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[Jopax]

Anyone watching Dororo?

It's pretty damn good, has a beautiful visual style, some cool action scenes and the story is pretty cool as well.

[heydude6]

I’ve kept my eyes on it. As a general rule I don’t watch anime until after all the episodes are out and the dub is released (it saved me from Franxx), but it seems rather promising.

[heatwave]

I like Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's so original, or at least it seems that way to me; the characters are really well-developed overall, even though they start as stereotypes; and it has so much depth and emotion. It really makes me feel, which is the most important thing about art to me.

[Cruxador]

For whatever reason, Kaguya Wants To Be Confessed To didn't hold my interest as a manga, but as an anime I'm finding it a great little comedy to watch in the evenings. Super adorable.

[Tack]

I'm actually really loving Kaguya. It's got the Hayate-esque narrator (except with less fourth-wall breaking), and a weirdly high animation budget for a slice of life- although I guess that's all money they seem to save on backgrounds, 'cos it mostly happens in the one room.

While I'm on it- Winter Anime Crunchyroll Go-
(I mention crunchyroll only because I haven't been able to see Dororo)

Mob Psycho II - More of the goodness. It'll tide me over until OPM2 comes out. Things seem to get a little bit more dangerous for him, which is cool.
Neverland- Thriller/horror. quite pretty, good shock value, but it's not subtle. Gets predictable pretty quickly, but who knows.
Black Clover - It's still going. I pushed through the first 20 episodes and so now it's gone through tolerable and up to good, so I guess I'll keep watching.
Boogiepop prequel-  I'm watching them one chapter at a time, but the first chapter was awesome. Spoopy Monogatari vibes.
Shield Hero- Awesome start, but ehhhh..

So yeah, I could write a whole paragraph on Shield Hero's disappointment. It started with a reasonably bleak premise "Protagonist gets screwed over". Dude is poor, unknowledgeable and unable to trust anyone. Which was the perfect setup for something log-horizon-esque. He finds out some interesting things about the game world and the races which dwell within it. Also, he's the only one who read it in a book instead of playing it in a video game so he doesn't have a bundle of preconceptions about the way things 'should' work.

But those expectations quickly went out the window as it turned into a typical isekai. No twists of imagination or intelligent management of a fantasy system - instead he starts lucking out and gains friends he can rely on, the 'bad guy' quickly becomes overtly obvious, both in who it'll be and how it'll happen.
That aside it is actually a great isekai, I think I just had my expectations raised by the Re-zero-esque start and now things are just starting to get too formulaic.

[JoshuaFH]

So yeah, I could write a whole paragraph on Shield Hero's disappointment. *Proceeds to write whole paragraph*

Yeah, when I initially saw Shield Hero on Crunchyroll, I read the synopsis and noped out, my weeb sense was tingling to alarm me of danger. The only reason I started it up was to follow the videos that Digibro was putting out with his brother discussing it. Otherwise I think the show just doesn't bring much to the table, and what it does bring it doesn't follow through on very well.

[Frumple]

Eh, I think it's one of the earlier-ish isekai novels, for what it's worth? Certainly read it several years ago. The show might not bring much to the table but the source material maybe sorta' did, insofar as you can consider the clusterfuck that is isekai a table, heh.

... incidentally I distinctly remember the latter parts of the books getting weird, in less than great ways. Can't remember exactly what it was (something about a flying fortress?), but yeah. Stopped reading a handful of chapters from like the straight up end.

[Cruxador]

Mob Psycho II - More of the goodness. It'll tide me over until OPM2 comes out. Things seem to get a little bit more dangerous for him, which is cool.

Yeah, like with OPM it takes longer than you can cover in one season to really get good. I was disappointed by how the initial confrontation with Reigen was handled in episode 6 because I feel like people will miss aspects of his thinking that were clearer in the manga, but we'll see how fulfilling the climax of that issue is. Episode 5 had some great sakuga for the second season of a show that's not really about action. Maybe they wanted to make sure they hooked people that are into that before launching into the next few episodes.

So yeah, I could write a whole paragraph on Shield Hero's disappointment. It started with a reasonably bleak premise "Protagonist gets screwed over". Dude is poor, unknowledgeable and unable to trust anyone. Which was the perfect setup for something log-horizon-esque. He finds out some interesting things about the game world and the races which dwell within it. Also, he's the only one who read it in a book instead of playing it in a video game so he doesn't have a bundle of preconceptions about the way things 'should' work.

But those expectations quickly went out the window as it turned into a typical isekai. No twists of imagination or intelligent management of a fantasy system - instead he starts lucking out and gains friends he can rely on, the 'bad guy' quickly becomes overtly obvious, both in who it'll be and how it'll happen.

I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that more along these lines does happen. It just doesn't really happen during the first arc.

And I'm curious who and what you predicted about the bad guy. It's obvious to me since I already read the story, but beyond what's already been revealed I would be surprised if anyone not familiar with the series had predicted much, even with the additional bit of foreshadowing that wasn't in the books.

That aside it is actually a great isekai, I think I just had my expectations raised by the Re-zero-esque start and now things are just starting to get too formulaic.

It's worth noting that Shield Hero is quite a bit older than most of the isekai that's getting adapted lately, like Slime, and more co temporary with konosuba or indeed Re:Zero. I don't think it deviated less from earlier templates than most. Later things have had the advantage of a lot of other writers doing isekai and building out the format. It's from a time where people were varying the formula less than today, and it's a product of its time.

Ninja edit: Yeah, what Frumple said.

... incidentally I distinctly remember the latter parts of the books getting weird, in less than great ways. Can't remember exactly what it was (something about a flying fortress?), but yeah. Stopped reading a handful of chapters from like the straight up end.

I stopped reading shortly after they invaded a big turtle, if I recall correctly.

[Reelya]

"doesn't follow through on the premise very well" seems a common complaint about light novels. I think the format puts a lot of constraints on what you can do, but writers come into the thing with a lot of big ideas. One important thing is that editors are going to want a casual reader to be able to pick up any of the novels in the series and reasonably follow what's going on, in just that one novel. Links to previous novels will be kept to cameo appearances of popular side-characters, and vague references to events only.

You can clearly see the "seams" in some LN adaptations where they fit the novels to the episode structure. For example the anime of A Certain Magical Index and a similar series Strike The Blood both suffer from the same structure. There are 4-episode arcs in both shows which almost all seem to follow the same exact pattern: Episode 1 start with hero's "daily life with main girls". Then, "girl with problem" is introduced who is hunted by "monster of the week". By episode 4 of the arc, "monster of the week" is vanquished and "girl with problem" is saved.

... Then mood whiplash happens because on the next episode, they're back to "daily life with main girls" and all side characters introduced in the previous 4-episode-arc suddenly disappear: this is not a fixable problem - it's a new book now, so the chaff needs to be cleared away in order to clearly tell a new story for that book.

If you liked a new girl from the previous novel you're outta luck, since they're now relegated to an obligatory 2-minute cameo appearance in each new novel: this can get really predictable, since the editors don't want fans of any one side-girl to get upset that their waifu didn't appear in one of the novels, so they end up needing to contrive ways to have all the girls do cameo appearances. If they're dumb writers, they just happen to come across one of the girls at the subway station when they're going somewhere else, and if they're smarter writers they'll fit Previous Girl into the story in a more organic way: maybe she's a hacker so once every novel, they need to hack something or use her computer-fu (which could introduce some weird fridge-logic: before they helped "hacker girl" in one novel they never needed a hacker, but now they seem to always end up needing a hacker in each story). However they fit them it, it's still done because they needed to cram everyone's Best Girls into novels where they don't belong, rather than because the story required it.

These are Dime Novels basically. Each individual novel is going to follow a similar genre-driven format. The same as pulp detective novels all follow similar patterns. Worrying about the "overall plot structure" of most light novels is like complaining that you read all the Phillip Marlowe books by Raymond Chandler and you didn't think much of the overarching plot.

[Cruxador]

"doesn't follow through on the premise very well" seems a common complaint about light novels. I think the format puts a lot of constraints on what you can do, but writers come into the thing with a lot of big ideas. One important thing is that editors are going to want a casual reader to be able to pick up any of the novels in the series and reasonably follow what's going on, in just that one novel. Links to previous novels will be kept to a short cameo appearances and vague references to events only.

I think Shield is different in how it doesn't follow through though, since this isn't the first time I've  seen people complaining that it doesn't do something which it actually does do in a later arc - and back when the novels were getting translated, I saw people complaining that they didn't like ways in which it diverged from the first arc.

As for the issue of continuity, I don't really see this so much in modern LNs, especially not those coming from Narou or web novels in general. Back in the days when we had books like oreimo and miniskirt space pirates, sure, but things have changed since then.

[Reelya]

Print novels and web novels would follow entirely different economic constraints, so it's not really possible to compare their plot structures.

When you need to have a publisher physically print thousands of copies before the revenue comes in, then that puts entirely different constraints on how they can be structured.

The publishers of print light novels definitely want anyone to feel that they can just pick up any of the new novels when it comes out without feeling like they have to hunt down every single previous volume to even follow what's going on: to do otherwise would be to just shit on potential customers for the brand.

None of that matters for web novels at all: however, web novels that are successful will be optioned to go into print, and then you'll have print novels but where the original series was written with a freer structure allowed by web novels. (however the possibility remains for a novel that started as a web novel, but which shifted into print having subsequent volumes pressured to follow the constraints of print novels in order to maximize sales).

[wierd]

While only tangentially related to anime/manga,  Alita Battle Angel apparently hit theaters recently.

I have heard mixed reviews.

[Reelya]

I'll probably go see it, but I have mixed feelings about seeing a Western adaptation of one of my all-time favorite mangas.

[wierd]

I saw the anime adaptation a few years back.  I am certain the Manga does a better job, but the backstory and world information about the elite city and its citizens is not covered well in the anime. I expect it will get the same treatment in the film version.

[Reelya]

Rather than it being bad for the movie not covering what's in the sky-city, it would a crying shame if they did.

The point is, the manga needs a TV show, or at least a trilogy, not a movie or OVAs. The OVAs are bad mainly because they don't keep going. At the start, almost nobody knows what's in the sky-city, the reader has the knowledge that the characters have, and it explores the "scrapheap" setting in detail, and the sky-city is this utopian ideal place where people feel they could escape to. Not knowing anything about it makes that work better as a plot device, and allows more focus on the main setting of the Scrapheap.

If they get all the way to sky-city in one movie, then they would have crammed 9 books into one movie, and they're going to have to seriously dumb everything down and remove most of the setting information and character development.