/a/ - Animu & Mango

You should know that if shit is gross you'll cringe, bad or good, take it for what it is and go on.

They are children, no matter how many badass stunts and cool magic they do they are still just a pair of brats with jackshit maturity and life experience

>>875254

They constantly work against their own interests in a way that makes it seem like they have no self preservation instinct.

>>875264

The last time I felt this angry from the sheer stupidity of a main character was Mirai Nikki.

Weren't they like 6 and 8 years old?

>>875264

The one that pissed me off the most was Rideback, where the heroine and her retarded allies needlessly antagonized the police and became outlaws in spite of having zero justification to do so, and numerous opportunities to reveal themselves.

>>875288

This. The Elrics were Superman-style do-gooder Shonen heroes who refused to even kill in a brutal Seinen setting full of (allies and enemies alike) murderers and rapists. They suffered so much only because they held themselves to impossible standards, but figured out how to win anyway.

>>875310

>>875288

Kimmble is the type of guy every fedora tipper wishs he could be. He is 100% honest in everything he does so he is in a perfect postion to call people out on their hypocrisy

They are what I like to call "too dumb to live" protagonist. The stories where they appear are usually structured in an way to make their idealism work. They bend the world's logic and morals to an impossible degree, and this breaks the feeling of immersion the reader/watcher has, making the story just plain dumb. An other way to look at it is this: a too dumb to live protagonist only works in a story where their dumb ideals are the center of a maelstrom of death and suffering. Made in Abyss and Now and Then, Here and There are two good examples of this. The problem is that those types of protagonists are usually found in battle shonen stories, and battle shonens with idealistic protagonists are invariably shit because of the "I want to save everyone!" bullshit the readers are constantly subjected to.

>>875388

Same in Mirai Nikki where that dumb faggot kept trusting the yandere despite every sign showing that she was trying to kill/enslave him.

>>875388

Also, something I've noticed as a trend for these kind of protagonists is that I always end up hoping that they die, because their stupidity is so intense that they effectively become the primary antagonist of the plot.

>>875426

The MC of Mirai Nikki is even worse than the Elrics. That dumb shit knew very early on that Yuno was a murderous psycho and the longer they worked together, the more clear it became that she was an absolute liability and a danger to him and everyone else.

>>875429

>>875426

Are you two retarded? He can't survive without her he's just not competent enough to win on his own so her trustworthiness is a moot point.

>>875310

>in a brutal Seinen setting

It's decidedly shounen. Maybe the first anime might have edged toward seinen at the end with the whole Nazi thing, Rose getting raped, and Dante/Lyra wanting incestuous congress with the son of her former lover (to say nothing of the movie with its occult themes and alternate-Alphonse straight-up coughing out his lungs from exposure to toxic rocket fuel). But the manga and Brotherhood never let go of its wide-eyed idealism and happy ending for absolutely everyone. Edward even managed to bargain with, and gain the admiration of, an eldritch horror that snatches body parts as some kind of cosmic balancing scheme. It's one of the big reasons I just absolutely LOATHED the canon version. All that setup and all that grimdark beginning just turns into sunshine and roses at the end for no reason. The first anime might have been kinda silly, but at least it was the logical conclusion to the way things were going; it represents a line that keeps trending down farther and farther to despair and only barely manages to be bittersweet, while the canon has a line that does the same for a while and then in the final act spikes straight up all the way back to happy. It's like deus ex machina on the mood.

>>875505

FMA/B and Cowboy Bebop are probably the only two dubs I'd consider tolerable. I'd still prefer the sub, but if there was nothing else to watch I wouldn't change the channel, so to speak. It helped that FMA aired at the tail end of when studios still had a decent budget to get good VAs, but after they'd gotten over their phase of changing all the music and removing culture influences and censoring the shit out of everything, as they did in the late 90's. But the number-one reason it's good is simply because the cast is mostly Europeans, and the names and terminology are mostly in English already, so everyone having European accents actually works for once. Same with Cowboy Bebop, really.

Reminds me of one of the first episodes of the dub of NGE, where Misato pronounces Ritsuko's name as "reet-SOO-ko". This is the kind of shit that happens when you can only afford bad VAs that can't pronounce Japanese correctly (although she got it right later in the series; maybe they redubbed it for the DVD releases?). FMA avoids this because there is no Japanese to pronounce. Ironically, in places it actually makes the dub superior, because the original seiyuu similarly struggle with the English words that contain phonemes that Japanese doesn't have: Wrath becoming "RAH-soo", for example.

Still waiting on a live-action movie of FMA that DOESN'T suck, by the way.

>>875388

This is why I mostly avoid outright shounen and stick to seinen, which aren't immune to this trope by any means. I enjoy the protagonist that may be a stone cold killer, but they're a product of the world they inhabit and still are morally good at heart.

Kino's Journey and Texhnolyze provide my favorite examples.

Tokyo Ghoul seems like it was going for something meaningful but it got lost getting to that destination. Ken Kaneki throughout the series was a punching bag caught trying to be a bridge between two sides: humans and ghouls. But the way it ended in tokyo ghoul:re was counter to the struggle he had to went through. I think it would have been best if he died in the original tokyo ghoul instead of being the confusing mess of a character he is in re.

The solution that Ken Kaneki fumbles into is accidentally create a third enemy that the ghouls and ccg would fight together. Not bad if it was handled better but it was by accident instead of something he carefully planned on his own. He just raged out after losing to a clearly powerful enemy team in the 3rd or 5th time in the series he's been clearly outmatched. Also the Clowns purpose was just to do it for shits and giggles. Then you got that overly long last chapter that tried to explain characters you probably forgot were in the series and giving a detailed response on where they are now.

>>875520

The Hellsing Ultimate dub is really well done from what I've seen of it. I would almost prefer it over the original if it weren't for Nakata and Wakamoto's performances in the Jap. Still a really well done production. Also a big fan of the Yuyu Hakusho dub, although it's not without its flaws (not a fan of Botan's faux British accent).

>>875652

It's obvious something went on behind the scenes that lead to Tokyo Ghoul being cancelled and the abomination that is Re being born. You can see the shift at the end of Ghoul where the mangaka dowses his own plot in gasoline and sets in ablaze. And it was a pretty awesome finale, for the execution, and just how unexpected it was. But it was unexpected because it was obviously not planned to ever happen from the start. They were going somewhere with the plot, Kaneki being someone who could bridge the gap between humans and ghouls. Everything about that just went up in flames. Then Re happens, and it's short for retarded. Suddenly everyone is a one-eyed ghoul, everyone is getting tortured and maimed and mutilated, because it was so awesome when it happened to Kaneki in the first series, right? We're bombarded with a whole cast of new characters, many of who spend lots of time talking about what's going on in the plot, as a prelude to action, like a briefing cutscene in a videogame. Whereas in Tokyo Ghoul, the main characters would actually investigate stuff themselves. The whole style of storytelling shifted from something that was engaging with a driving theme (humans vs ghouls, but can they learn to coexist?) to a trainwreck so edgy and dark it makes the previous series look like Yotsuba To by contrast. And don't even get me started on the Quinx, fuck them.

>>875551

The genre of an anime (and its target audience) is not always the same as the age of the protagonists. There are plenty of seinen that focus on small children, and plenty of shounen that have a mostly-adult cast. That said, I definitely feel the difference between the two when looking at the antagonists. Most of the homunculi in the 2003 version were complex and their own persons, rather than just being Father's quirky miniboss squad. There are exceptions (manga Wrath and everything GreedLing) but for the most part they're just pale imitations of human-like characters (which if you think about them being homunculi I guess makes sense?) and for what: some God-complex jackass foil to Hohenheim?

I never could stomach the whole mystical aspect to it, either. I'll admit that alchemy coming from people dying in an alternate universe was pretty dumb, but at least it was consistent: something unexplained (souls) creates something unexplained (alchemy). Not some alchemy coming from tectonic plates (which is mixing real science with magic in a way that should NEVER be done); while other alchemy comes from the spirit of the Earth or Chi or whatever bullshit Xingese alchemy was; and then Father and Hohenheim can just do fuck-all whatever they want because they're made of Haxlosopher Stones. The ending seemed entirely built on whatever seemed the most cool, while the actual logic of it collapsed into insanity.

>live action Hellsing

Stop, my penis can only get so erect.

Is the manga of FMA any good? Or is this one of the rare cases where the anime actually exceeds the source material?

>>877032

The 2003 anime is better than the manga (and Brotherhood by extension), up until the movie which is retarded. Well the 2003 anime's solution to what lies beyond the gate was already pretty retarded. But overall the 2003 series had better art, better plotting, better characterization. It was very unconventional. The manga by contrast is not bad per se, but it's nothing particularly special. Brotherhood brings Bones' talents to adapting the manga straightforwardly, and it works well, but this has more to do with Bones' talents at animated storytelling than it does the source material. 2003 FMA is a unique, (flawed) masterpiece; the manga and Brotherhood, while alright, pale in comparison.

I just got around to watching brotherhood a few weeks ago, and I think there was a pretty major plot hole regarding the people from not-China. They went out in search of immortality so that they could please the current emperor in hopes that he would choose them as his successor. Doesn't giving him the secrets to immortality kind of defeat the goal of being his successor because he won't ever die to open up the position? I think one of them also mentioned that they thought he was the kind of guy that might actually try vaporizing the country for a philosopher stone if he knew how. So he probably wouldn't really be the kind of ruler you would want to give eternal life to. Is there more information about this given in the manga or something I missed? They also showed what looked like greed as the emperor during the final credits. Did he end up getting the seat through the use of force?

>>877032

The manga is better just because mangas are better (can be read at your own pace, no budget issues so detail is superior, source; not adapatation). The second anime is as accurate as an anime can be, though.

OP here, I finished it and the ending felt like an asspull. Everyone should have died for their sheer incompetance. Mustang was the only intelligent character in the entire story.

I found a really interesting Korean manga. It's about a teen who was disfigured,has some mental health issues as he sometimes has forgets what he's doing, lost his leg bellow his knee & his parents who died in an accident.

He meets a girl at a new school who has a stuttering problem,and is a social outcast because she's made out to be liar to her peers. Her family is poor due to a dead beat father, and she has a senile grandmother. The mother has to be cleaned up by the girl, the manga does not beat around the bush regarding the grand mother pissing herself.

The MC is involved with another female who's trucker father became disabled in the auto accident that killed the MC's parents & left him disabled.

What I hate is that the MC blames himself to the point that he tries to help out the disabled father. He blames himself because he beleived that he distracted his father for not putting his seat belt on., but it was his mother who did that.

My questions are.

1. Why blame himself when the disabled trucker father had to been driving in the wrong lane?

2. Why blame himself when his father should have put the seat belt before they drove off? I don't know anything about Korean driving regulations, but here in America you would be given a ticket for not wearing your seat belt.

What I like about the manga is that the female that he met at the new school is made out to be petty, this is when she asks how can he be so happy with all of his problems when she's depressed about her minor issues compared to his.

He told her that he was suicidal in the past.

I really like this content more than your generic Shōnen.