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Notes -
The sub-genre you seem to like most is called Shonen. Some recommendations are here: https://gamerant.com/best-shonen-anime-to-watch/
Personally I highly recommend Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I thought it had a fairly conservative message all around, but not obnoxiously so. I mean, it does follow the law of conservation at least, (haha).
Dragonball Z had a lot of sexual stuff in it, but it might have gone over your head if you were a child. There were dramatic nosebleeds, an old man who was a pervert, etc.
No Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann?
Gurren Lagann is my favorite counter to feminist complaints about media. Most pieces of media I hear their complaints about don't really fit the bill. Gurren Lagann, on the other hand, fully embraces a masculine worldview and is full of blatant examples of the "male gaze", thinly veiled phallic references, etc. And it shows you that all that stuff is actually totally super awesome and not the horrific evil feminists claim it is.
In fact if anything, feminism kind of maps on to the anti-spirals in the series decently well. And the ending of the series basically amounts to "Yeah maybe our capacity to continually grow and improve through our masculine strength and efforts is destined to inevitably destroy the entire universe, but we're going to make it not-inevitable through sheer force of masculine will".
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Thank you for this. Your link hits the mark pretty well. Hell’s Paradise sounds like an awesome anime they describe. Full Metal Alchemist seems so-so. I tend to like linear plots that focus less on character development (Death Note did this well, though I found myself bored of the dialogue at times and liked the exchange of trickery between the characters) and more-so interesting ideas or power interactions between people or systems.
I fully got the references and innuendo in DBZ when I was younger, but it was nowhere near as extreme as much of the other anime you could find.
Fullmetal Alchemist had some really cool ideas. The story begins with a difficult problem and as the plot continues the problem seems to get more and more impossible and maybe not as important as some other things, but then main characters get out of the problem at the very end. The way they get out of the problem seems "correct" in hindsight but was also very cathartic and hard to guess ahead of time. There's one big magic system that everyone uses differently, along with some competent muggles who make things interesting.
I wouldn't write it off based on a blurb. I persist in recommending it, if only because it's fairly short for a shonen and you can probably figure out if you like it or not by the 5th episode or so.
I second the recommendation. FMA:B is one of the best anime series I've ever seen, bar none.
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Dragonball Z was instrumental in teaching kids how the real world works. The guy who beat everyone up gets best girl, the autist is stuck with his childhood sweetheart, the short guy has to marry a robot, and the old guy that owns his own island is a giant perv.
Your girl will happily monkeybranch to and get knocked up by a stronger, more powerful man—even though he and his buddy just brutally assaulted and murdered you and a bunch of her lifelong friends, from which you were revived shortly thereafter through supernatural means. And that perhaps “even though” in the previous sentence can be replaced by “especially if.”
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