Anime for people who hate anime

Inspired by this exchange on the Evangelion thread:

while mourning my lack of fresh Eva content I've spent most of today trying to find other anime series that I don't find intensely grating on one level or another - after a bunch of false starts, Masaaki Yuasa's stuff seems pretty solidly up my alley

― the naive cockney chorus (Simon H.), Sunday, September 13, 2015 1:48 AM (19 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

who am I kidding I will totally rewatch it when 4.0 comes out, this franchise is built on (and fosters) masochism

― the naive cockney chorus (Simon H.), Sunday, September 13, 2015 2:04 AM (19 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

[...]

simon, have you seen either mushi-shi, serial experiments: lain or kino's journey? they aren't at all like eva tone-wise but pretty much free from most anime cliches and are v cerebral and emotionally engaging.

― hello, it me (clouds), Sunday, September 13, 2015 3:02 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^ all 3 of those are excellent, especially Mushishi. Someone should make a anime recommendation site for people who hate anime

― ( X '____' )/ (zappi), Sunday, September 13, 2015 3:09 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have not but Lain is on my to-check-out consideration list. Currently watching Ping Pong, which feels oddly substantive given the subject matter? I've seen Bebop (eh) and FLCL (neat). Basically hated what I saw of Death Note, Future Diary, and a few others that aren't immediately coming to me.

― the naive cockney chorus (Simon H.), Sunday, September 13, 2015 4:19 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the biggest problem is that all anime gets marketed essentially the same in english-speaking countries, as if "anime" were one monolithic genre -- so you get this phenomenon of the same people recommending in the same breath stuff made for teenage boys like death note also recommending more complex shows like steins;gate or the others i mentioned. it seems to me that the targeted demographic for these shows are quite distinct in japan, though i could be wrong.

― hello, it me (clouds), Sunday, September 13, 2015 5:00 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is exactly why i had a bad time whenever i went to an anime convention

― insufficiently familiar with xgau's work to comment intelligently (BradNelson), Sunday, September 13, 2015 7:47 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

anyway all of anno's pre-eva miyazaki-inspired series nadia is on hulu and i recommend it; it's very digressive but also very charming. another gentle, kinda perfect, nontraditional anime, by lain's character designer: haibane renmei

― insufficiently familiar with xgau's work to comment intelligently (BradNelson), Sunday, September 13, 2015 7:49 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

attending an anime convention sounds like my idea of hell!

― ( X '____' )/ (zappi), Sunday, September 13, 2015 8:54 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Coffee

welp that's Nichijou added to the queue

lol

paranoia agent

in 72 point bold red font

yeah that one

<3 nichijou

ghost hound. sorta like twin peaks x lain with an amazing dark ambient score.

i don't really like anime but i much enjoyed serial experiments: lain and texhnolyze

def rec all of yuasa's stuff, especially Ping Pong and my favorite, The Tatami Galaxy. funny (even if you don't really "get" anime humor) and manic and inspiring and brilliantly animated.

my other favorite ever is kids on the slope, a coming of age story from shinichiro watanabe ( cowboy bebop, samurai champloo ) about a love triangle between three jazz-obsessed teenagers in 1960s small town japan. the music sequences are incredible.

would recommend Wandering Son (Hourou Musuko), a show about a boy who likes to dress as a girl and a girl who likes to dress as a boy. Surprisingly thoughtful exploration of transsexualism and gender identity, a million miles away from how these subjects are usually handled in anime. Also has a beautiful watercolour art style.

paranoia agent

in 72 point bold red font

― Bouncy Castlevania (Will M.), Sunday, September 13, 2015 11:55 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah that one

― insufficiently familiar with xgau's work to comment intelligently (BradNelson), Sunday, September 13, 2015 11:59 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

oh yeah, kids on the slope! I've only seen a few episodes but the premise kills me

kids on the slope is pretty good, otm about the music sequences

my rec is Redline, one movie that i might say is more intense and thrilling from start to finish than mad max

mad max fury road that is

fyi there's also this thread Animation Snob Thread (no Disney, no Pixar, no mainstream anime, mention Family Guy and you get kicked out a window), puppet films are allowed whihc i've had bookmarked forever

if strongo were still here he'd tell you to check out Mind game. he's not so I'm going to tell you to check out mind game.

Redline is really good in places but I don't think it has the momentum or overall quality of Fury Road. I felt the character development was unnecessary.

just finished Berserk which was enjoyable but it might be too "anime"

As to the question of the thread, it depends on what one hates about anime. I'm generally not a fan but I can deal with the things I don't like if there's enough other good things going on. But I can't pretend I haven't seen a lot of ecchi trash (a true guilty pleasure).
A lot of the better anime still has a lot of the things some people dislike about anime, like the drawing styles. I've always preferred far more textured animation and unusual expressive techniques.

The thing that impressed me about the Satoshi Kon stuff is how well the scenes are composed. Most of the anime I had seen was very sloppy and badly edited.
Paranoia Agent is actually my least favourite of his works. It's probably supposed to be confounding but I don't think it really carried off on the intrigue they built early on, I found a lot of it a tad boring and the animation quality drops in a few places.

Like I recommend in Animation Snob Thread, Keita Kurosaka is the least typical Japanese animator I know of but his work isn't easy to find. Angel's Egg is a lovely science fiction mood piece without much (any?) dialogue, with designs by Yoshitaka Amano.

Berserk (90s tv version) does an impressive job of telling the early best part of the comic saga despite clear time/budget constraints and even improving some parts of the story. Great soundtrack too.
The later film series version doesn't allow the story time to develope and breathe properly. It feels too much like a summary.

Satoshi Kon is definitely one of the go-to anime directors for people who aren't anime fans. Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers are all great movies in different ways. Paprika was a bit weak story-wise IMO, but is still worth a watch.

Paranoia Agent is pretty great too, although I think the series loses a lot of momentum once it abandons the initial set-up - those stand alone episodes in the middle are great, but the over-arching plot kinda gets lost.

I'll second the recommendations for Mushishi, Kino and Lain above, and add Haibane Renmei, which is intriguing and reflective in a similar way.

Planetes is a pretty solid sci-fi series with good characters and little in the way of anime cliches.

Haibane is excellent but I gotta disagree about Planetes, i watched the series after reading the manga and was super disappointed with the adaption, they really anime-ed it up by adding in lots of comedy sidekicks and useless drama. Don't even get me started about that last episode :(

haibane renmei is incidentally all on hulu plus

I liked Haibane Renmei too. I'll also throw Psycho Pass out there for anyone into Philip K Dick sort of themes. It's on Netflix for easy access.

thx for the many recs y'all, I need as much distraction as possible at present

Seconding Mind Game, and reposting from the Netflix thread to remind people that Studio 4C put up a batch of films a couple of weeks ago- Mind Game, Genius Party and Genius Party Beyond (which are both mixed, but each has a fairly lengthy short from respectively Masaaki Yuasa and Koji Morimoto that are among the best things either have ever done), and Princess Arete (which I haven't watched yet but is supposed to be a gentle, Ghibli-esque thing?).

I don't know how easy it is to get outside the kickstarter, but Yuasa's Kick-Heart is pretty fun. And the adaptation of Taiyo Matsumoto's Ping Pong is well worth your time- I love Michael Arias's Tekkonkinkreet movie, but Ping Pong is a much more faithful translation of Matsumoto's style to animation and it's gorgeous:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcSuAhbtIFg

Crap, sorry, didn't see Ping Pong was already recommended twice >_<

Less than four minutes long, but this Ken Ishii video by Morimoto is kind of a classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6maVVFs0As

One last thing before I shut up about Morimoto:

NOISEMAN SOUND INSECT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPOlYfHdpwU

Dumb qn from someone v.far outside but a lot of suggestions seem to be, say, post-PKD-ish ... is there much in the way of, IDK, George Eliot/Jane Austen-y stuff?

Josei anime would be the term, from a quick look at manga categories, I guess?

This was Google's first result, anyone want to comment on any of these? http://www.themarysue.com/josei-anime/

wow, that ping pong series looks amazing! excited to see it's on hulu.

From that Josei list:
Michiko & Hatchin stars two female characters but it's much closer to Black Lagoon/Tarantino territory, lots of action set pieces and stylish baddies. It's really well made but is twice as long as it needs to be tbh, towards the end you will be dreading yet another car chase. Which is rarely said about Jane Austen.
Princess Jellyfish is really good, lots of interesting characters although some can be a bit too one dimensional, particularly the one mentioned in the article.
A series that is currently airing called Snow White With The Red Hair caught me by surprise and might be the purest Josei show I've ever enjoyed. As you can guess from the title it has a fairytale like quality, with a commoner girl and a dashing young prince falling in love. What sets it apart though is the title character, a strong willed girl who feels like she's walked out of a Ghibli movie, you can't help but cheer her on.

etc, you might want to look into honey & clover (about a group of students at an art school), nana (about the friendship between two women, one a fashion student and one a rock musician), nodame cantabile (about the romantic relationship between a pianist and an aspiring conductor), his and her circumstances (the show hideaki anno made after evangelion, about the romantic relationship between two high school students), and revolutionary girl utena (hard to summarize?)

also, a lot of the shows mentioned itt originally aired as part of fuji tv's noitamina block, which is specifically dedicated to programming that appeals to ppl outside of the young male demographic. the noitamina lineup is a p good place to look for "mature" anime in a bunch of different genres

reporting back

PING PONG

Watched all of this one - the animation is obv incredible but what surprised me about it is the persistent and convincing bittersweetness, which helped offset how predictable many/most of the plot/character beats really are. Into it.

KIDS ON THE SLOPE

Also watched all of this, liked it less. The musical sequences are incredible and kept me going. As w/ many shows like this (regardless of genre) the relatively subtly homoerotic friendship >>>>>> the neverending tedium of the actual "romances." (Tho I admit that I have a problem w/ series wherein 100% of the long-running conflicts could be solved with one frank conversation.)

tried UTENA but it's just too mid-90s for me. a couple eps into MUSHI-SHI - animation's gorgeous, stories seem a bit intert? will keep trying.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-AHo-_XEV6E

Maybe most of you guys know all this stuff but its just a little video about the difficulties of making anime.

good timing on that as it frequently refers to Manglobe (Champloo, Michiko) who finally filed for bankruptcy the other day

Just finished watching Gosenzosama Banbanzai, a pretty bizarre and funny six-part OVA from the late 80s. It's one of Mamoru Oshii's more obscure efforts (like that odd "Twilight Q" short), about a girl who travels back in time to live with her ancestors. The whole thing is presented like a stage play, making it pretty unique.

I know Oshii made a big splash with Ghost in the Shell, but I actually think that was his last really good film (though I haven't seen his live action stuff, and discount Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, which he wrote but didn't direct).

so uh toonami is producing two new season of flcl

Nice!

brave new world

oops. didn't realize this was a 3 month revive

I've just started the new anime version of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, and it really defies description (although Merritt Kopas's phrase "Twink Peaks" is pretty apt, as long as you bear in mind that it also involves spectral combat and Gauguin-like color clashes): an escaped serial killer has just been fused into a living statue by a vengeful high school student after attempting to infiltrate the student's house as a malign spirit in rainwater, and this is two episodes in. Idk what kind of relation to anime the ideal viewer would have, but it's certainly distinctive.

Jojo is so batshit, i love it

Neo-Tokyo was really good

finishing up 'puella magi madoka magica' after reading that it rivals evangelion (it doesn't, but i still have a few eps left so maybe it will!)
it's on netflix with or without subs so check it out!

which ecchi? they can be so different. i finally watched food wars after hearing all the time about how great it was, even though the premise sounded pretty ick to me, and it's... surprisingly wholesome?

so ok i don't super get the stuff that goes viral

this week it's a pseudo-anime show called "PUNCH PUNCH FOREVER"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ndBoc6R8_A

and it just looks like early studio trigger? like "space patrol luluco" or something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKbPXBfvbZY

am i missing something?

dialogue excerpts from Lupin III Part II, Episode 114, "The Secret of the First Supper" (first broadcast December 17, 1979):

FUJIKO: Do you remember ten years ago when that prominent supernatural researcher, Dr. Nesser, went missing?
JIGEN: Wasn't he the guy who figured out how to produce X-ray vision in people? Wait, so you mean..?
FUJIKO: Nesser spent the last ten years developing those eye drops Zenigata is using. That woman's name is Nova, and she's Nesser's sponsor.
LUPIN: Nova, huh? She's so hot.
FUJIKO: By the way, does this painting look familiar?
LUPIN: Yeah, Jesus's masterpiece. Grandpa left it behind.
FUJIKO: Right. Jesus made that 2,000 years ago. He painted it over a parchment that had the location of an inheritance he got from the Virgin Mary. When Judas, Christ's disciple, found out about it, he wanted he treasure for himself, so he stole the painting. Then, he sold out Jesus to the Roman authorities for 30 silver coins. But since Judas was never able to solve the secret, the painting went to his descendants, and eventually passed into myth. Then, at the start of the 19th century, after learning of the legend, a famous thief stole the painting from the home of Judas's descendant.
LUPIN: That was my grandpa, Lupin the First.
FUJIKO: After a scuffle between the two, the painting was torn in half. Ever since, Judas's descendant has had one half, and the other half has been here, in Lupin the First's hideout.
GOEMON: So that woman is Judas's descendant, after the other half of the painting?
FUJIKO: Yes. All of this was in an old diary I found in a study on the second floor.
JIGEN: Now that we know this, Lupin... We should steal the other half of the map from that woman and take Jesus's stuff for ourselves!

LATER:

LUPIN: So Jesus buried his inheritance under the stable where he was born. Hey, got anything?
GOEMON: A vase. Perhaps the inheritance is within?
LUPIN: What the?
FUJIKO: It's a baby bottle the Virgin Mary used to feed baby Jesus.
JIGEN: Friggin' crap. The inheritance is just this thing? A baby bottle?
FUJIKO: I guess for Jesus, this might be more valuable than any gemstone, seeing as it's the bottle used to raise him from a child.
LUPIN: I prefer Fujiko's mommy milkers to Jesus's baby bottle any day.

END EPISODE

lol, love the irreverence japanese media has for western religions (see also Shin Megami Tensei)
how about that fifth episode of CITY tho, hoo boy Kyoani still got it

city is amazing, i've watched most of kyoani's stuff so i know how high a level they're working on and yet i can still hardly believe something that looks like this exists as a real full-length tv anime and not, like, a short film. nichijou was already an all-timer and i think this one's outright better so far.

lol, love the irreverence japanese media has for western religions (see also Shin Megami Tensei)

― ( X '____' )/ (zappi)

i take it less as "irreverence" and more as "um, that's.. an interesting understanding you have"

i did actually have to do some reading on the history of breastfeeding. why would jesus need a baby bottle? even if jesus was a virgin birth, mary should theoretically still have been able to breastfeed him, no? it turns out though that there are documented baby bottles going back to 2000 years BCE, typically for, like, formula and stuff. i can't see why jesus would have needed one.

nah i'm more like... wait. so they know exactly where the stable jesus was born is located. and nobody really gives a shit, it's just, like, an empty stable that a gang of international thieves can waltz into and start digging in. i mean it's not like it's an ancient archaeological site. it's not like the _literal baby bottle used to feed the infant christ_ would have any value whatsoever. a painting _made by jesus christ_, similarly, no value, the only thing it's good for is you can use it to find some diamonds or something.

i mean maybe this made sense to people before indiana jones and the last crusade came out. idk.

i can't keep up with anime, or much of anything really. city sounds cool, tho!

btw did you know that Jesus is buried in Japan? https://www.japan.travel/en/spot/528/

i believe it

Those pilgrims going to Fatima or Lourdes every year lack ambition!

A bartender I know recommended the “Bartender: glass of god” series. Anyone seen it?

yes it's ok, like a collection of short stories based around the customers of a bar.
the confusing bit is - there was an 11 episode series from 2004, then a 12 episode series from 2024. I much preferred the writing in the 2004 show.

Amazon are trialing AI Dubs on anime, needs to be heard to be believed
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3venpcgf47clyp4mmui3ciak/post/3m6pzmn6sok2e

I guess Amazon heard about Crunchyroll trying to ruin their subtitles and decided to outdo them.

I don't think I've put any anime on for several years now but this interview series is brilliant. So many funny situations in trying to sell anime to different audiences. I really like Jonathan Clements writing and commentaries he does outside of anime (usually about japanese and chinese prose SFF or live action films) but he's good talking about anything. I remember seeing some of these people talking on television over 20 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g59AsmwgRUY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKAljpMpnj4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToXPQL1CDOs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdEMsTXKOVg

Amazing with that person saying they wouldn't give them an anime license until online piracy was defeated!
The parts with the manga uk company being involved in the making of the Ghost In The Shell anime were really interesting. And Andy Frain's meeting with Buichi Terasawa (Space Cobra)

was watching some of these the other day! so funny when the guy whipped out concept art from the proposed Spice Girls anime.

Frieren is back! I'm gonna wait for the English dub to come out as that's how I've watched it so far, though I think it's pretty cool that the animators seem to have referenced the "Frieren looking up" meme already. One of the very few cool and uplifting things to have happened on social media in recent memory.

i love this video series too
i saw a video somewhere taking apart mccarthy and clements' "anime encyclopedia", and i thought it was interesting, because first off the person who made it was clear that they weren't trashing mccarthy and clements. i think they were a little more judgemental than i would be - the gist is that the anime encyclopedia is not encyclopedic and in fact mccarthy and clements expressed strong opinions and howlingly bad takes on anime that they clearly hadn't actually atched. both of which are true... well, i'd kind of say it's the equivalent to dave marsh's old rolling stone record guide, which has very similar problems. i look at it as a historical artifact, a time capsule - what important historical figures in the development of uk anime thought about certain anime at various times. because there _are_ a lot of "anime lost to time", if you will - stuff that people rated and is now mostly unknown. this is true even in the MAL era - i don't know shit about 2011 anime, cuz i wasn't watching anime then. i see it as sort of a, and i don't mean this in a derogatory sense, grognard's take on anime. i do think of myself as a grognard, not an anime grognard (i did watch Star Blazers on WNEW as a kid and loved it, but that was about it) but an internet grognard certainly.

the thing that bugs me most is their decision to lump the hentai anime in with, uh... is there a better word than "non-h"? stuff. i'm trying to read about interesting anime and i genuinely do not give a shit about _anything_ pink pineapple _ever_ released. well, unless it has a particularly hilarious dub.

I quite enjoy reading random entries in the encyclopedia, it is very opinionated but the put downs and mini rants can be funny at times.
the amount of hentai in it is daft though, I guess it is part of anime history but does anyone really need to know about (looks up random entry) Mail Order Maiden 28, "an obscure porn title features Aiwa, a typical anime geek, who orders a sex doll and gets more than he bargained for."? I suppose someone out there does.

anyway watch Journal With Witch which is currently airing, it's a wonderful depiction of loss and depression with characters who act like real people shock horror!

the amount of hentai in it is daft though, I guess it is part of anime history but does anyone really need to know about (looks up random entry) Mail Order Maiden 28, "an obscure porn title features Aiwa, a typical anime geek, who orders a sex doll and gets more than he bargained for."? I suppose someone out there does.

― ( X '____' )/ (zappi), Sunday, January 25, 2026 12:42 PM (two days ago)

i don't _need_ to know about it but sure some of that stuff can be interesting in some contexts, if i was writing an essay about, say, "air doll" i might keep it in mind. idk, 20th century hentai is one of those extremely fraught subjects - i am very much a history nerd and it is part of history, and i _also_ want to stay completely the fuck away from certain common aspects of those particular works. amelie doree's videos about VNs are super culturally and historically interesting and i really appreciate that she when she puts up the essays on YT the video consists pretty much entirely of black bars haha, i do _not_ want to actually see any of that stuff.

amelie doree sounds cool, will check out

I hate anime but started watching Utena, and it's so astonishingly charming! The theme song is also incredible.

A couple classics on 4K had me curious about weird 80s anime set in the USA. Mad Bull 34 is a lot of fun, but California Crisis is EXACTLY what I was hoping to find. To quote someone on letterboxd, it's like a whole movie of vaporwave gifs. Written/Directed by Mizuho Nishikubo who did assistant directing on both Ghost in the Shell movies, and the animated sequence from Kill Bill.

Xp to myself I forgot to mention that Utena is entirely on YouTube so that's been pretty handy, even though it keeps defaulting to a horrible AI dub.

Miss Nanami you utter psycho I love you.

To ask a serious question, I've never watched shojo, so have no idea how unique Utena is, but it seems like it's pretty singular as far as genre goes? Is there anything else like it?

it's pretty singular but you might like The Rose of Versailles as it has some similarities with the gender stuff and was a big influence on Utena
you can also give Ikuhara's other stuff a try, like Penguindrum and Yurikuma Arashi (Lesbian Bear Storm!)

yes and no? the most relevant prior anime are Sailor Moon (which the director/staff previously worked on) and the shoujo melodrama Dear Brother, it's kind of mashing up those things but also creating a lot of new stuff

oh yes and Rose of Versailles also, duh

I really should get around to watching Dear Brother ...

and then imo the best 'post-utena' anime are Penguindrum (same director), Star Driver (same writer), and Simoun (no direct relation to utena but likely inspired by the genderfuckery)

none of those are really taking from the shoujo side of utena though i guess, just watch shoujo dramas for that

i'd say it's "singular" in kind of the way a show like evangelion is "singular" - i mean sure there's nothing else really _like_ utena but it's also pretty hugely influential. basically any sapphic/wlw anime out there is likely to take some influence from utena. partly it's that utena is good and partly it's that, like, the stereotype that lesbians love swordfighting has some basis in reality.

Angel cop sounds pretty good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Cop

it's fun in an old school gross anime way, and then it takes a bizarre antisemitic turn

Sigh :-(

The anime club I attend did a showing of Angel Cop and yeah, that was a strange turn--as if all the right-wing stuff wasn't enough. The host mentioned the show has an extensive and lovingly detailed page on the Internet Movie Firearms Database. At least that crap made it memorable, I suppose--a lot of those action 80s anime featuring buff character designs and explosions blend together in my mind.

just started on City Hunter and wow, there is a lot of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abYdoXUSQ4s
Bonus videos are fun too

ok mostly i've been watching anime for people who love anime, i.e. the original "hokuto no ken". i love this because of how stupid it is. it's the apocalypse and ken is a total bruce lee knockoff who also, like, defeats his enemies with acupressure? i didn't realize this before, he's, like, shiatsuing these dudes to death. also, he can use his acupressure powers to, like, heal the lame and restore eyesight to the blind. literally he does both of those things in the first 13 episodes. so his jeet kune do acupressure techniques give him jesus powers. who needs fight scenes when you can have him sticking his finger up to a dude's head and saying "you're already dead"? and then five seconds later everything becomes shadow puppets so you can't see the blood and their head explodes. yeah i would've _loved_ to pretend to be ken as a kid, because god knows i can't actually fight. apparently there's a new one and apparently it also sucks, or at least, i haven't heard anybody gushing about how great it is, which i feel like people would if it didn't suck.

but i got sucked into watching a little of this show called "kirio fanclub". it's these two high school girls gushing about how much they love this guy kirio, and we never actually see kirio so we don't really have any idea what's so great about them except through what they say, and what they say doesn't really help much. i think it's a great take - there are a lot of these anime protag guys where all the girls want his dick and one can't help but be like, "why?", cuz he seems to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. idk why it is but removing the actual guy from the equation makes it so much more fun. my friend mara is like "are you sure they're not actually lesbians who are way way way overcompensating and in denial about how into each other they are" and it pisses me off because no, not everything with two girls talking to each other is lesbian.

the thing i love about it is that kirio seems like kind of a dork but the girls are also kind of dorks, like... just girls being friends and they can be dorky around each other without it being gay or anything. a lot of anime has this really idealized notion of particularly high school girls, everybody's a fuckin' waifu, and neither of the main characters in this anime are waifus, there's no question to me of calling any of them a "best girl" or whatever.

i've gotten used to anime where 15 year olds act like adults because you have, like, three anime featuring adults in any given season, and as an adult, i guess the closest i'm gonna get to stuff that reflects my needs is 15 year olds who somehow have the wisdom and maturity of people my age. of all the problems with an entire medium where most of the characters are younger than 20, to me it's them as _role models_ that gets to me. a show like this where kids get to act like kids and i have fun laughing while not thinking of them as role models, cuz they're _kids_ and i'm very much not... idk. it's a relief, somehow.

re: Kirio Fanclub have you seen See You Tomorrow at the Food Court? very similar setup, just two girls meeting up at the mall after school and talking about whatever, both letting loose with their real characters after putting up appearances at school (honor student & gyaru). a fun hang and occasionally quite funny.

I've been doing a deep dive on 80s/90s OVAs I hadn't seen before over the last couple of weeks and the collision of Deeply Problematic subject matter and incredible animation has been bracing to say the least.

re: Kirio Fanclub have you seen See You Tomorrow at the Food Court? very similar setup, just two girls meeting up at the mall after school and talking about whatever, both letting loose with their real characters after putting up appearances at school (honor student & gyaru). a fun hang and occasionally quite funny.

I've been doing a deep dive on 80s/90s OVAs I hadn't seen before over the last couple of weeks and the collision of Deeply Problematic subject matter and incredible animation has been bracing to say the least.

― ( X '____' )/ (zappi), Saturday, April 25, 2026 3:59 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

re: food court - no! i'll have to check that out, it sounds really neat.

i'm with you on '80s/'90s "otaku" culture. it's difficult because i am a white american and i don't want to, like, do some fucking bullshit cultural imperialism, i just, like, know a _lot_ of people who _were_ CSA victims and it makes it _very difficult to navigate_ the culture sometimes, even some of the words they use in japan to talk about fashion can get extremely triggering to some people i know.

i feel like maybe i've talked about this before, but there's this seinen manga that had a really deep effect on me called "bokura no hentai". it's not a hentai, but it deals pretty unflinchingly and explicitly with some harsh material, including the sexual exploitation of "cross-dressing" kids. despite me being a white american i feel like some of the stuff it portrays are very relatable for me, having grown up with only these, like, really flawed labels to work with. but the only copy i've read is an old fanslation that uses some inaccurate derogatory language in the translation. i'm not sure you _could_ publish it in america. i think there is a lot of awful shit that's part of a lot of different cultures that one maybe wants to not confront directly. maybe it's for the best, idk. i mean i'd rather openly acknowledge this stuff, but it does get me into a lot of trouble, so....

mostly the old anime i know is from hazel's YT videos... i've mentioned her here before i think, she just has these amazing takes on weird, obscure, old stuff. like "california crisis", i think she did a video on that one. your description of "food court" makes me think of her amazing video ranking anime denny's. it's just... idk, i guess one of the things i think is cool about watching anime is that i have to come to it with a sort of "beginner's mind", let go of a lot of my ingrained cultural preconceptions, which is how i wind up watching something like the original "hokuto no ken" in the first place... it's not a show i ever thought i would willingly watch haha.

all that to say, i'd love to hear your take on some of the deep dive OVAs. even if it's Deeply Problematic there's a lot of _interesting_ stuff in there. particularly like... i want to get a firsthand historical perspective on this stuff, but a lot of it is stuff that i, uh, wouldn't really want to watch firsthand, _because_ of the subject matter and how it's portrayed.

Can I ask, do we have a J-Drama version of this thread?

I just watched a really entertaining one-and-done series called 'Rebooting' (possibly not too dissimilar in tone to the Food Court anime) and was wondering if there were any really great non-crime/action-based dramas that didn't involve schoolgirl romance or glacially slow unrequited love stories.

i say just put 'em in here! it's complicated. i'm on one discord and they spend all their time on the anime thread talking about manga. there's that great manga called "she loves to cook, she loves to eat", which was adapted to live-action... in korea! so i think there's room for flexibility.

i know hardly anybody else really posts here but ilx is kinda the only place i internet

i just finished watching "i'm the evil lord of an intergalactic empire". this absolutely fails to live up to the thread title, and i do love it. i'm going to kind of spoil it here, because this isn't, like, some super-clever conceit. there's no real twists. it's pretty straightforward.

the "anime for people who hate anime" version of this is almost certainly re:zero... this strikes me as being more "re:zero without the trauma". this is just a ridiculously wholesome anime given that the protag is a guy who is, in the first episode, literally cucked to death. i know trash anime when i see it, and this is it. "trash" doesn't necessarily mean bad, though, and i'd argue this show is a good example of that principle. i personally read it as a satire on all those edgelord power trip anime. a demon offers our would-be edgelord all the trappings of power he didn't have in his old life, and he gleefully accepts, seeing it as a change to get one over on all those so-and-so's who made his last life hell. this is, like, half of all isekai, revenge fantasies for boys about slaughtering their high school bullies in gory detail while accumulating a vast harem of big-boobed elf sex slaves. a lot of this stuff makes john norman's _gor_ novels look woke.

i found the way this anime flips the script to be really interesting. schadenfreude demon works by doing the usual "monkey's paw" thing - protag gets what the demon promises, just in the worst possible way. there's a double inversion here, though, because it turns out the protag in question is just not very good at being evil. his attempts to be evil backfire, which in turn causes the demon's attempts to screw him over to backfire.

the first thing the demon does is make him the heir to a kingdom that's been run horribly for decades, born to horrible parents who spend all their time living the high life and don't care at all about their kid. so much so that when he's five, his parents fob responsibility of the kingdom off to him and flee their debts to keep living the high life. since he's five, he can't take care of himself, so they ask _him_, a five year old child, what kind of AI robot he wants to take care of him. he's worse than a five-year-old child, though - he's a power fantasy isekai protagonist. which means that he wishes for a big-boob maid doll who will do anything he wants. on top of all this, the world he's incorporated into doesn't trust AI after a crazed supercomputer tried to take over the world a couple generations back. robots are technically legal, but people who go around letting AI make their decisions for them are trusted, well, about as well as any of us would trust someone who lets AI make all their decisions for them. which, actually, is what protag-kun promptly starts doing. the demon rubs his hands in glee and decides to do something more difficult, meaning in this case literally taking candy from a baby.

heeeeere's the problem. like i said, the evil AI was a couple generations back, and what was once healthy skepticism has hardened into something that bears a _lot more resemblance_ to dogmatic prejudice. protag's big-titty maid who exists only to serve him is also possessed of brilliant strategic capacity and a much better long-range understanding of the social, political, and economic forces in the kingdom than some edgelord who only showed up five years ago. big-titty maid _consistently_ gives him excellent advice. _all_ AI in this environment are capable of giving excellent advice, assuming they're created with the capacity to do so. protag didn't demand a _stupid_ big-titty maid, so he's got a smart one. the first thing she does is advise him to go into the plot-convenient learning machine for 20 years, which he does, while leaving her in charge. normally people wouldn't go for this, but the kingdom he's in charge of is such a shithole that people are like, well, shit, how much worse can it get leaving a literal fucking robot in charge? and in fact things do get better.

maidbot, throughout the series, is reluctantly tolerated by everybody but protag for two reasons: protag demands it, and protag also, by following maidbot's decisions, consistently proves to be the wisest and most effective ruler they've had in _ages_.

protag does not LIKE this. protag is there to be EVIL and CRUEL. he wants all the gold. "sure," people say. "you can have all the gold". gold, it turns out, is basically worthless in this world. protag is not happy. "i want a swimming pool filled with booze!", he says. "um, sure," his advisers say, "you can do that, but why? are you gonna drink it? swim in it? oh. now that he thinks about it, that's actually not very cool. he wants, uh... a harem of women! a hundred of them! thank god, his advisers say. they're not happy that he spends so much time around maidbot. maidbot can't be trusted. she's not a real woman. she's just a doll. she can't give him children!

i'm pretty certain this is not an _intentional_ trans allegory, but, uh, it do kinda hit that way for me.

wait wait wait wait wait, he says. these women all WANT to get with me? well of course. he's the ruler of the land, he's done awesome things, the entire palace is packed with gorgeous men and women who would be thrilled to sleep with him. well. that's no good. he wants to find women who _don't_ want to sleep with him. this is kind of a fictional conceit - even the best ruler would find plenty of people who don't want to sleep with him.

the truth is that he's starting to realize that being an evil lord is kind of unsatisfying. he wants to fly a giant robot! one that he can control manually! manually? who does _that_? but no, he wants to do it manually. so he spends 20 years working hard learning to do that (people live about three times as long in this world as they do in ours) and then people respect him because he's really good at flying a giant robot.

other people are always trying to upstage him by doing things that are more evil than him and then he kicks their ass with his giant robot and then people praise him as their hero for kicking the evil guys' ass.

it's wholesome for me, i think, it's wish fulfillment porn in that it's a world in which the "evil" guy gets rewarded for doing good things, and the demon who's trying to get him to fail keeps getting fucked over when the protag looks at some "evil" thing he's supposed to do and realizes that actually, it would be stupid and self-destructive to do that, and that it would be a lot better for him to work on punishing corrupt officials and paying off the interest on his kingdom's debts. god. i would fucking love to live in that world.

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the other anime i've been watching, this is from last season, is "i made friends with the second-prettiest girl in my class". this, i think, is more "anime for people who hate anime", because i really don't dig "school anime" that much. it's just about these high-school kids who are well-rounded and plausible characters and make good decisions and support each other and work through their normal high school problems. it kind of reminds me a bit of "the wonder years", but without the extra layer of, i don't know, sentimentality and/or nostalgia on it. just kids learning to treat each other like human beings. it's wholesome because it's something a lot of people, including me, sometimes struggle with even as an adult. these kids are good role models, i think. i like that too. anyway, yeah, i definitely recommend that one for people who "don't like anime". really gives me good feels.

have heard "Second-prettiest" is cute, will add to backlog
for peeps who like anime without anime bullshit highly recommend the currently airing "Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia", beautiful animation from Science Saru with Naoko Yamada (A Silent Voice, Sound! Euphonium etc) overseeing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-Szfn5Tkn4

I'm old and liked some of the really mainstream 90s anime stuff, but my kid is now dragging me into the world of anime and I've seen some good stuff. We watched all of Demon Slayer including the recent movie, and I'm now reading the manga that picks up after the movie ends. I like it.

Frieren is amazing. For me it's going to end up a comfort show. I love the characters so much. I agree that it got a little off track with the trial story arc, but I'm sure it will get good again. I just saw thanks to this thread that there's more that has been released that Netflix hasn't picked up yet, so I guess I'm getting a Crunchyroll subscription or something.

I haven't seen mention of The Summer Hikaru Died, which I guess might be exclusive to Netflix, but it's really good.

I'll have to go back and watch Second Prettiest; I started it at the same time as Gals Can't Be Kind to Otaku but they felt too similar so stuck with the latter.

I've really enjoyed the recently-finished Botan Kamiina Fully Blossoms When Drunk, a yuri about college dorm residents and their various liquor tastings. Many of the episodes are done in different animation styles from the last, and I dig the show's quiet nature. Each episode also has a unique ED telling a little vignette about a character's backstory through still illustrations. Just lovely to look at all around.

Just watched the first episode of the new Ghost in the Shell from Science Saru. Yes, ANOTHER one, but this time more directly influenced by Shirow’s original manga. Fun with some lovely visuals and colour. But what is it about GitS that people keep making new adaptations?

I’ll check out Jaadugar, Saru are really on a roll now.