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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2944 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 11, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Digital fast update, Peter and Paul edition.

  1. Your Name, +2. A feature-length anime about a city boy and a country girl swapping bodies that takes an unexpected turn when they decide to meet. It's one of the best-drawn 2D movies I've ever seen and even some 3D-assisted total animation they used doesn't look jarring. As far as I know, the director deliberately wanted to avoid making "another anime" and wanted this to be treated as a work that is judged on its own, not because it has round eyes and too few FPS. He made a couple more feature films after this one that I plan to watch, but I can't be assed to find proper ass subs that overlay carefully styled text over signs and phones and newspapers and do other fancy stuff like that.
  2. Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World, 0. If you have a hardon for the Royal Navy, like Catgirl Kulak, then watch it. Volokolamskoye Shosse is probably a better book about military leadership. The ship scenes look great, but the plot feels more like a series of vignettes than a coherent story. And Russell Crowe is fat.
  3. Breaking Bad, rating pending. I still haven't finished watching it. It will most likely get a +2 from me, but I want to finish season five before rating it properly.
  4. One Punch Man, 0. I almost gave it a -1 after watching the first few series, but then it finally realized it needed at least some plot. It's still nothing more than The Adventures of Dr. McNinja with Japanese characteristics, which makes sense, given than it started as a webcomic as well.

I can't remember if it was Your Name or Weathering With You that I watched. I think it was Weathering. I downloaded both of them after reading yet another "recommend some anime for non-anime watchers" thread. Whichever one it was I switched it off unfinished, deleted the other one without watching it, and re-examined my credulity for internet anime recommendations.

One Punch Man on the other hand was thoroughly entertaining even as the joke began wearing thin, but that was recommended to me by a real person who isn't into anime.

Must’ve been Weathering

Just watch Samurai Champloo and Cowboy Bepop over and over again like I do

Maybe add Elfen Lied - or Gantz if you want something almost good

I feel like I'm the only person in existence who doesn't like Cowboy Bebop.

It's a very vibey show but it's all aesthetics, the characters and their motivations are about as deep as a puddle, and the episode-to-episode plots make very little logical sense and feel like they were all made up on the spot with a lot of technobabble to cover up the sheer lack of effort put into any of the plotting or worldbuilding. I watched many episodes and never got the sense that it was a coherent world with rules that had to be adhered to at all. Incoherent ass-pulling constitutes a significant portion of how most of the plots in each episode actually progress, and it's really hard to be invested in the episodic narratives when some deus ex machina can be invoked at literally any time to turn the plot on its head. The overarching reaction I had to most episodes was "This is happening now, I guess". Honky Tonk Women is an early example of an episode that's just needlessly contrived and really only exists because of a lot of irrationality and a one-in-a-million coincidence without which the plot would not happen.

They also try to pull emotional scenes at the end of most episodes that don't hit IMO because they spent too little time fleshing out the characters; that moment in Asteroid Blues when it's revealed that Asimov and Katerina won't make it to Mars is clearly supposed to be a pensive one, but you've spent all of 15 minutes with them at that point and so the emotional scene feels unearned. Also seriously, does anyone actually like Faye Valentine? She's superficially charming but is often shown to be a selfish, arrogant, lazy individual who leeches off the rest of the Bebop without so much as a show of gratitude, with a bad habit of gambling all her money away.

Visually, aurally, it's a great experience; the whole atmosphere is immaculate. But you need more than that to carry a show IMO, and animes almost always fall apart on plotting and characterisation for me (Japanese narrative writing generally rarely delivers on these fronts). Ghost In The Shell is another great example of a classic anime with fantastic art direction crippled by a wafer-thin narrative, which purports to be way more than it actually is given that it has basically nothing much to say on the subjects of consciousness and AI it touches on (what it does say is vague and bordering on incoherent). This banger of an intro sequence deserved so much better.

I think you might be right on Cowboy Bebop, though I still like it because I grew up with it. It wasn't until I watched Samurai Champloo as an adult that I realized that Cowboy Bebop was as you say, because I found that Samurai Champloo was superficial in the same ways that Cowboy Bebop was, though Samurai Champloo's case was more severe, I think.

I definitely agree with you on Ghost in the Shell, the movie. I watched it and just could not understand at all how it was so popular and influential as a 90s anime movie. Akira was way better.

I will defend GitS the movie: it's ultimately a tecno-thriller action movie with great visuals and music. there's a little bit of mystery-conspiracy to drive the action scenes forward, and little bit of philosophy to ponder about during the slow scenes. While ultimately not too deep, by standards of action movies the philosophical ponderings are actually pretty great.

The Wachowskis say it inspired the Matrix, and I think GitS -- and also the first tv anime series-- beat the Matrix in internal coherence.

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