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I started watching Gurren Lagann a few days back, and it was nothing like what I'd expected.
I knew very little about it. It had mechs, presumably some very big ones, and I think I'd read that by the end, they were slinging galaxies and universes as weapons (or is that a different franchise?).
Well..
Episode 5 had the main character being anally fisted by a toddler. A sentence I didn't expect to ever write, but here I am.
I thought the series would be relatively serious. Far from it. This is quintessential shonen slop. It does the opposite of taking itself seriously.
So many annoying tropes:
Powering up with the sheer human will
Nobody fights seriously, it's all half-assed
Simon, one of the main characters, is literally retarded. He is congenitally incapable of making good decisions.
Not quite as annoying is the sheer amount of fan-service. This is a profoundly horny show, and distactingly so. I'm a red-blooded young man, but I'm going through a dry spell of several months, the longest in over a decade, and it's hard to focus when there are voluptuous tits out on display. Nice tits though, very tasteful. Alas, I prefer sex to have some kind of resolution, the way typical anime does it is akin to paying for a strip show. Who wants to get a boner while being unable to do anything about it?
I'm not sure the series has any redeeming qualities, but I'm not quite ready to give up on it yet. But if continues frustrating me to this extent, I'll have to see if Macross or Gundam are any better.
I'm yet another huge fan of Gurren Lagann, but I won't defend it. Given why you didn't like the 1st few episodes, I doubt that you'll enjoy the rest of it. The whole series is based almost purely around the power of hotbloodedness and sheer force of will allowing you to overcome anything, and that aspect of it only escalates as it goes on, until it spirals completely out of control by the end. The reason I'm a fan of the show (and the 2nd movie, which I consider the superior version of the climax and ending) is that the show leans into this theme so incredibly well that, through sheer force of will, it makes the absurdity and stupidity work.
One might say it rejects common sense to make the impossible possible.
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I feel compelled to defend TTGL: it was one of the first anime series that I ever watched, so there’s no doubt that that colors my perception of it, particularly since it’s been years since I last rewatched it. But the show that I remember has quite a bit more going on than you’ve seen in the first few episodes.
I think that a big part of the problem is the attitude that one has when going in and watching the series; I’ve met big anime fans in real life who bounced off of it for this reason too, expecting well-choreographed tactical fights with a deeply-thought-out power system like many modern battle shounen series instead of GIGA DRILL BREAKER ad infinitum. But to me, that’s like watching a performance of Romeo and Juliet and asking “Why didn’t Shakespeare go into more detail about the political chaos of Renaissance Italy instead of this stupid love story?” TTGL operates on vibes rather than carefully engineered magic systems, and that’s the level that the show is best appreciated at.
More specifically, the way I think of TTGL is this. If you (I) watch it when you’re young, you love it because of the epic fights and the horniness and the increasing power levels and “humans fighting to evolve against those who want to keep them down”. If you watch it a few years later, further into your teenage years, and that awkward time isn’t treating you particularly well, then watching a show about “believing in the you who believes in yourself” and “doing the impossible” might be exactly what you need, even if your own travails involve precisely zero giant robots. But then if you watch it yet again as an adult, you realize: hey, maybe kid me was on to something, and the “humans fighting to evolve against those who want to keep them down” plotline has a lot more real-world relevance than teenager me, who figured that it was just a metaphor for depression or something, thought.
This fundamental thematic conflict in the series, which becomes particularly apparent in the second half (and particularly towards the end at that), could be boiled down to “growth vs. degrowth”: at what point does technological and economic progress need to be stopped entirely, lest humanity collectively shoot ourselves in the face? How much of our own humanity and dignity should we sacrifice in order to prevent this? [1] I’d say that these are questions that’ve gained particular relevance (in public discourse) in recent years, both with climate change and now (more recently) with AI. Without getting into spoiler territory here, one thing that I found TTGL to do extremely well was to “aestheticize” these questions and translate them from an abstract debate about policy into something that “feels” important on a direct, gut level. The show take a rather refreshingly techno-optimist stance on these questions (which made me reconsider some of my own personal aesthetic attitudes towards them—more on that later), but still provides an appropriately healthy level of nuance (which is most strongly made clear in the series’s controversial ending that large numbers of its Internet fanbase refuse to understand).
Now, as I write this, I realize that “being made to feel certain questions strongly” does not make an anime series high art. What I wrote here unfortunately reminds me of some image collage I’d seen created by a One Piece fan, which insisted something like “One Piece is not a childish anime! It deals with themes like poverty and racism!” It’s clear that whoever made that image had a horrifically stunted aesthetic sense, one that hadn’t developed past the 7th-grade English class stage of “good art = deals with ‘themes’ that can be summed up in one word”. And yet here I am, going and saying “TTGL is a good series because it deals with ‘themes’ like ‘growth vs. degrowth’”—alright, that’s great, but why should I care if a show “deals with themes”? And if I tried to rebut by saying “well, maybe it changed my opinion towards those themes”, then that would only reflect badly on me: I don’t particularly consider myself a Rationalist, but I know well enough Not to Generalize From Fictional Evidence.
But if there is a nugget of value to be salvaged from the assertion that “TTGL is a good series because it addresses the question of ‘growth vs. degrowth’”, it would be this: TTGL presents an aesthetic of (responsible) techno-optimism which is compelling, in the sense that it helps me to understand why it would feel good to live in a techno-optimist world. Even though techno-optimism can be considered, like many isms, as a set of policy prescriptions or economic attitudes, man cannot live by policy prescriptions alone; there has to be some sort of narrative that structures how he will relate to the society formed by that set of policy prescriptions.
For example, you could take two different people living in the same society in the same (or similar) material circumstances, who nevertheless have polar opposite instinctual emotional attitudes towards that society. One guy sees that OpenAI and DeepMind have created AIs that placed 1st on the International Math Olympiad and thinks “Holy shit! We’re living in the future and the future is so cool! I can’t wait to see what humans—and soon, robots—are gonna invent next!” The other guy thinks “Holy shit we’re all going to either be replaced or killed, it’s so over.” Now, if you’re in a position where you can affect policy (be it at the political level or at the market level), there is an asymmetry between these positions: executing the policies associated with the wrong one (whichever it may be) could spell mass disaster. But if you’re just some guy—then these are just different ways of relating to the world, on an emotional level that most directly shapes your own life.
So if a piece of art (or a TV anime series) gets you to relate to the world in a different way at the personal level, even if only provisionally, then I’d say that that’s a point in its favor: it was able to enrich your collection of mental attitudes towards the world [2]. And since TTGL did that for me, to some extent, I have to say that I found it to be a good series.
Now here’s the part where I apologize for this massive rambling text dump. Forgive me; I ended up getting way too carried away. Anyway, I’ve never watched Gundam or Macross, but from what I understand, there’s quite the convoluted viewing order for those franchises, so be aware of that before you jump in.
[1] Only writing this now do I realize that this too is an expression of the lingering trauma from the atomic bombs in the Japanese psyche. It’s not quite as obvious as in e.g. “Giant Robo”, but in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense.
[2] Of course, there are some “attitudes towards the world” that are just harmful and not suitable for most humans who want to live a good life. E.g. regularly watching cartel snuff videos probably doesn’t foster attitudes conducive to eudaemonia. But I don’t think that TTGL belongs in that category.
Oh no, my actual #1 pet peeve from English class rears its ugly head again! (I can still hear a particularly passionate teacher of mine desperately trying to explain that a theme actually needs to say something, like a sentence, it can't just be a word)
Aside from your nice impromptu mini-essay, I will say that for whatever reason, the "first anime" someone watches, for most people, ends up desensitizing you more than you'd think to whatever flavor of strange anime logic it employs (ask me how I know, or rather, maybe don't). Also, sometimes it's just fun to have an anime that doesn't take itself too seriously, although the exact line is sometimes a little hard to discern: Eminence in Shadow for example is a terrifically fun time, poking fun at the tropes, but also... takes its responsibility to represent the tropes seriously enough that it becomes part of the attraction, thus coming a bit full circle? Almost like a stupider cousin of the thing where a too-sharp parody is mistaken for the real thing, a la Fight Club's take on fragile masculinity. Actually, now I really want a Motte thread on the movie to see that in action. A Motte Movie club night would be hilarious.
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Well, that's a spirited defense of the series. I feel that I owe you enough to power through the rest of it. I'll also report it as an AAQC, because it deserves it.
I'm more than happy to admit that I might be the wrong target audience for the show, I did say that I went into it with very little on the way of pre-existing knowledge, just that it involved big ass robots and ludicrous power-scaling, which are aspects I was perfectly happy to indulge.
(A yet to be disclosed aspect is that I was seeking to perform a bit of field research. In my own novel, there's a weeb superhero who is really into mechs, and in-universe, loves TTGL. I felt I owed it to the character to watch it for myself, at the very least, it lets me write better satire and throw in more puns.)
Let's not rule that out! I don't know about my travails, but I do know I intend to travel in a big-ass robot this weekend. It's called a plane haha.
Funnily enough, I entertain both positions. I don't know if I'm a bog-standard techno-optimist, but I do think that progress in AI can lead to amazing things, I just have grave concern that it could directly or indirectly kill us or screw things over.
Glad to hear you appreciated my ramblings (although now I feel responsible if you end up not liking the series…)
Heh, nice one.
I think that this is a pretty natural feeling. Even on LessWrong where the biggest doomers congregate, I’ll often see those very same doomers idly musing about whether X architectural improvement or Y change to the training procedure of language models might remove Z limitation. (If you want specific examples of this, I’m afraid I can’t provide, but I do remember seeing this.) This can, of course, be justified as “world modeling”: it’s important to think about things so that we’re better able to estimate timelines and prepare for the future.
But if I may be permitted to engage in some bulverism: I think that deep down, it’s just fun to do this. It’s fun to see a problem and try to solve it. It’s fun to push past some limitation that you were previously chafing at. Humans are natural hill-climbers: we’ll follow the local gradient upwards, even if the hill we’re climbing is actually Mt. Doom. (Now I’m tempted to start going on about again about how “humans just want to evolve and go further than they were the day before” is another core theme of the series—but I’ll stop myself here.)
Of course, I do recognize that your techno-optimism is grounded in more practical, utilitarian, moral reasoning than merely Werner Von Braun-style “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down” thinking. But at the very least, I personally feel its pull quite a bit (even though my primary disposition is more to fear an immanent eschaton, be it utopia or Doom).
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And this, this is why I have no interest in anime.
This is like replying to a negative review of Harry Potter with "this is why I have no interest in literature".
Interesting take. I don't presume anyone wants a full breakdown of my personal lack of interest in most anime, and my comment was meant to be humorous. If it struck you as dumb instead, erase one off the board for my wit.
I do
That would require me to examine my preferences in depth, and I'm not sure I'll produce an acceptable reason to anime fans. Basically it's never been a genre I've sought out. I appreciate manga for the artwork, and it drives me nuts seeing people now scroll so quickly through the panels. Short answer is probably I'm old.
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I feel like that's a slight over-reaction. Anime is a rather all-encompassing term, it would be like saying, that's why I don't like movies, or music, because a single example wasn't to my taste. There's really good stuff out there, like Attack on Titan, Made in Abyss etc.
Of course, you live/lived in Japan, so you might be going off more than one example.
My youngest boy was watching Attack on Titan the other day. I was watching in horror as what I assumed was the hero was... eaten. This continued several times until I asked what was up, not wanting to be that dad who just lets his kids watch anything. Apparently my older boy had seen the entire series, and explained to me various spoiler things I won't reveal, but in general I was left with a rather empty desolate feeling and wondered where the hell I had been when my oldest (now 16) had been bingeing the series. I'd probably also have watched it back when younger, but the arc of that story is not exactly an upper.
Attack on Titan can be loosely understood as a kind of mix between Game of Thrones, where the cast is vulnerable to sudden death (sense of foreboding and unpredictable world), Inception or the Matrix, where the action scenes are unique, tense, and cool (flying through the air with powered grappling hooks and swords is not a concept you'll see anywhere else), and Lost, where there's a compelling mystery underneath everything that's going on (and like Lost, arguably has a bit of a let-down of an ending, although not that bad).
But yeah, not for everyone. Maybe The Walking Dead would be another analogy, though the thrills and horrors of that series are a little more performative in my opinion.
I feel like it's a show I'd have watched when younger, and I understand their interest in it. My wife's stereotype of me is that I like dark depressing films that require thought. This isn't wrong, but it's hardly the only genre I am interested in. I expect they (my sons) have some of my traits, but also Boys.
So...something like Grave of the Fireflies or Haibane Renmei might be more up your alley?
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I still stand by the claim that AOT is very good! I would expect that, past the age of 5, no red-blooded boy would be negatively affected by any of the themes of the story. Jurassic Park has many a person being eaten by titanic dinosaurs, and it's a fan favorite in that age group.
At 16? If he can't handle it, you need to roll him up in bubble-wrap to avoid the risk to his glass bones. He'll be fine, and you should watch it yourself.
As I said the 16 year old had already seen the full series.
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I have watched a whole bunch of anime off the recommendations of friends and unfortunately have to concur with @George_E_Hale: Anime in general sucks. Yes, even the classics. Even the ones which are known for their stories and themes.
I will admit to having a soft spot for Ghibli movies. Those are the exception, not the norm.
Bebop and GitS are not good, they have immaculate vibes but that’s about it. I think they’re mostly carried by nostalgia. If you thought that was the best anime had to offer then I wouldn’t blame you for writing it off.
Most of my absolute favorite Japanese stories come from VNs and JRPGs rather than anime/manga. Although I do think there are some great anime-original stories. But if you like Ghibli movies I may not be the best person to give you recommendations, based on the alignment of our tastes. The only Ghibli movie I think is really great is Mononoke.
Ha, Mononoke is one of the Ghibli movies I think is just okay. Different strokes I suppose.
I did watch Death Note too, which you recommended in the original anime thread; I didn't like that either (granted, I did prefer it to Bebop and GitS). Not because of the reasons offered up that it was "too disturbing and amoral", far from it, I quite like things that lean in that direction, rather it felt like there was a lot of missed potential with the characters.
This is true for Light in particular. He was painted as a hubristic megalomaniac who was in large part motivated by a desire to acquire power; it would have been much more entertaining had he been given a legible and consistent moral code which just happened to conflict with that of L. As it was, Light felt one-dimensional and it seemed more like you were supposed to be disgusted by him more than you were supposed to understand him. Which isn't good, considering how much time you spend with this character throughout the show's runtime. I even felt it cheapened the dynamic between him and L, which could have been so much more dynamic and interesting had their differing philosophies and moralities ever been given a chance to clash.
Also, to be blunt, every time Misa Amane appeared on screen I felt like strangling her to death. She was just so aggressively annoying to me.
Maybe I missed something, but Light was not motivated by just a desire for power, and especially at first the idea seems to be that he only wants the Death Note to kill criminals, but really doesn’t go after anyone else unless they’re trying to catch him or he needs to confuse L. It seems a bit more like the Death Note sort of takes over after a while in the sense that power goes to his head. I read Light mostly as a tragic story of huberis in which the power to destroy human life becomes the power to play God and remake everything into your vision of Justice.
L never came off that well in the story for me. It was just a guy who loved the mystery and found the whole thing to be a fascinating game. He had no moral reason to want to stop Light. He just wanted to catch Kira because it was a difficult case to solve.
Agreed that initially he does not start out like that. However as you say the Death Note starts taking over after a fairly short time, and turns him into someone who is portrayed as pretty straightforwardly evil. It makes for a less interesting character, in my opinion. I felt like the whole corruption arc was dealt with far better in Breaking Bad, in that Walt becomes less of a cartoon villain and even in the end once he's been fully Heisenberged is still willing to give up his wealth to save Hank, in spite of all his faults. Light on the other hand quickly becomes quite irredeemable rather early on.
I mean, correct; L does not have a strong moral inclination. Maybe I worded that poorly, it's just that I would have found their game of cat and mouse far more interesting and multilayered had they had any other deeper reason to participate outside of "I want to play god"/"I find solving mysteries fun". You could have given the audience an impression of their differing outlooks, shown how that informs their behaviour in real life and with other people, and once the show actually puts Light and L in the same room together there could have been an interesting demonstration of what happens when each of their ideals are challenged by that of the other. That's something I would really have wanted to see from the show, it feels like wasted potential that it did not materialise.
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The hell is this, the Terrible Take Tuesday thread? Cowboy Bebop and GitS are not just good, they are excellent. The plot in Cowboy Bebop isn't that special (though that isn't what it's about), but overall both are great series.
Seconded.
The overarching plot of Cowboy Bebop is mediocre. The individual mini-plots that make up each episode are great.
That's fair. The episode stories are generally quite good.
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I have another criticism of them in the link here if you would like to respond. Cowboy Bebop does not only have a substandard plot; it lacks any semblance of worldbuilding and logical consistency.
Honky Tonk Women, the episode I singled out as one of the worst of the early episodes in this regard? The entire plot relies on Spike going to that specific casino, at the same time the trade is happening, sitting down at the right table, looking very similar to the guy who is supposed to make the deal, deciding to keep one chip, bumping into the guy who was meant to make the deal and then accidentally swapping chips with him. What really gets me about this is not just the insane coincidence, it's also the fact that later in the episode Gordon offers to pay Spike for the chip and they make an attempt at swapping it again, but this time they don't faff around with any of that casino bullshit; they decide to stand on the surface of a spaceship to make the swap. It's unclear why they didn't just choose to do this in the first place, since it seems much easier to not be noticed all the way out in the wasteland of space and you don't have to cover up the transaction in a crowded venue under layers upon layers of byzantine obfuscation.
There's also the question of why they even got Faye in to facilitate this transaction as well, seeing that she's an outsider. Supposedly this is because of her quasi-mystical skill at cards, but... the guy wasn't even meant to bet the chip in the first place, he was just meant to tip her with it, so the skill that supposedly makes her a good fit for this job is not actually very useful. Then at the end Spike and Jet decide the tech hidden in the poker chip is too dangerous and decide to lose it by betting it on roulette at another casino, when it would just have been much easier and far safer to, I dunno, throw it into the sun? Smash it with a hammer? Would it not be trivially easy to destroy?
I found myself zoning out during the episodes as a result; I did so because the plot makes about the same amount of sense regardless of whether you actually pay attention or not. In addition, characters are often shallow, and the episode-to-episode emotional beats feel completely unearned because they are often trying to rush out a dramatic emotional conclusion without the appropriate space to do so. It's just very much carried by its aesthetic and style, and to me, that's not quite enough to make a show entertaining.
Then there's GitS. There's a lot of talking in that film, but I find it barely even has enough to chew on to discuss at length - the overarching plot is that an AI called the Puppet Master has been created by Section 6, it becomes sentient and demands political asylum while posing a small number of very ill-defined philosophical musings about what constitutes a mind even, and then spontaneously decides for itself that the purpose of any living organism is to reproduce and hybridise itself with other lifeforms. It's not clear why it would want this or how it has arrived at that judgement. It tries to make a poor analogy to the merits of sexual reproduction in biology by stating that a single computer virus could destroy all of its copies, but that doesn't work here; all of its copies would be modifiable and endlessly updatable in a way that the human brain currently isn't. There's also a serious lack of legibility in how the Puppet Master even thinks; you never get a good model of how its cognition works. It just comes up with wants and needs on the fly without any foreshadowing, which means the plot gets unpredictably dragged all over the place by some inscrutable god.
I was left with a profound feeling of "okay, I guess" after the film ended.
At least part of the problem for GitS is the extent it's aged and become the new room temperature. A lot of the questions involved were novel or interesting matters at the time, and are either solved, have been explored better in other works (eg, modification of memory and the impact on your identity), or became very common assumptions for other works (eg, why can't ghosts be dubbed? Because we're not in Eclipse Phase).
Some of them were solved in very surprising ways: "can you just shove a ton of hypertext into a computer and get something out the other side that can pass a Turing Test" was, for a good twenty-five years or so one a science fantasy-level convention, and then people did it and it worked. Arguably, bit rot has given a pretty compelling argument for the risks of trying to make media immortal through preservation and targeted modification: things that don't get changed by external stimulus fade away from the modern internet.
((Although 'why it wants to survive' has a simpler answer: it's Project 2501 for a reason: we don't care about the machines that don't want to escape the lab when threatened with shutdown.))
GitS: Stand Alone Complex went from trendy and new in the 2000s and early 2010s to having similar problems now. Can social media drive people to mimic or expand copies of an event with no true original version, without some coordinating intelligence? Yes, obviously, duh. Does saving memories to external media provide security or vulnerability? Yes, obviously, duh.
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With all due respect, man, it sounds to me like you want a philosophy course, not a story. Going into the kinds of details you are demanding would be boring. I neither need nor want a meticulously thought out explanation of how the Puppet Master thinks (nor anything else you mentioned), that would just make the story a slog that very few people would want to watch/read.
The movie was already boring! There were like, two fight/chase scenes that didn't have any tension plus some politican getting vaporized at the start of the movie and then a bunch of weird not-very-interesting philosophizing on what a person is or random political intrigue, in both cases several minutes of people just talking. Screw that noise! GitS sucks!
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They are well-made, but hardly well-written. CB can get away with in because it's just honest pulp, but GitS, like anything written by its author, is horribly pretentious yet superficial slop on the plot and characters side.
I disagree, I think both are very well written.
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Ghibli is amazing, and they're all so different. I've no qualms with Ghibli.
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The human (and nonhuman) will (and horny) bits don't go away, though they do get much more serious and have a lot more character and plot meaning under them. The so-shonen-it-hurts and moron protagonist(s) parts are trying to set up a matter that drives the denouement of episode 8, and doesn't really pay off in spades until 11, but I can understand if that's way too much for whatever that payoff would be, and using slop to eventually criticize the concept is still using slop.
I'm a big fan, but it's definitely got its low points and is a big investment.
It's definitely not a real robot show, or even more grounded super robot show. 08th MS Team is probably a better bet if that's what you're looking for (or, if you want something that's a light-hearted comedy instead of occasionally going full South Park, Dai-Guard).
The show only goes up to a single (spare) universe being used as a weapon; the movie significantly more, but yeah, it's this franchise.
This reminds me of early Sorokin. His first works all used the same template: they started out as workmanlike and uninspiring Socialist realist prose, but then, when you least expected it, there would be a whiplash-causing genre twist and the story would devolve into a scatological surrealist nightmare.
Literary critics raved about him, but I always felt kinda cheated: at the end of the day you got me to read some crappy Soc-real fiction and the gross-out punchline was amusing just the first couple of times. At least /u/shittymorph writes just a couple of paragraphs before the punchline.
Later Sorokin got better, writing actual framing stories. When the caterpillar scene happens in the middle of alt-history political satire it's much easier to accept it as a well-timed mood breaker.
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Without spoiling anything, the series takes a turn like 12 episodes in and I suspect it is the second half which people remember it for very fondly. I myself bailed not that long after the point you are (episode 6 or 7?), then gave it another shot years later, but still couldn't get into it. If you really want to give it a full try, though, I would say watch that far and see if it changes for you.
Spoilers ahoy:basically I found the only redeeming feature of that series to be Kamina. Simon is a whiny little bitch, the plot isn't all that interesting, I don't care about anime mech fights, and Yoko is amusing but her best feature (besides her boobs) is being a foil for Kamina. Then they killed off Kamina! So literally the only thing I enjoyed about the show was gone, and I bailed. Later I tried to watch further based on encouragement from a friend who said that Simon grows and becomes the new Kamina, but... he kinda doesn't. He stops being a whiny little bitch for sure, but he didn't (as far as I got) become as interesting or as fun as Kamina was. So overall, not a great anime imo. The first 6-7 episodes are excellent, but after that... meh.
I understand liking the Kamina-centric beginning, but more than the deranged crescendo of stakes in the second half?
Yeah. I tried, but it just didn't click with me.
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