#the politics of aot is shit but most of the world building and the characters are works of art and the plot points are mostly very good

[donghuamuqing]

the aot au that lives in head is banging against the walls of my skull to get out

[crehador]

brother crab’s 2023 seasonals in review: fall

most of the fall shows i'm watching are still an ep or two away from being complete but i'm leaving on a trip tomorrow and wanted to get this finished first so here we go

pretty sure none of this will change at this point (though aots and runner-up did just flip like five days ago lol)

FIRST UP. IN A STARTLING LAST MINUTE UPSET. ANIME OF THE SEASON

MIGI TO DALI!!! although for the past month or so i was convinced overtake! would take it, migi to dali has been coming to such a stellar climax that it's shot into the lead

overtake! is still exceptional and i've talked a lot about it this season, it's just a beautiful thing in its simplicity, with characters that are so Weird yet Real

migi to dali is EVEN WEIRDER in an astonishingly good way, it was intriguing right from the start and continued to build and build to a payoff that really blew me away

i don't think uniqueness is everything, sometimes a show that feels like i've seen it a hundred times before can still be my favorite thing of a season, it would just feel like home. but migi to dali's uniqueness is definitely a huge part in what makes it so alluring to me, the way it balances psychological suspense and comedy is so excellent and fresh

and now the sequels! in addition to spyfam, arknights, and dmdp, bpro and hpmi got sequels and hanako-kun got a little tv short

no comment on hpmi it'll get its own post

best sequel probably should go to dead mount death play, the world building is just fantastic to me, and this season definitely feels even stronger than the first (which was already very strong!)

however. i'm giving sequel of the season to arknights just for the sasha and eno ep, they put me on the fucking floor with that one

bpro s3 was unfortunately not really my thing, i want tsubasa happier and more well-rested :( but spyfam is adorable as usual, and some more hanako-kun was great (though we need more!)

quickfire thoughts on everything else:

onmyouji was unspectacular but surprisingly fun! and gay. gay as hell. asnm u have not led me astray this time

dog signal is not exactly High Quality but it's... fine and sometimes fun? i'm forever amused by the fact that it's billed as an educational series, and it kind of is! there's actual information about dog training in here. but there's also "guy walks other guy on leash in public for 2 hours" in here. and that was just episode one

kawagoe boys sing is a hot mess and i love it to bits, it starts out so silly that i'm sure it's an insta-drop for many people, but the club dynamics really come together throughout the series in a way i'm enjoying very much

bullbuster... talked about this a lot already, it was fine as an office drama/tiny business vs giant corporation type thing, but fell short on the mecha side of things

bokuame's shit. more on this later

atarashii joushi wa dotennen FREAKING ADORABLE. MORE OF THIS FOREVER

yuzuki-san chi no yon kyoudai EVEN MORE ADORABLE. MORE OF THIS FOREVER AND EVER

good night world was pretty decent, i overall... liked it, i think? it was very bingeable, so it was nice of them to drop it all at once lol and i liked the general premise and plot and all. but i think the wrap-up just felt a bit, eh, maybe slapdash to me? not Bad, but fell just short of exceptional

hoshikuzu telepath ADORABLE AS WELL as far as cgdct goes i'd say this is one of the better ones, kind of same tier as diy for me, but it's no yuru camp (the gold standard)

s-rank musume had a premise i really liked, and an overarching plot that was less compelling to me. wish we'd seen more of a focus on the family bond rather than like... magic and politics type stuff

watashi no oshi wa akuyaku reijou was a cute fucking yuri, the romance was a delight but as with s-rank musume, the 'plottier' bits were not as compelling to me

kamonohashi ron no kindan suiri feels like a very solid adaptation! makes me even more keen to read katekyo (which has been on my planning list for... fucking forever)

ragna crimson is pretty fun but not that outstanding, but like. really fun actually

shangri-la frontier is also very fun! not terribly high stakes (not really any stakes at all) but hilarious, action-packed in a good way, and probably especially entertaining for anyone who's played mmos before (because some parts are so so so relatable)

undead unluck is SO GROSS but IN A GOOD WAY idk how to explain this so i won't try

and sousou no frieren is anime of the year. no contest. (personally i disqualify my aots shows from winning aoty as well so i can do this. i can do anything i want forever)

as for the music!

we had a queen bee op this season and i will almost always pick queen bee as op/ed of the season when we have one, this is no exception. undead unluck's 01 takes op, and ed of the season goes to kamonohashi ron's lip-sync! just really like the vocals of that one

blorbo of the season MADOKA-CHAN KOUYA ship of the season surprisingly it's a toss up between like. seimei/hiromasa (WHAT YEAR IS IT) and kinjou/aoyama from atarashii joushi. like. momose/shirosaki VERY GOOD but those side bitches... they are in my head

[female-eren]

Since you wanted more aot asks, what is it that made you like Eren so much? Why is he your favorite? And what did you think about the ending and is Eren the true villain?

When I first watched season 1 and started reading the manga, I didn't care all that much for him. He was a pretty standard main character that got the job of shonen main character done okay. I actually liked Mikasa most for a pretty long time. The manga also didn't inspire a lot of feelings for the characters for me? I read the manga pretty "clinically" during the 4 year wait between S1 and S2, for the plot.

When S2 dropped, especially during the whole sequence where Eren loses Hannes, is inspired by Mikasa and is able to use the Coordinate, I started getting invested in him as a character. I liked what was happening to him, he started growing and strategizing a lot more. After S2, I read the manga with more investment in the characters themselves as much as the plot. I wanted to see where Eren got. His breaking point with Historia in the crystal caves was really good.

The basement reveal was a bit weird to me, I felt like many fans at the time that the story was becoming so much bigger than anticipated and it felt strange and a bit out of place to see Grisha's backstory. But Eren Kruger's scenes with Grisha really stuck with me. I was on board with the entire Marley and rest of the world idea.

And that was it for a while, until Eren's entire attack on Marley, where I really started finding him interesting. You asked what I think of him as the villain, and I like it, although I really, really wish everything had gone differently. I love the idea of Eren using the Rumbling as a threat but I would've liked there to be more... I don't know, strategy, attempts to build alliances. Marley is a war economy that is failing, because the rest of the world is catching up technologically. I don't believe Paradis was so fully cut off and incapable of collaborating with any other nations. There could have been so much more political intrigue like with how Hizuru allied itself with Paradis but was unwilling to help Paradis get more allies. We could've gotten ambassador/political negotiator Mikasa or Historia.

I think Eren's plan of massacring 80% of the world's population, letting Paradisians win, and hoping for the best that nobody will be mad is the stupidest plan I've ever heard. If it needed to go that route I would've preferred that Eren actually believed in his own plan, believed that he needed to genocide the entire world, not just doing it for shits and giggles. This plan has been done before, like in Code Geass. It didn't work, it's not original, and it wasn't satisfying.

However, one aspect that really draws me to Eren is of course my idea that AOT mirrors female oppression and female rage. Eren being the symbol of KAM makes it better. But in the actual story I think AOT's ending fell flat and I hate it. I want to make my own rewrite of the story, but first I need to figure out what exactly I want to do with it.

[smolcinnamonchipmunk]

An info dump on “A Most Abnormal Titan” that nobody asked for.

I’m also gonna say that “A Most Abnormal Titan” is in a wildly different AU than the canonical AoT. Spoilers ahead for the canon series, so if you don’t want any, shoo. If you don’t care, I’ll get into the differences under the read more. It is a bit wordy, so be prepared for that. I should be studying, but I’m nauseous and feeling gross, so here I go with this instead.

Personally, I’ve always HATED time travel shit. Like, I don’t care if it wraps everything up in a neat little bow or tries to give people that shock and awe that comes from a character being behind everything or whatever, I just hate it. Time travel, while simultaneously so seemingly fragile is also used to give characters a sort of roundabout way to give an upper hand. Sure, it was *memory* time travel and this is a fictional world, but my mind’s just far more willing to be open to photosynthesizing humans taller than buildings more than going through fucking time and space to talk to the past or future. So, no time travel in this.

“Where does that leave this in the story?” you might ask, justifiably so.

Well, let’s just say that I’m also not overly fond of the episode “The Basement” and everything after, including the end of the manga. It’s just... well, if I could put it in a way that doesn’t have me making a three part essay on why I hate that as well: If I wanted to watch a political drama with war and oppression, I’d watch the news, dredge through history texts again, or watch war documentaries.

So, as it stands, I’m kind of retconning all that??? Honestly, AMAT was supposed to just be a oneshot where I just kind of cranked something out, but of course my brain goes a million miles a minute, so while I was writing Jae’s perspective a part of my brain was fucking worldbuilding, haha.

First off, let’s start with geography. In canon, AoT takes place primarily on an island off the coast of a larger continent. But, because I’m retconning that stuff, I’m getting free reign of landmass. 

Now, unless ‘Titan-itus’ is airborne or spreads through physical contact with Titan blood or something, having only one continent affected allows other civilizations to advance to the point of the manga, which I’ve already said I wasn’t fond of. I like medieval fantasy, not early Industrial Revolution. And, in the canon material, turning into a Titan *isn’t* contagious. So, we either have this event affect the entire world like the Nanite Event in Generator Rex, OR we have everything on a Pangea-esque continent.

To simplify any needing to worry about how each continent would handle a Titan infestation, potentially calculating populations for separate landmasses, etc, etc, I’m going to say it’s a mostly Pangea world with occasional islands on the outskirts. So, our geography is taken care of.

What about civilization? Surely there can’t just be one now that I’ve basically destroyed other cities with my retconning? And, you’d be correct. You see, I’ve dug myself so deep into this rabbit hole of a thought process that I fucking made a map using a picture of Pangea that I put on its side to try and give the humans as much chance of surviving as possible. You’ll probably need to click for better quality

As you can see, I made nine civilizations in total scattered around the globe, including a placement of the original in Madagascar that I used for size reference and to potentially tie in with canon characters. I’m still on the fence about having canon characters in this.

Each civilization I’m having around the same amount of people inside, following MatPat’s Film Theory about AoT from 2016, so each one starts off with around 1.5 million. He says 1.25, but I’m rounding up to half because I’m lazy. Assuming this is a post apocalyptic world, let’s say 5 billion ‘people’ survive whatever event leads to the Titans. Why is people in quotations? Because the rest of the 4,986,500,000 calculated got turned into Titans! But, that seems like an unfairly large number, so let’s cut that down by half the amount of ‘people’ at the start. That still leaves 2,486,500,000 Titans roaming around this massive land mass against 13,500,000 people.

Obviously, the Titans stay relatively close to each civilization because they *know* there are concentrations of humans in them, but they haven’t been able to get inside for hundreds of years. And yes, I said hundreds. Because of lack of time travel, I’m also getting rid of the stupid mind-erase stuff as well. But, after hundreds of years, memories fade and documents get lost or become damaged, still leading to complacency, forgetting how the civilizations and kingdoms/walls were formed, etc, etc.

The civilizations also are similar, but vastly different. They each started with the same government and class structure, the same military structure, and the same sort of work structure that have all changed in different ways depending on the civilization.

Anyways, I’m going to leave this for now, I’ve already rambled on long enough, haha

[masteroftheblade]

What are your favorite and least favorite animes? Why do you like/dislike them?

oh god here we go lmao 🤠👍 prepare for an entire novel as always lol

my favorite animes atm are Naruto, Dragon Ball, Attack on Titan, and Claymore. Overall, my favorite genre of anime is shonen (and in case you dont know what that is, its basically shows that are marketed to young boys. it'll have shit like superpowers and poorly written female characters). My least favorite genre is Shoujo (marketed at young girls). I honestly don't hate the entire genre, I just hate how much romance is in there since im pretty romance-repulsed. If there were more Shoujo series like Claymore, I'd probably be in love w/ it. I'll start talking about these shows individually, starting w/ Naruto.

1. Naruto.

Honestly, the only reason I started watching Naruto was because my friends peer pressured me into doing it, and it actually differed from what I expected it to be story-wise. The beginning of the show started off amazing; it had excellent world building, magic systems, interesting characters, and it attempted to address how messed up the whole shinobi system is. But then Naruto got on the front page of Shonen Jump, and everything went down from there. It started to focus more on cool fight scenes than the actual plot. I wont get too much into that, because you can literally find entire blogs dedicated to dissecting that, but Naruto killed itself w/ its own popularity. That said, I love the characters and world building and I can look past most of its flaws anyway.

Would I recommend reading/watching it? Yes, but only to say you did it for bragging rights. Don't go into watching Naruto if you want deep looks into imperialism and militarized governments, because you will get the complete opposite of that :P Also the best way to watch it is to watch it with friends.

2. Dragon Ball.

I only started watching DB about a month ago, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I think its a garbage series. The fight scenes have little to no weight to them, because no matter what, the protagonist of that episode will always succeed in some way. For example, when Goku (a 12 y/o boy) was fighting Giran (a 10ft tall godzilla man) and was getting his ass beat until Goku just... randomly grows back his tail that was cut off earlier and wins. We are never told why he grew back his tail, and i think he only gets it back so he can have a cool fight scene in a later episode. Goku can literally be battling genocidal gods and he will still always win. The show also goes out of its way to sexualize/show a female character being harrassed. Every. Fucking. Episode.

That said, it is a fun show, and I really enjoy watching it. Like Naruto, I really love the characters and the world they are in, I just hate the way it was handled, and its painfully obvious that DB was made by a bunch of old men in the 80s. Unlike Naruto, however, I really appreciate how simple it is. It doesn't force a narrative about space genocide or whatever being bad, and I'm very thankful because that kind of narrative would be absolutely botched in this kind of series. It's also nice to have a show that doesn't take itself too seriously. Shows like AOT are amazing and important, but those shows can be overwhelming with their heavy subject matter. I would only recommend watching DB if you want to see some really good art/character design. Don't take the show seriously, and you'll have a good time.

3.Attack On Titan.

This anime was actually the first I've ever seen! I saw the very first episode when it aired in 2014, so I'm definetely biased in that regard, but I still try to look at this show in the most objective way I can. This show does almost everything right. The pacing, the characters, the art, the plot, you name it. It takes a concept that looks silly on paper and turns it into this grueling story about war, politics, and the trauma of being a soldier. It never treats it's characters like they're only one-dimensional, or like they are there just for one purpose only. These characters feel human in a way Naruto and Dragon Ball could never be. But there is one thing that has me concerned about this show, and its about the weirdly anti-Semitic undertones it has.

You probably heard the controversy already, but it really effected the way people on the outside of the fandom view the series. The show is heavily inspired by European culture, specifically that of Germany, and there are an ethnic group of people called The Eldians in the show that are pretty anti-Semitic in this kind of setting. The Eldian people have the capability of turning into Titans, and the Titans are what divided the world and killed millions. As a result, another group of people started doing the shit the Nazis did to Jewish people, basically making the Eldians into this weird allegory for the holocaust??? Which was kind of a shock to me when I first realized that was the angle they were going for. I genuinely did not expect that considering what the series started off as. The foreshadowing is there and all, I just didn't think they'd use real-world events as inspiration.

Now, this actually has the complete opposite problem Naruto and DB had. Naruto and DB had amazing ideas and concepts that went to shit, AOT's whole holocaust narrative was trash from the beginning.

The show could have easily had a different kind of social/political commentary without even going near the holocaust narrative. It comes off as kind of a half assed idea that people put way too much effort in, so it's kind of in this weird grey-area between "modern anime masterpiece" and "what the fuck were they trying to get across with this show?". If you asked me what the moral of the show was, I wouldn't be able to tell you.

Now, because of the fact that the Eldians can literally turn into man-eating beasts, this makes the comparison of Jewish people and Eldians very racist, and it doesn't help that Japan is still full of legitimate Nazis, making the whole situation look even worse. Since I am not Jewish, I wont speak for other Jewish people. There is a very heated debate on whether the show is racist, and frankly I don't think it's within my right to say if it is or isn't. What I will say, is that I really loved the show and appreciated the social commentary it provided, and I think a lot of people would benefit from watching it, but I think it's also important to listen to Jewish people's views on the show. For this reason, I specifically avoid reblogging AOT stuff, but I do love that show and I wont hate on people who do reblog stuff from it. It's definitely not a light watch, but it does provide a lot of thinking material.

4. Claymore.

This. Show. Was. Amazing. But. Underrated.

First off, this is a shonen show that is led by a majority female cast and a female protagonist, and all of those women are badass swordwielding lesbians and I love it. Second, the art style is beautiful. Third, the story is really interesting from so many angles, so much so I am not even going to mention what its about because you dont need to know, you just need to watch it and see what happens. The first season was an absoloute ride of a show, and if you love shows like AOT or Berserk, you'll love Claymore. Honestly, this show was what AOT should have tried to be. It also has its fair share of militarized imperialist commentary, but this is the only show on this list that actually fucking critiques imperialist ideals and has a main character that actively refuses to participate in that kind of oppressive system, choosing to fight it all together.

But the show got fucking cancelled right before the first arc even finished. You can thank shows like Naruto for that 🙃🙃🙃

10/10 Would reccomend, but just be prepared to be left on a major cliffhanger. You can try reading the manga, but it's kind of hard to follow since all of the warrior girls look the same.