blog好き

May 15 2016

Categories: five images
Tagged: bungou stray dogs, kabaneri of the iron fortress, kuromukuro, mayoia the lost village, sakamoto desu ga

1 Comment »

Haven’t you heard? We’re the minor characters!

Dozaemon, The Lost Village

Every time he opens his mouth, he talks about food or something food related. I get it! He’s fat! That’s the great thing about anime– it’s a visual medium. I can clearly see he’s fat but not morbidly obese. Can we get one fucking line of dialogue from him that isn’t related to his fatness? Does everything he say has to be food related? Maybe he can comment on his adventures through the Johto Region or how he fought off Team Rocket that one time. Nevermind, he’ll probably just rant and be all butt hurt since he picked Popplio instead of Rowlet.

Also, the show constantly shows him snacking on potato chips. How many bags of potato chips did he bring to Mayoiga? The other people are mad at each other for dumb reasons like trying to find dead bodies while Dozaemon is hoarding all the Lay’s? Priorities, guys, priorities.

I think the problem is that all the characters in The Lost Village are so one dimensional, they might as well be townspeople in a 16-bit era RPG. Every character can be summed up with a single PowerPoint slide and that is being generous. I am rooting so hard for the Village to win and kill everyone. I am disappointed that the smoke monster in this show just scares people and is not even in the same league as the smoke monster in Kabaneri.

Osamu Dazai, Bungo Stray Dogs

Can we go one episode without him mentioning suicide? My gosh, if you want to kill yourself, kill yourself. Don’t make me listen to your dribble every episode. Oh I want to kill myself but it has to be a double suicide with a beautiful girl! I get it. It’s more repetitive than the boilerplate I control-v for thin slicing. I also totally understand why he is dominating the male character charts on Newtype, dethroning the venerable Ararararagi: he is the maniac pixie dream girl with a penis.

Koharu Shirahane, Kuromukuro

To be fair, both Koharu and Yukina are absolutely terrible at trying to explain the modern world to Kennosuke. Hey, he’s a samurai from 400 years ago… why do they expect him to understand things like curry, traffic lights, shopping malls, televisions, or mobile phones? Instead of taking it slow to explain stuff to him or even just dropping him off at the local library, Koharu goes out of her way to troll him. You would think that the UN would quickly assign a social worker to help Kennosuke adapt to the modern world. Nope. All he gets is Yukina, who seems like she rather be on Facebook the entire time, the uncle who is mildly helpful, and Koharu is negative help. At this point, the bear from Kuma Miko would be a better ambassador than any character in Kuromukuro.

(I always found it interesting that the UN is so prominently involved in any anime featuring a futuristic discovery or government. The UN Spacey in Macross, the UN in Robotics;Notes and Steins;Gate, the UN in Evangelion, and the UN in this show. It is like Japan has already answered the question of whether or not critical science advancements need world oversight: yes. That is probably shaped by how WWII turned out for them, but it goes against the general feeling of America. What movie features UN oversight of American military or advance science facilities? That’s the biggest stretch to Captain America: Civil War for me. America would never let its highly weaponized citizens, most of whom use American technology like War Machine, Falcon, Ant-man, and Hawkeye, be put under the jurisdiction of the UN. Just won’t happen. What will happen? Go watch Watchmen.)

Takumi, Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress

Top bro. He might as well be named “Sam” for how he supports Ikoma.

(Samwell Tarly in A Song of Ice and Fire is a nod to Samwise Gamgee. I do kind of want a version of Kabaneri meets ASOAIF where the White Walkers/Kabane have taken over most of the world, except for a few heavily fortified stations plus the steampunk trains that run between them. Jon Snow and Brienne would be the Kabaneri.)

Sparrow, Sakamoto Desu Ga?

One thing (out of many things) that I love about Sakamoto Desu Ga? is the running thread about the small bird that Sakamoto saves in the first episode. The next few episodes features him nursing it back to health. And in the most recent episode, the bird is jumping around playing with Sakamoto.

One thing about this show that I did not expect is that the characters develop quickly. Outside of the Horie Yui-voiced female classmate and the one mom, all the other characters learn very quickly to not fuck around with Sakamoto. He is slowly winning everyone over. The show feels like a classic school teacher anime (like GTO) except the one winning everyone over isn’t the teacher but rather an interesting student. This show continues to be one of the funnier and more unique comedies that I’ve watched lately.