is a brief few seconds of Ichigo fighting some interchangable bad guys in kimono. Instead we're given a vibe: Ichigo's friends wearing stylish clothes straight from the manga while the camera darts from one angle to another, Orihime and her friends spray-painting the title of the theme song on the screen, the camera revolving endlessly around Ichigo as he stands in the middle of the city. The promise of this sequence was eventually crushed beneath a never-ending tide of new characters and concepts as the series collapsed under its own weight... but for me and my friends, watching this opening relentlessly on YouTube as teenagers, it convinced us of Bleach's effortless cool. The best first Bleach opening.

2. "Ranbu no Melody" (SID ❤) 

  Like the previous opening, "Ranbu no Melody" is notable as much for what it doesn't show as for what it does. We see Ichigo, the hero of the story, for only a few seconds. Instead of our heroes running endlessly toward the camera, we are given the slow unravelling of reality by invisible forces that repeatedly squish and stretch the aspect ratio and blast the viewer with impossibly fast, overlaid images. The brainchild of Masashi Ishihama, one of the best directors of opening sequences working today, this one works as both a horrifying short film of dramatic climax and as a sneakily crafted foreshadowing-laden promise to longtime fans of Bleach that the story has been building to this arc from the very beginning. The best opening.

  1. "Rolling Star" (YUI) 

  As a child, I would watch the first six openings of Bleach over and over on YouTube. I loved the first, and the second, and the third. But the one I would return to over and over again, even though it came from a section of the series that I never reached myself, was "Rolling Star." Seen in retrospect, it's a synthesis of all the aspects that made Bleach openings memorable. It's stylish, rendering Ichigo's hometown as a neon-lit sunset hangout where battles secretly play out just around the corner. It's just a bit scary, with Ichigo duelling his masked evil self as traumatic future events are carefully foreshadowed. But more than anything, this opening sells a closeness between the main cast as they eat together and fight together. A careful juxtaposition between the high school gang of friends who were way cooler than you'd ever be, and the supernatural terrror just barely poking out from beneath the surface.

  This opening was also directed by Masashi Ishihama, though the previous listed entry represents a more concentrated form of his style. "Ranbu no Melody"'s sequence may very well be superior from an animation perspective, but from my point of view, "Rolling Star" is and will always will be the best Bleach opening. And the song's a banger, so there's that!

  What is your personal Bleach opening ranking? Did I underrate "D-technoLife"? Is Bleach more or less cool than Sonic Adventure 2's "Escape from the City?" Let us know in the comments!

---

Adam W is a Features Writer at Crunchyroll. He sporadically contributes with a loose coalition of friends to a blog called Isn't it Electrifying? He recommends reading David Brothers's old pieces on Bleach if you want to learn more. You can follow Adam on Twitter at: @wendeego

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[mysticdragon3md3]

finally watched Dr. Stone ep6

[There’s supposed to be a cut here. *glares at Tumblr mobile*]

2:35 PM 12/3/2019

Dr. STONE Episode 6 – Two Nations of the Stone World

Oh, so Senku was the one who purposefully put Taiju in the cave.

"Rolf"?

I like how they're addressing loop holes.  Why just swallow birds and humans petrified?

"I"m standing in the face of an uncharted branch of science."  This shot looks like a motivational poster for mad scientists.  And I love it.  ^____^

"What's the difference between me and the rest of them?" Please don't say "shonen protagonist". LOL

I like this whole scene just showing Senku thinking through the petrification problem and trying to solve it.  It's got as much tension as a mystery or a battle tactics series or something.  But also, since it's a flashback and we already know how he solves the problem, it's relaxing for me, someone who doesn't like tension/drama.  So what's the point of this scene?  To show how difficult the challenge is to problem solve, like a duel in a "battle anime"?  Are Taiju and Yuzuriha going to have to go through the same process?  Can they do it, without being geniuses like Senku?  Maybe that's the point of this flashback.  Or maybe it's characterization portrayal for Senku.  

Maybe it's supposed to show the Resolve needed for most Shonen battle anime. That's a common theme in the genre, and I love it.  

"You don't know when to give up!"  "I'll believe in you and wait for as long as it takes.  I"m hopeless without you!"  There we go.  The characterization.  And I like how they split the screen to show parallels between these 2 friends and transition into the present.  

"I’m sure you know not to, but don't go thanking me for every little thing. I won't thank you either."  I know I shouldn't think it's cool to act cold, but that sounded cool.  I don't even like the preformed abrasiveness of tsundere!  And I certainly hate the trope of "shojo love interest is attractive because he's never nice, always cold, and unemotive except for anger and possessiveness".  I hate that stuff.  But maybe because we already know Senku is a good guy (regardless of his intentions), these lines don't come off as just abrasive cold.  

I remember Kikyo saying something like that in Inuyasha.  I thought it was logical, but Kagome's reaction framed it as really offensive.  I'm glad Taiju and Yuzuriha are such cinnamon rolls that they don't take Senku's "cool act" the wrong way. 

3:09 PM 12/3/2019

Well, commercials made Crunchyroll crash again.  I guess I'm done watching Dr. Stone for now.  -_-;  

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5:54 PM 12/24/2019

Dr. STONE Episode 6 – Two Nations of the Stone World

The subtitles aren't working again.  While I was just watching Ascendance of a Bookworm, I'd just have to pause and unpause the vid, and the subtitles would return.  But it's not working with this Dr. Stone ep.  Luckily it looks ilke a recap. ...Or have I seen this ep already? 

Yeah, I've seen this ep before and the subtitles still haven't returned even after 10min.  

I reloaded the page and the subtitles returned.  But after the commercial break, they're gone again.  The universe really doesn't want me to watch Dr. Stone right now.  ^^;

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7:19 PM 12/25/2019

I think this is my 3rd time trying to watch Dr. Stone ep6.  Let's hope Crunchyroll doesn't crash this time...or have that glitch that made the subtitles disappear again.  

7:40 PM 12/25/2019

Finally made it to the 2nd half of ep6.  ...but I might have to stop watching because I've got other things to concentrate one.  Meh.  I think I can watch for 15min more.  

I can't figure out if her eyes are too far apart or something else is wrong with her character design.  But something seems off about her face to me.  

Ah, she saw the hostage situation.  

Woah.  Vocal song.  

Oh, Senku is the "sorcerer gentleman".  LOL

This music takes me back to Bleach.  Is this the same band?  

Ah, greasing the gears.  

Here it comes.  Everything about her character design says "love interest for Shonen manga/anime protagonist".  ~.~;  Now she's stating her awe of Senku's characteristics....  And...There's the love confession.  

Omg.  I don't think posted about this before, but I've finally gotten tired of this trope.  Not just the "Shonen series female who exists primarily as a love interest/sexy eye candy", but the whole "sexy eyecandy female character" thing.  Which is weird because I've been trying to be sex positive for a few years now, and for decades I liked the sexy eye-candy character designs.  It's fun, cheeky, and cute.  And I can see the confidence as a female, owning her own sexuality. So I really don't understand this sudden feeling myself.  ...But more often I've been thinking:  If MCU fans can get tired of the "sky beam portal" trope becoming cliche after less than 10 years, then I'm allowed to become tired of the "sexy for no reason other than to lure in the Shonen series target audience" after FOUR whole decades.  And it's not like the "sky beam portal" limited to only superhero movies.  But the "girl sexy for no reason" cliche is in EVERY genre, every medium, and ads all over the place, in real life, the internet, etc.  It makes sense that I've gotten tired of it.  It probably makes less sense that I've been ok with it all this time, watching harem anime for decades and such.  ...But maybe I haven't been ok with it all this time. I mean, the trope of "female character who primarily exists in story to center around romance and her crush" has always been a tired cliche to me. Not just because that made her shallow, uninteresting, and most of all unrelatable to me, but also because it heavily alluded to the misogynist aspects of society, who already want to insist everywhere in real life that females are objects solely for their benefit and not autonomous people. If I’m reading/watching/listening to a fiction story, one of my reasons is to get away from all that type of ugliness in the real world.  Maybe “sexy girl” tropes wouldn't imply all that, if such phenomenon wasn't already so prevalent in real life societies.  Meanwhile, female characters owning one's sexuality and wielding sexual expression as power and/or pride, and part of one's identity, has never been a problem with me.  What's bothered me is that implication that the sexuality is more about making them objects in service to someone else, vs for themselves.  And let's face it, it's been many centuries of fictional characters where that has eluded most officially published authors.  ~o~;  It just makes me tired.  And I'm at that age where I'm going to get tired.  I think after 4 decades I'm allowed to get tired of a cliche.  Especially compared to how short the "sky beam portal" lasted before it was vilified.  

But hopefully Kohaku will prove to be more an autonomous person who happens to respect Senku while coincidentally being sexy.  We'll see which aspects prove more prominent.  

8:03 PM 12/25/2019

Well, after 3 tires, I finally finished ep6.  No crashes or long/frequent buffering this time.  And the times the subtitles disappeared, all I had to do was pause/unpause and they returned.