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Notes -
I suppose I should add my own anime recommendations to the list. In no particular order:
K-On: 10/10
This is a series about high school girls who are in a rock band together. The personalities range from "very responsible" to "complete moron slacker", and a lot of the enjoyment comes from seeing how the different girls interact and handle the situations that come up. There is essentially zero plot to this show, which would normally bother me as a plot-centric person, but somehow works here. The closest to a plot is a general sense of the girls moving through their young lives - figuring out where to go to college, having to face the pain of saying goodbye to friends when they graduate, that sort of thing. It took me a bit to get into it as you need to get to know the characters some to fully enjoy it, but once I did it was a blast. Also one of the few shows to ever make me cry, which it somehow does every single time I watch one episode in particular.
As an aside - there's one part which I always found kind of bizarre, where the girls are on the beach and one of them feels embarrassed because she has bigger breasts than everyone else. @George_E_Hale, do you know if that's an actual thing for Japanese girls? I know you have boys and not girls, but thought you might have some insight. It was odd to me because as far as I know, American girls feel self-conscious if they have small breasts, not large ones. But maybe it's different over there, IDK.
Fullmetal Alchemist: 7/10
Note I don't mean Brotherhood here. I've seen that and rate it quite highly (9 or 10), but figured I would focus on the first anime adaptation. Overall it's not as good as Brotherhood, because about halfway through the series they caught up to the manga and had to figure out their own ending. Questions like the origin of the Homunculi and the nature of the alchemy gate play out very differently in this show. I generally prefer the manga author's vision (as seen in Brotherhood) for those plot elements, but this was still good. There are also various parts of the manga that were only adapted into this show, as Brotherhood chose to skip material that was in the first show unless it was critical to the plot. So that is another reason to watch the show, more fun adventures with the characters that you don't get otherwise.
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: 9/10 first season, 8/10 second season
While the movie is good (as I argued in the WW thread this week), the show is better. Rather than trying to adapt the Puppet Master story again, the team wisely chose to write their own original story for this. Each season is divided into episodes which are self-contained plots, and episodes which are part of the story arc for that season. This structure works very well for the series, as it means they don't have to stretch the story arc too thin. It also means they can poke into more corners of the world even if they aren't strictly relevant to the main story. Overall I really enjoy the look at day to day operations for Section 9, and getting to know the characters better than you can with a 2-hour movie. It also has my favorite take on the GitS art style, and great music. Season 1 is overall stronger than 2, but both are good and worth watching.
Durarara: 7/10
Based on a light novel (side note: can anyone explain to me the difference between manga and light novels? They seem the same, as they are both comics), this series follows a huge cast of characters as they deal with gang warfare and paranormal activity in their corner of Tokyo. And when I say huge cast, I mean it. There are probably 20-30 characters in this story, all of whom get a decent amount of screen time over the course of the two seasons. The plot gets kind of messy and overly complicated at times, but it's a very fun show and the characters are a treat. There are real gems like Celty (a dullahan, as in the Irish mythical creature), who has lost her head and is working as a courier in the city while she tries to find it. Or Izaya, an info broker who loves to stir up shit just so he can see how people react, because he gets bored otherwise (and who is arguably the villain of the series, to the extent it has one). Or Simon, a black Russian who has landed in Tokyo running a sushi restaurant, and who is freakishly strong (he can throw refrigerators), but who is a devoted pacifist. And a lot more. The plot lets this one down at times, but it's still great fun and the music slaps.
Food Wars: 7/10
This show is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen. It's about a culinary school where disputes are settled with dramatic cooking duels, where everyone gets together in the school gym to see whose honor will prevail based on the votes of the judges. It's about a world where people's clothes fall off (mostly girls) when they taste food that is good enough, or people will imagine themselves being forcibly penetrated by squid tentacles as they eat a particularly nasty squid dish. It is not remotely serious or in good taste. But that's exactly why I love it. They go so over the top with the ridiculous premise that it loops back around from "stupid" to "actually hilarious" just by virtue of how hard they commit to the bit. Very fanservice-y, don't watch this one on public transport or anything. You also cannot try to take it seriously, you have to just enjoy it for the farce it is. Special props to the animators for making the food the star of the show, they know that a show focused on dramatic cooking needs to have delicious looking food and they deliver. Some of the recipes actually seem like they would work pretty well in real life, which supposedly is because the manga author worked with an actual chef to develop them and would even include recipes in each issue. I do think the show goes on one or two seasons too long, but it's great fun despite that.
Delicious In Dungeon: undetermined, not yet finished
This show is about a group of adventures who are too poor to afford provisions, so they plan to cook and eat monsters they find in the dungeon. I really wanted to watch this based on the premise alone, it sounded funny and I once DMed for a D&D campaign where my players did a very similar thing. What surprised and delighted me was that it turns out there's a plot, and it's pretty good (so far). I don't want to say much more than that, because for me discovering that was part of the joy. It's also incomplete, so it might not stay good. But possibly the highest praise I can give is this: the story gets so good that I seriously considered buying the manga just to see what happens next faster, and I hate reading manga. The fact that I was that eager for more speaks volumes, to me. I would definitely watch it, but can't really rate it just yet.
Food Wars had so much potential. Behind all the titillation was a genuine coming of age story and a solidly executed food power system. It goes downhill real fast in the 2nd half. But the 1st half was a ton of fun.
Can confirm that the manga ends with a conclusive and satisfactory ending. Worth it.
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I armchair psychologize that many girls who are more well-endowed here (not simply big) develop a kind of hunched-over posture to de-emphasize their tits. Onsen (hot springs) and public bathing are not uncommon here, and a girl who develops breasts larger than the norm will 100 % have this commented on by other girls. While this is also true back in the states (or used to be, I've no idea now) there is a cultural tendency in Japan to avoid standing out. What you describe is not that surprising.
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Light novels are not comics.
Can you explain? Because I've seen pictures of Durarara and it is most certainly a comic. It's panels of artwork with text bubbles and the like, just like manga. I can't tell a difference between the two, which is why I asked.
Light novels are mostly regular books that have occasional anime-style illustrations in them, maybe ten per volume. They are written at a lower level of language complexity and are aimed at younger audiences; basically the Japanese equivalent of YA novels.
Example 1, from "An Introduction to Light Novels".
Example 2, from "What Are Light Novels? How To Write Light Novels?".
Durarara was originally a light novel, and was adapted into both a manga and an anime. This is completely normal in the incestous media ecosystem of Japan; The Saga of Tanya the Evil is another good example.
In general, the lower the production cost, the more titles there are. So these days there are tons of web novels, the most popular of which get rewritten into light novels, the most successful of which get adapted to manga, and only the very best get adapted to anime.
One notable feature of modern anime is that it often serves as essentially an advertisement for the manga or light novels rather than as an end in itself, so you get one or two cours and then nothing, because there is no point in promoting a print series that has already ended. C'est la vie.
Thanks, that helps a ton. It sounds like we don't really have anything directly comparable in the US, since our YA novels don't have illustrations (or they didn't back in the day, maybe they do now).
Yeah I have seen series which don't bother to adapt the entirety of the source material, which can be frustrating when it leaves the story unfinished or rushes the ending. Maoyu was one I saw that was like that - good premise, fun characters, but it managed to feel both rushed and unfinished. My understanding is that the manga was better, but they didn't adapt the whole thing.
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According to both English Wikipedia and Japanese Wikipedia, light novels may have some manga-style illustrations but are not full manga.
I'm not well acquainted with light novels, but Durarara was adapted from its original light-novel format to a manga as well as to an anime, so maybe you saw an image of the manga.
I see. Yeah I wasn't aware of that, so maybe my confusion is caused by having seen the manga without knowing.
It's pretty common for works to only get localized to the West if they're popular enough to have a manga version, or sometimes only after they've had a successful anime release. I'll point to Kino's Journey as a particularly extreme example: it went directly from light novel in 2000 to anime in Japan in 2003, you could find it in the US anime in English in 2005ish, but the manga didn't start until 2010 and for stupid licensing reasons only the first volume was ever officially translated in 2006, and it was nearly impossible to find.
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