big bad birtha's suggestion box 2: secret passions unveiled

[Doppleganger]

Originally Posted by Talon87

I need to start watching Granblue, if only so that I can see what all the fuss is about in the doujin and greater fanart communities. I still have Episodes 01 and 02 from months ago to watch, let alone the newest ones. Hmm ...

Please elaborate on this, I haven't been able to find much Granblue doujin material even though the character designs scream for it. The one doujin I did find was dynamite, but I've found nothing for Katalina specifically and there's a lot of other girls I don't recognize.

My collection so far has a Mary/Clarisse, Yuel and Cagliostro (x2). Nothing for Katalina. Not even a drug rape/tentacle NTR doujin for Lyria!

Where the gold at?

Originally Posted by Loki

I watched episode 1 of Granblue Fantasy and I was really bothered by the art style. The weird lines make the images look like they aren't sharp and distract me. They look like they should be paintings or drawings, but they're animated and not odd. I know it's a stylistic choice to match the game's Final Fantasy Tactic's like art, but it's one that irks me. If it was only for like background or wide shots I could understand, but all the characters should be in focus with clean lines. Also I hate that little dragon thing.

I too was bothered by the sketch-work, but thankfully it decreases with each subsequent episode. There was less in Episode 2 than in Episode 1, and I hardly remember any in 3-4.

As for Vyr, I know nothing about him/her, but it strikes me as odd that nobody really bats an eye at it. Everyone treats Vyr as normal even though it's the only one of its kind, has been hanging around for a while, and looks like a dragon. It's early, but from what I can tell in Granblue, dragons = gods.

Originally Posted by Loki

I also hate the heavier and heavier use of CGI in anime now. It's very clearly not the same art quality as the non-CGI portions and it gets distracting. Berserk became unwatchable for me because of it.

This is kind of an odd complaint, given the CGI in Granblue Fantasy is actually pretty natural looking with the 2D graphics. At the same time, you invoke the new Berserk series which is a textbook example of how horrible and jarring CGI can be.

So I can feel ya, but at the same time I don't get it.

[Talon87]

Originally Posted by Doppleganger

Please elaborate on this, I haven't been able to find much Granblue doujin material even though the character designs scream for it.

I don't see how you could fail to find it searching for it given that it's everywhere, but okay: try searching for 1) グランブルーファンタジー and/or 2) the names of the specific characters you like best. If you're going to search by name, then ideally do so on a tagging site first (examples include Danbooru and E-Hentai), as searching on a tracker first will only net you those uploads which feature the girl's name in the title.

I would say that Draphs have historically been the most popular, but in recent months there's been a huge swing towards more of the human females. Other races tend to be pretty underrepresented. The most popular Draphs in doujin works are Narmaya, Danua, and Anila. For the humans, I'd say the most popular have been Vira and Djeeta.

Also: I didn't say the last thing you quoted. Loki did.

[Doppleganger]

Now that you mention it, I have seen a number of Vira doujins. But I ignored them because most were yuri with Katalana, and that is not my scene.

It's a bit of a pity, yet not surprising the draphs are popular. I say that because anything featuring the "kemono-mimi" has skyrocketed in popularity following Kemono Friends, and a lot of the draph women have the same, recurring problem: huge breasts that are literally spilling out of their blouses/bras.

There's a cow warrior thing right now in the anime who has this problem. I want to blame the farmers who selectively bred her race for milk production over the the centuries on her embarrassingly large problem(s).

[Talon87]

Originally Posted by Doppleganger

A lot of the draph women have the same, recurring problem: huge breasts that are literally spilling out of their blouses/bras.

Spoiler: show

Originally Posted by Doppleganger

There's a cow warrior thing right now in the anime who has this problem. I want to blame the farmers who selectively bred her race for milk production over the the centuries on her embarrassingly large problem(s).

[Doppleganger]

I think this disproves Konosuba's author is a woman.

Also SUPER SPOILERS! We find out who the best girl is, the author's favourite, and likely the winning girl. Don't watch if you don't wanna get butt-devastated! HAHAHAHA!!

Originally Posted by Talon87

Spoiler: show

My friend, we cannot endorse The Machine any longer. Animals were not meant to be genetically exploited for human consumption.

Just look at this sad situation:

http://i.imgur.com/YKncn4C.jpg

[Doppleganger]

Granblue Fantasy 5

Spoiler: show

I thought Tiamat was going to be the newest girl added to Gran's harem, until the final shot where he breaks the corrupting jewel around her neck:



Boo. Too big. In more ways that one. =3=

The Gran x Katalina scenes made me really jelly! Gran's a greedy mofo. Why he looking at MAI WAIFU?

Also, I think this is the top anime of the season in terms of production values. Every episode so far has had a splendidly animated scene. This week's was sort of over-the-top, but that doesn't change that the closest anime I've seen recently in comparison was One Punch Man. The female character designs remain top-tier and an inexpensive Viagra substitute, and all the other production values ooze quality. Oh, the cast is fun too, except the adolescents. But I've said this already.

Shows don't need to be superdeep, epic megagrim. I think Youjo Senki was superior because the highs very STRATOSPHERIC and the lows LITERALLY THE "SANDS OF HELL", but that doesn't mean Granblue Fantasy is bad.

It's like complaining you were not born Stanley Kubrick or something when you're William Howard Taft.

[Doppleganger]

Nyaa.se is permadead it seems. The domain is unregistered. This is really bad news.

[deoxys]

Hidden gem of the season? Seikaisuru Kado

Here's a modified/more accurate synopsis:

Kojirou Shindou, Cabinet Office Director-General for Policy Planning, is at Haneda Airport for a business trip.

While the plane is on the runway, a giant cube suddenly appears out of thin air. The plane carrying Shindou and 251 passengers is absorbed, undamaged into the giant structure. After the initial panic, a strange man appears from within the structure with a message for the world. "I am Yaha-kui zaShunina, and I am here to make you an offer."

The show is animated in 3DCG, but it does it exceptionally well. It's extremely intense and suspenseful. The show takes itself pretty seriously, and it gets pretty intensely geopolitical and delves into weird theoretical physics as well as realistic consequences. In a lot of ways, it's a lot like Arrival, but in my opinion it promises to be more interesting, going into theoretical and political territory Arrival did not.

Highly recommend so far, and we're only 4 episodes in!

[Talon87]

Originally Posted by Doppleganger

Nyaa.se is permadead it seems. The domain is unregistered. This is really bad news.

I'll say. Tokyo Toshokan was the gold standard back in the mid-2000s, but by the late 2000s it had been eclipsed by Nyaa. For years, Nyaa has been gold, Tosho silver. Now both are dead. And there's no real bronze medalist there to replace them.

For the time being, the community tech lords don't seem to be too distraught. I didn't even know about Nyaa being down until an hour ago on reading your post, but it looks like the general consensus shakes down one of two ways:

1. DHT and magnet torrents

Spoiler: show

2. IRC and XDCC

Spoiler: show

IRC has been trumpeted by most anime distribution groups since forever. I may be ignorant about how it works behind the scenes, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't imagine it's a suitable replacement if everyone decides to hop on board with it. Not in this day and age. The first problem I see is bandwidth; the second, is servers getting shut down the same as Nyaa and the other big public BitTorrent trackers have been. But if I'm just an ignoramus, then cool: long live IRC, I guess!

Magnet torrents seem like the likelier direction the anime community is going to go in. They already were starting to see a rise in popularity over the past few years, but the fall of Nyaa might finally see most casual anime viewers putting them to good use. With Nyaa, you could go to just one site and search for whatever it was that you wanted. I imagine that with magnet torrents, it's going to be a lot more site-by-site oriented.

We'll just have to wait and see. While there's always the possibility that Nyaa will resurface, the general consensus seems to be that the nature of the takedowns indicates that Nyaa's owner personally dismantled the site rather than a government body doing it for him. Some are speculating it has to do with recent EU legislation which threatens up to 10 years in prison for those who illegally stream copyrighted content. Others say it has to do with this recent trial in Sweden, where Nyaa's servers are hosted.

[Doppleganger]

I don't agree Tokyo Tosho was ever a gold standard. Even during its heyday, it was always second to the servers it more often than not linked to - AnimeSuki and Scarywater.to. TT was the only major tracker that allowed merely submitting links to other trackers as an "upload", so a good chunk of what it does host is useless. Yes, TT hosted licensed anime and raws, but that was all it was good for and only during a brief period. Nyaa existed since 2007 (remember when it interfered with SaiGar?) but its search algorithm didn't come into fruitition until around 2011. TT parasites off Scarywater until Scarywater died, then jumped on Nyaa once it rose to prominence. Why TT is bad now is because it's mostly links to the now-dead Nyaa.

XDCC is trolling. Horrible knows its servers cannot survive the massive demand that would hit it if everyone who torrented switched to XDCC.

I don't trust newer p2p technology. If it were really better than torrents, companies wouldn't have been continued their jihad against pirate culture and torrents like they have been over the past 9 years.

[Doppleganger]

I remember mocking Rakudai Kishin no Cavalry several years ago because it debut in the same season as an anime with a similar plot.

There's an amusing scene posted on YouTube that is basically an insightful commentary on every indecisive Japaneses romance, ever.

Why doesn't either partner make the first move?

"I don't want you to think of me as a perv." (guy)
"I don't want you to think of me as a slut." (girl)

LOL

[Doppleganger]

I was linked to an article that seems so bizarre, yet so believable.

Spoiler: show

It's fake. But it's one of the more convincing fakes on that site.

I had not heard of "Anime Maru" before today, but it's interesting. Some might try to say it's an Onion wannabe, but it's closer to Weekly World News in both writing quality and bizarre eyeball attracting-headlines than Onion's clearly brainstormed satire.

Weekly World News was a treasure so I'm glad it's been reincarnated in some way.

[Doppleganger]

Eromanga-sensei

I watched this to be on the same "cultural wavelength" as the kids of the day. I've missed out on such titles in the past, like Oreimo, K-ON!, Lucky Star (not really) and Fate/Zero. Mostly 2010 when people graduated college, not yet entered the workforce, and had some time to watch blockbuster anime.

It's hard to call Eromanga as a cultural wavelength show but it's the closest thing to right now. And I think the show would be decent if it subverted too many of the light novel conventions.

For example, I was surprised that the "eromanga" actually referred to the girl-artist and not the boy-writer. Convention is that girls are pure but sex curious, while boys are lustful apes.

Like in Oreimo, it seems that the sister is more lewd than the brother, but it's buffered by both of them having jobs. If this is an incest title, there are a number of easier paths to a hook-up rather than Oreimo that detour around Westermarck:

1. Siblings are not blood related
2. They've known each other for only a year, if.
3. They've shared a professional relationship for longer than a familial one

There's no anti-incest imprinting here. In fact, calling this incest might even be dishonest because it's hardly there.

Oreimo was disturbing because it went out of its way to deliberately challenge the notion. The innocent childhood relationship between Kirino and Kyosuke, which went nascent and gave way to an adult reintroduction, was used as justification for the sexual relationship later.

This isn't like two siblings separated as children, reunite as adults and start their relationship over from scratch. Kirino and Kyosuke had a childhood relationship (brother-sister) that ended. They ended up reuniting as adults but any romance in that relationship dead-ended. So then the original relationship was resurrected and used to springboard into the bangfest. Given how horrible Kirino was as a person, you could see why people were angry over this. And no, the trolls were wrong, it was the wrong pairing and they knew it. The author was also a degenerate.

Eromanga is like a censured commentary on Oreimo. It's a bit boring, but watchable?

[deoxys]

re: Dopple

[Loki]

That was glorious.

[Doppleganger]

He only gets 50% credit.

He's correct that you have to be a moral degenerate to recognize Eromanga's qualities. I've been there for years, no sense in denial.

But, Eromanga is less degenerate than OreImo precisely because of the reasons I outlined: inseki, and barely for a year. Professional relationship was the first relationship. It's heavily implied, even, than Sagiri was a fangirl of main guy when he was an amateur web novel writer.

The show having to go so far in visual lewdness is testament to how little it challenges social boundaries otherwise. It hardly does at all.

[Doppleganger]

Eromanga-sensei

Urrrrghhh...dropped. Really, honestly, truthfully.

This is the first series I have outright, officially dropped in a while.

The second episode didn't have much plot, it was a character intro episode, but it was filled with so much obnoxious, cringeworthy pandering I couldn't take the heat.

Ultimately, I am too adult for this "adult" show. I have grown up too much to be entertained by shallow ecchi comedy. Even though it was cringe, I was more offended than anxious, which was how I felt about cringe in the past. It was so stupid and pointless I couldn't go any further.

Kirino was awful, and OreImo was an upsetting title, but it was better written than this. I think I mentioned that above. Eromanga-sensei has half of the controversy but none of the compelling.

Gonna watch Granblue only from here on out, and pack in some Sharnoth.

[deoxys]

I dropped it at Episode 4 for all of the exact same reasons. It just became too fucking weird for me and I was pretty uncomfortable with the boundaries the show was pushing.

[Doppleganger]

I don't think Eromanga is really pushing anything. It's just a more openly perverted, stereotypical harem anime. The setup is really similar to Netoge really - seems normal then all of a sudden EVERYONE IS A GIRL AND THEY'RE AFTER YOUR CHROMOSOMES!

Shikokou no Sharnoth

This title is sad because my earliest save dated back to 2012, and my most recent save in 2014. Clearly this neglected child has waited years for my love, and I'm actually playing it now.

It seems like the Wuthering Heights exposition has passed a bit. Good.

[deoxys]

HOLY SHIT WHY THE FUCK IS NO ONE WATCHING SEIKAISURU KADO

THIS SHOW IS TOO FUCKING GOOD TO BE LOOKED OVER BY THE WHOLE FUCKING ANIME COMMUNITY

JESUS CHRIST GO FUCKING WATCH KADO PEOPLE

HIDDEN GEM OF THE FUCKING YEAR

[Crys]

might be because fuck cg

i'll see about it idk

[big bad birtha]

Time flies when you're uhhh...not watching anime! I didn't even realize the season is almost over. That means it's next season's chart time!

What do we have? NOTHING! God what a mediocre looking lineup.

[deoxys]

Originally Posted by Crys

might be because fuck cg

i'll see about it idk

The show is only about 60-70% CG. And when it does use it, it's exceptionally well. The rest is traditional.

It's really worth it.

[Crys]

Originally Posted by big bad birtha

Time flies when you're uhhh...not watching anime! I didn't even realize the season is almost over. That means it's next season's chart time!

What do we have? NOTHING! God what a mediocre looking lineup.

Pretty dookie line up, but i got a good chuckle from Swim! clone.

Might watch the fate/a thing though idk. I know nothing about it though.

And aight i'll see about checking it out deo.

[McSweeney]

I hate to judge a book by its cover, because if you stuck Minami-ke onto that and I had never heard of it before, it would look like some generic moe crap, but how are we to know about those hidden gems? The importance of word of mouth.