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Old 05-10-2013, 08:42 PM   #1
Quicksolver
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Maken-ki

If any of you are interested (I know a certain member out here is), season 2 has been announced.

Hopefully I'm not late to the party.
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Old 05-10-2013, 08:46 PM   #2
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What's it about?
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Old 05-10-2013, 08:50 PM   #3
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It's a bit on the fanservicey side, mind you.

It's about a rather normal-starting guy who transfers to a magic combat school (though he didn't know about it at the time), and I think the first person he meets there is his childhood friend (although there are other girls he met as a child that he sees again there).

He has a bad memory though and it gets him in trouble with them, particularly when his skills/talents in combat show and he garners their romance, I guess? So yeah, I'd easily call this a harem animu, but it's not necessarily pure fanservice. Good luck trying to defend that argument, though - I personally wouldn't.
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Old 05-10-2013, 08:59 PM   #4
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This sounds a lot like Maburaho.
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Old 05-10-2013, 09:03 PM   #5
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Actually, the premise is very cliche/overused in the anime scene since forever ago. It's very easy to spot similarities with predecessors that did the same thing, but Maken-ki simply adds extra fanservice to it, so it's not really that special to me. Gotta admit though, Himegami is awesome on lots of counts.

Maburaho seems much older though. How was it?
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Old 05-10-2013, 09:23 PM   #6
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Maburaho is like 10 years old I guess. Magic school. Girl who declared herself his (future) wife and doesn't remember. Magic only used during extreme situations. Fanservice. Harem. Yeah, a lot alike.

Maburaho was okay and got a bit better after the main character died oddly enough. My tastes in anime (and things in general) have changed a lot since then, so today I probably couldn't stomach all the tropes and fanservice.
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Old 05-11-2013, 07:22 AM   #7
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Eh, I guess it's all about establishing a fanbase. If they decided to air a new season of Maburaho I'd think you'd still like to see it, even if it's no longer your thing anymore. ;p
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Old 05-11-2013, 03:34 PM   #8
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No. Unlikely.

I was a huge fan of Shakugan no Shana series and when they announced the third season I got extremely excited and wanted to watch it right away. To this day, I have yet to finish watching it despite it being the most exciting and biggest finish to the series my past self could have ever hoped for.

Maburaho was just a series I sort of enjoyed back then. If they announced a 2nd series, I really wouldn't care.

I brought it up simply as a comparison point. The two series have extremely similar premise and both look like the same genre. I'm sure there will be enough differences to make them unique.
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Old 05-11-2013, 10:48 PM   #9
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When you're as big a fan of an eromangaka as I am of Takeda Hiromitsu, you really want the very best for them when they attempt to break out into the world of non-pornographic manga. That's what Maken-ki! is, Doppel -- Takeda Hiromitsu's first non-porn comic. And that's why Quicksolver mentions I'm likely interested in it -- because Takeda Hiromitsu has been my #1 favorite eromangaka for the past 5˝ years.

Spoiler: show
WARNING! NSFW! 18+ only!
Spoiler: show


I own a physical copy of Takeda's only eromanga tankoubon to date. I have been waiting over four years now for him to release his long-overdue second.

Takeda is a true master of drawing women erotically. I am not talking about matters purely of aesthetic opinion (like particular fetish likes or dislikes, like ideal body shapes, so on and so forth), although he excels there too. No, what I'm talking about is his technical mastery, something which, judging from even his earliest works, he has a natural gift for, an appreciation which is both intuitive and complete. How he contorts or arranges the body. Where he positions the "camera", i.e. what angle he positions our eyes at and how zoomed in we are. The shapes and sizes and everything else relevant of the eyes, mouths, and other facial features. Gravity and its effect on the human body. The adipose-to-muscle ratio of the various body parts, perfectly nailed. On and on I could go, but the point is that Takeda Hiromitsu just "gets it." He's one of the most technically and aesthetically proficient eromangaka of the past decade, and it's a real gift to the community that he shared his talent and his mind with the world.

That stated, Maken-ki! is not quite the same gift to the world of manga that Takeda's other works have been to the world of eromanga. ^^; God bless him for trying -- honestly, God bless him for trying! -- but from what little I have glimpsed of the Maken-ki! manga (and later anime), it's a pretty typical harem series. Tropes are often the bread and butter of the ero scene and work delightfully well in the hands of a talented artist and storyteller because most hentai fans know what they love and know what they want to see; but, it's kind of a night-and-day opposite in the world of regular manga writing, where we so often ask that we be surprised and shown something astonishingly original, and unfortunately Maken-ki! shows off very little in the way of originality, sporting a ton of tropes that we've all seen a dozen times before in other harem anime. You've got ...

Spoiler: show
  • the harem that takes place at a private academy
  • the private academy filled with magic users and/or supreme martial artists
  • the male lead who isn't particularly handsome (honestly he's slightly goofy looking, in a lovable and innocent enough way, I guess, sure) nor is he particularly smart nor is he particularly much of anything except ... well ...
  • the male lead who just happens to be super-mega-awesome-THE CHOSEN ONE at the one thing that the plot will ultimately be based around
  • the childhood friend / past acquaintance with a crush on him
  • the stuffy kendo girl with a crush on him
  • the supermodel-grade smoking hot school nurse
  • the "lol misunderstandings" men and women living under the same roof

Could keep going, but I don't remember much else, having not touched the anime in over a year (and I only saw one episode) and the manga in several years (and I only skimmed the first two volumes). Suffice to say, Maken-ki! has not been the next big thing in the world of mainstream manga. But it's Takeda's baby. Doppel, you can probably appreciate the parallel with Kobayashi Jin here. Think of Takeda's eromanga as analogous to Jin's School Rumble -- insanely popular with the fans, and something he too is fond of, but something he kinda doesn't want to do for the rest of his life either -- and then think of Maken-ki! as analogous to Jin's Natsu no Arashi -- his dream project, his intended magnum opus, and yet sadly something which hasn't gone over with the public nearly as well as he would've liked it to. I don't claim to 100% know the full story, but I do think that to a very large extent I'm right that this is what's going on with Takeda Hiromitsu's double duty between the world of manga and eromanga. His most recent commercial eromanga work, Ima Ria, has just been absolutely phenomenal. Absolutely goddamn phenomenal. But it's taken years for him to squeeze out the only five or so chapters that comprise it (with the most recent of these chapters seeming to wrap up the story quite cleanly), whereas before his Maken-ki! days he was pushing out one chapter every two months for Comic Megastore (circa 2007 and early 2008). I'm pretty confident that what happened was, Takeda wanted to put all of his focus on Maken-ki!, and so eromanga took something of a backseat for him. And you can see that in his publication history: outside of comic conventions like Comiket where he may (may) release a doujin, Takeda Hiromitsu hasn't had published a bound eromanga product since December 2008 (Tsundero) whereas he's had ten Maken-ki! volumes published between June 2008 and April 2013, averaging two tankoubons a year. As one of his biggest fans, I'm quite happy for him if he's making his dreams come true; but for those of us who'd much rather see him working the eromanga scene than the manga scene, yeah, it's bittersweet. ^^;

As an aside, but related to what is discussed above, another well-known eromangaka (though not nearly on the same level as Takeda Hiromitsu imo), TakayaKi, recently tried his own hand at busting out onto the regular manga scene with Hyoui☆Don!. I've been meaning to check it out. The artist for Dakara Boku wa H ga Dekinai, Katsurai Yoshiaki, was quite popular in the late 2000s (and I'd say is still decently popular), and we're going to see that series get an anime soon. Yeah, there are actually quite a few of them -- quite a few of the kings and princes of eromanga, I mean -- trying to make it big in the cleaner world of softcore / mainstream entertainment. Maybe I'll make a list of past and present artists and their projects.
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Old 05-12-2013, 02:30 AM   #10
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I'll add some insight to your very informative post. The income for legit manga-ka and doujin creators isn't even comparable. We all hear that manga-ka are over-worked and not paid a lot, but that's relative to the quantity of work - in gross numbers, they're still paid a wage we could admire as respectable, and it completely blows out any fan works.

I'm sure you are probably more informed for doujin writers than I am, so correct me if I'm wrong, but most doujin writers who might have the artistic talent to cut it in the kosher world -

-either have real jobs and don't want to go full-time
-don't have jobs but see H-doujins as a hobby
-can't handle the schedule
-don't have the exposure/attention of someone

If this Takeda Hiromitsu is as popular/famous as you say, I guess he's gotten someone's attention and he's not willing to withdraw his foot now that it's in the door.

...

Unfortunately, as Loki implies, I don't think I'll be trying this, because if it's really generic as it is, the likelihood of me appreciating it is very low. Slapstick, sexual comedy needs a lot of skill to impress me at this advanced stage of sophistication I've evolved to, and if it's his first work and is admittedly a bit clumsy from the two people with first-hand experience I'd probably either be too bored to continue or dispassionately hate on it. Don't want to do either.

Quicksolver should poach one of the PASBL green-horns and get them to try it! They're the perfect audience for a story like this!
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Old 05-12-2013, 08:23 AM   #11
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Just to clarify, he doesn't do just pornographic doujinshi and then commercial clean manga. He does both of these and he does commercial pornographic manga. His foot was within the door of one of the most famous and generally popular eromanga magazines, Comic Megastore, after publishing only one doujin. And he submitted works to them bimonthly for two solid years. The tankoubon I mentioned before, Tsundero, is precisely that -- a tankoubon which collects all of his commercial work from 2007 and 2008 into one bound book published by the same publishing house which handles Comic Megastore. The recent work I'd also mentioned, Ima Ria, has shown up in several commercial publications, most recently the newly-launched Comic X-EROS. So don't think he went from making pennies on the doujin to thousands on the clean manga chapter. There was definitely paid contract work with Comic Megastore, and there continues to be paid (if not contract) work with other eromanga publications.

That stated, I honestly couldn't tell you how well the eromanga industry pays vs. how well the regular manga industry pays. I do believe that the regular industry probably pays a bit better given that you don't often hear stories of regular mangaka working multiple jobs -- you usually hear that manga is their only job and their primary source of income -- whereas you do often hear stories of how such-and-such eromangaka has a day job and uses eromanga to supplement that income. Also, given how notorious the regular manga world is for overworking its artists and demanding strict deadlines of them, I wouldn't be surprised if it were more than just passion which led Takeda to mostly "switch sides," as it were, and focus primarily on his regular manga career. But that stated, the vast majority of talented eromangaka do not attempt to break out into regular manga. I think that has to say something for how decent of a gig eromanga is and/or how little regular manga may be an improvement over eromanga. Most talented eromangaka who do feel like telling a lengthy tale (rather than writing many unrelated, single- or double-chapter short stories) seem perfectly happy to do so within the walls of eromanga's castle.
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Old 05-12-2013, 08:53 AM   #12
Quicksolver
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W-what have I started.

Well, it's still gonna be a while before season 2 starts. I'm more for Seikon no Qwaser really, the protagonist there was a true badass. Wish they'd have a 3rd season in the works for it...
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