dj_girthquake
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User ID: 722
dj_girthquake
3mo ago
I'll start with some comments on your review.
Made in Abyss: Great worldbuilding and it has a very nice visual style. I don't love the writing though, and veers heavily into misery porn, where it tries to create emotional depth by simply taking the characters through as much fucked up shit as possible, making it feel emotionally manipulative. Still, the world is really unique, detailed and fascinating and I am fairly curious about why the abyss is there.
One Punch Man and Mob Psycho 100: One Punch Man is great and I agree with the recommendation for season one, but I definitely think Mob Psycho is the better series of the two. One Punch Man is a lot of fun, but I think Mob Psycho is much better written, with more interesting characters and character dynamics. The last season of Mob Psycho in perhaps not quite as good as the rest, but I still rate it as one of the best (and perhaps the best written) anime series I've come across.
Some further recommendations of my own:
Dorohedoro: The main character is a man with amnesia and a lizard head and the story follows him and his attempt to figure out who he is. It is set in a beatiful and detailed cyberpunkish city where the people are oppressed by magicians who live in a parallel dimension. This is an amazingly weird and funny show, with a unique world, that it populates with characters that turn out to be very different and much more interesting than the initial impression suggests. It sort of reminds me of early 2000s New Weird fantasy (think China Mieville), and it also has a lot in common with Arcane, but without being a complete, borderline unwatchable, cliche fest. Only one season so far, but the second season is expected to be released this year.
Golden Kamuy: This show is set in northern Japan shortly after the Russo-Japanese in 1904-05. It follows a war veteran and a girl who belongs to the local Ainu hunter gatherer population, and how they get drawn into a hunt for a huge golden treasure, trying to find it before the yakuza or the military. This show is simply great. It is well written, with really strong, complex characters and it manages to combine a unique setting with humor and an interesting and unpredictable plot. If I were to recommend one anime, I think it would be this one.
Heavenly Delusions: This is a slow-burn postapocalyptic show that follows a boy and a girl on their travels through a Japan almost completely destroyed by a mysterious disaster. This is a well written show that does something that is way too uncommon in anime: it actually has subtle exposition and doesn't take every chance it gets to over-explain everything in excruciating detail. Instead it trusts the viewer to figure out what has happened to the world and who the main characters are without too much handholding. On top of this it has some of the best art I've seen in an anime series. There is only one season so far, but I'm looking forward to see where this show goes.
dj_girthquake
8mo ago
I just finished reading it a couple of days ago. It was pretty good. Plenty of cool ideas, reasonably well written, but I also thought it was a bit rough around the edges and could have used a bit more structure. Apparently, the author recently signed publishing deals with a couple of mainstream publishers, and he has been working on an updated version of the book that should be available in the near future.
dj_girthquake
9mo ago
I found Count Orlok in Robert Eggers' new Nosferatu movie to be absolutely menacing. He is not a cosmic horror like in Lovecraft, but you can absolutely feel him emanating raw, evil power when he is on screen.
dj_girthquake
1yr ago
They've now changed the text to "I have Latino friends, waiting for their green cards, who admitted with some hesitancy that they would have voted for Trump."
dj_girthquake
2yr ago
The Baratheon issue could probably be explained by meiotic drive, where a driving locus is strongly linked to a hair color locus.
dj_girthquake
2yr ago
I'd recommend Pancakes for Findus. It has beautiful art, a fun story and it's been hugely popular among kids in Sweden (and some other parts of Europe I think) for decades. It seems to be temporarily out of stock at Amazon at the moment, but other stores seem to have it, but check out the excerpt at Amazon to get a feel for it.
dj_girthquake
3yr ago
Have you read anything by Guy Gavriel Kay? He writes mostly standalone fantasy novels, often with little or no magic and sometimes veering close to historical fiction, but with an epic scope. My favorite is Tigana, which is inspired by medieval/renaissance Italy and has a comparatively large amount of magic. Another good one is The Lions of Al-Rassan, which is inspired by medieval Spain.
I would also recommend The Iron Dragon's Daughter and The Dragons of Babel by Michael Swanwick, They're very well written, weird and grim novels set in a steampunkish fantasy world.
If you liked Diaspora by Greg Egan, I'd recommend his short stories. He has several really good collections (I've read Axiomatic, Oceanic and Luminous), but I think he has many stories available on his website. This is one of my favourites: https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/MORAL/Moral.html
If you read Magician series by Feist, did you get to the Empire series, that he wrote together with Janny Wurts? It's more political and a bit of a precursor the Game of Thrones, and I liked it a lot more than the main Magician series.
TFA is indeed not a very original movie, but at least Abrams is a competent director. The same can absolutely not be said of Lucas.
Before watching TFA I decided to rewatch the whole prequel trilogy with my girlfriend, since she hadn't seen it. We made it through The Phantom Menace, but we had to stop, because it was just too fucking awful. It is literally bad B movie level bad, like something you would see on MS3K, but where the only difference was a bigger special effects budget (and not even those hold up well by today's standards). I genuinely don't feel that it would be too much of a hyperbole to say that not a single good decision was taken when that movie was made. The contrast to TFA, which I watched a few days later was immense. Yes, finally! Basic level competence! Abrams can actually tell a story! And direct an exciting scene! He can even direct actors so they sound vaguely natural! And this actually feels like a movie made by a professional filmmaker!
The fact that people defend the prequels are for this reason completely incomprehensible to me. The only argument that even comes close to making sense is that at least Lucas tried to tell a more ambitious story about the fall of the Republic and Anakin's conversion to the dark side, but this is an extremely weak argument. Firstly, ambition means nothing if you can't write (and Lucas can't) and secondly, it is not like anything in the prequels is really that deep or complex. You easily find better written and more complex ideas in the rejection pile of your average science fiction publisher, or even your favourite fanfic repository.
I'm not going to defend TLJ and ROS though. They are indeed really, really, really bad movies. Genuinely awful. They might even be close to being as bad as the prequels, but they are definitely not any worse.
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