Fullmetal Alchemist Rewatch Post

As with my prior revist posts (Avatar, Lord of the Rings, Cowboy Bebop), this is disorganized and has no thesis. Spoilers everywhere, naturally. Unlike those prior ones, though, I don't have notes and there's been several months (by this point, nearly a year) of downtime since the viewing. Shoulda been more on the ball, but so it goes.

**

Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood was another formative work for me (as these revisits seem to be trending towards). Right time, right place. Watched it as it aired in 2009-2010 (which, if we are paying attention to timelines, came right after Avatar wrapped up), read the first couple volumes of the manga at the library, and didn't get around to watching the 2003 anime until last year, after finishing my most recent (fourth) Brotherhood rewatch.

Going forward, when I say FMA that is in reference to Brotherhood or elements shared between the two. Presume that as the default. If it's specific to the 2003 adaptation, I'll call it 2003.

**

God this show still looks so fucking good.

**

Lots of anime have the "did you get to that part" shibboleth, and against all odds FMA does it twice. And while I know I said there would be spoilers up top it still feels unfair to say precisely what they are, just in case someone has managed to miss nearly 20 years of spoilers.

And if you know, you know. Critically, there's not a whole lot to say. It speaks very well for itself.

**

Anime often has this thing of having a phrase that keeps getting repeated but it's just clunky enough in translation that the meaning takes entirely too long to sink in. Or perhaps I am just thickheaded and was not being an active viewer at the time, because it took me until now to actually realize what is going on with the taboo on human transmutation. What it is actually saying is "a purely transactional worldview will only lead to continual horrors visited upon humanity" and yeah, yeah that's pretty on point.

**

FMA is a poster child for the cathartic benefits of melodrama. Sometimes you feel big emotions and want to have a solid cry and/or scream about it, and this series is all about big emotions with attendant crying and/or screaming. Many tears have been shed.

**

I very much appreciate that the cast of FMA generally look like actual people. And unique ones, too; you can easily identify even incidental characters. I remember what Sheska's coworker looks like and she shows up in maybe 30 seconds of one episode.

**

Another soundtrack that's been burned into my brain. Can't pick a top song, they're all great.

This is a lie; best songs are One is All, All is One, Knives and Shadows, The Fullmetal Alchemist, The Intrepid, OPs 1, 2 and 4, ED 1 and 4.

That is also a lie; The actual best song is Amestris Military March.

**

I do wish we could have seen a bit more of the other state alchemists. I understand why we didn't, but I'd like at least a little throwaway line of "they're all at the southern front" or something like that. We do get to see a bit of the everyday working-class alchemists, and that's nice.

**

FMA is actually one of my go-to mental references for D&D wizards. When you have someone who can set someone else on fire with their brain (and is willing to), whoever is in political power is going to want to get as many of those folks around them as they can. Regardless of how centralized power is, you can expect to see war-wizards as a standard, and the structures in place to create more of them.

**

Brotherhood's pacing in particular is worth some praise; it is steady as a long-distance runner (once the intial rush is done, I must admit), and I (notoriously bad at watching anything that isn't a video game for long periods of time) can easily do 5-6 episodes a night, every night. Got a weak first episode, though, not a fan.

**

Things That 2003 Did Well

• "I LOVE DOGS!", "TINY MINISKIRTS!", etc
• The Philosopher's Stone is a crapshoot - all you'll do is murder hundreds or thousands of people for diminishing returns.
• The final confrontation between Mustang and Bradley.
• Homunculi as the end result of human transmutation.
• Lust having a character.
• Man they weren't fucking around when they were dealing with how Amestris treats Ishval. Writers who use subtext are all cowards indeed.
• The little bit of extra time spent on Al wondering if he was programmed or not.
• Mustang's flashbacks, holy shit (and as part of that, the fact that he killed the Rockbells).

**

Things that 2003 Did Not Do Well

• Robo-Archer, what the actual hell.
• Wrath's part in the story gets undermined by being an obnoxious screeching child, which is at least the third worst anime archetype.
• The early filler episodes are generally pretty weak and anomalously of their time more than the rest of the show.
  
• The plot kinda limps across the finish line.
• Sloth is just kinda eh. I mean so is the Brotherhood version so at least its consistent.
• Not a big fan of what they did with Kimblee. I mean he's still a monster either way, but the loss of the dapperness is too far.

**

It has been noted before by many other people that Lust is the only homunculi who serves as the object of the sin rather than the subject. This works very well with her backstory in 2003, and next to not at all with hers in Brotherhood.

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In case anyone has forgotten, on this blog we stan 2nd Lieutenant Maria Ross.

**

Winry's great. That's it, that's the point. Winry's just great.

**

Honestly let's just expand this to "I like everyone in the cast". Even the weird chimera guys towards the end who really feel like fifth wheels, they're fine. 2003 dropped the character ball in places but Brotherhood nails it. If I hate a character, I like hating them.

**

I like how the antagonists compliment each other: Father and Dante are both trying to cheat death, just with different methods. Dante has embraced the rot, clinging to her life despite the ever-diminishing returns of her stones. Father is hellbent on breaking out of the limitations of mortality entirely by going for the all-or-nothing option. Both options fitting for the overall themes of their respective series.

**

I feel like it was part and parcel for the era, but FMA leans very heavily on the comic-relief violence vs. real violence divide.

**

The one scene in 2003 with Scar's brother, when he walks out into the street naked but for the tattoos of the Grand Art, is one of the most effective moments of cosmic horror I've seen. That's the look of a man who has seen the truth and it is more terrible than anyone can imagine.

**

I love how Envy is just, beginning to end, a repulsive piece of shit without a single redeeming quality. They just like hurting people. No sob story, no glimmers of redemption arcs, just this absolute monster cackling with glee over the time he murdered a child and killed a guy while disguised as his wife. A wonderful change of pace of a genre beset by "we must understand this genocidal maniac's motivations because you see, they were sad once." None of that bullshit. Envy's just cruelty and spite and ultimately pathetic.

**

Ishval being destroyed in antiquity by a philosopher's stone transmutation in 2003 is better than Xerxes doing the same in Brotherhood. Fuckin' inexplicable blond haired white people in the middle of the fucking desert, what the fuck. Also we get the old Ishvalan man telling off Ed for presuming that they were just ignorant desert barbarians.

 

**

Hoenheim in 2003 is...strange. I was used to him being a rather integral part of the story, and then he comes along as just kinda a deadbeat with a degenerative brain condition. It's thematically appropriate for 2003, but I found it a lot less compelling on the whole. He just kinda shows up and putzes around.

**

I am forever amused by Arakawa's "Men should be buff! Women should be vavoom!" quote. She knows what the peorple want and by jove she will give the peorple what they want.

**

Olivier Armstrong definitely got kicked down a few notches on the character rankings on rewatch. "Ridiculing your brother as a coward for having a mental breakdown brought on by being forced to mass-murder civilians" is certainly a look, and I wish she got challenged more on that than not at all. Like holy shit. She is a very good example of how fandoms will twist themselves around to favor terrible people because they are quote unquote badass.

**

I love everything with Mustang's underlings and the counter-conspiracy. Especially when we get to the end and everything is tying together. When similar "heroes' cunning plan executed perfectly" moments show up in other media I will still call them an FMA moment (The sequels to Sabriel had a notable one)

**

I appreciate the chutzpah of the real world twist at the end of 2003, but it falls into the same issue I have with a lot of multiverse stories: when you introduce one alternate world, I immediately think "but what about all the others" and start fixating on that aspect. It's a me problem to be sure, but a problem nonetheless.

**

One of the bloopers for Brotherhood features Hoenheim shouting 'FUCK HIM UP!' during Ed's last fight with Father and I am devastated that they didn't include that. You can get 1 F-bomb and still be Pg-13 and that would have been the perfect place.

**

So they just let Ling go with a Philosopher's stone, right? I'm not misremembering that? That's kinda fucked.

**

It would be, all things considered, rather easy to do a live action FMA adaptation. Yes I know that there was one already and that it failed miserably, but hear me out.

Live-actions often fail because they are trying to capture the style of animation with living people, while ignoring the spirit. The style is nearly impossible to translate and so we end up with cosplay fights on a cheap sound stage.

If you're trying to adapt the exact mixture of melodrama or the exact plot it won't work, but if you stick to "~WW1 era elseworld with alchemy + war is hell + militarist autocrats are evil fucks + nothing is gained without loss + childhood trauma", you should be all good to go. That's the important stuff, the plot can be whatever. Get a director who can do a solid WW2 movie and you're halfway there.

Let's skip over Liore. We're not doing Liore, we're not dealing with the homunculi (we can deal with homunculi, and honestly I think we should, but not those homunculi.) Ed and Al return to central after another bust on looking for the stone. There are two routes we could go here: adapting the Tucker arc, or making something like it (another state alchemist working with incredibly shady shit, possibly with homunculi). Scar can be in the background. Potentially wrap in Lab 5 stuff. You can make a solid movie out of that.

Most difficult thing would be finding a child actor who can convincingly sell his leg being forcibly amputated.

**

Overall - I like many of 2003's themes and detail work a whole lot, in many places a touch more than Brotherhood's, but it's overall plotting and pacing is shaky at best; Brotherhood wins handily in the beat-to-beat plot category and has aged a lot better, if we were making this a contest. Which we shouldn't but does feel inevitable in the comparison.

This makes compositional fanfic nice and easy, as you can port the good stuff from 2003 into the good framework of Brotherhood without much trouble.

Build Your Own Shonen Battle Series

Roll as many times as you like, I don't dictate your life

What Color Is The Naruto?

1. Red
2. Orange
3. Yellow
4. Green (dark)
5. Green (light)
6. Sky blue
7. Indigo
8. Purple
9. Lavender
10. Pink
11. White
12. Black
13. Brown (dark)
14. Brown (light)
15. Umber
16. Amber
17. Octarine
18. Jale
19. Ulfire
20. Dolm

 

What Is the Power Source?

1. Devil pacts
2. Ninjutsu
3. Normal-ass magic
4. RPG mechanics but in the real world
5. Magical martial arts
6. Mundane martial arts
7. Magic swords
8. Normal swords
9. Tarot magic
10. Magic ghosts
11. Magic animal spirits
12. Cyborg bullshit
13. GUN
14. Supernatural patron entities
15. Raw willpower reshaping reality
16. Incredibly complex qi gong system
17. Children's card games
18. Summoned battle-parters (robots, dolls, monsters, etc)
19. Mecha
20. Nothing. It's basically shonen pub fights

Setting

1. Ordinary high school
2. A different ordinary high school
3. Magical high school
4. Oh god it's another high school
5. They're coming through the goddamn walls
6. holy shit
7. fuck
8. Post-apocalyptic wasteland
9. Alternate-universe
10. Japanese countryside (modern)
11. Japanese countryside (historical)
12. Somewhere in the real world that is not Japan (modern or historical)
13. Sometime in the past
14. Sometime in the future
15. Deep space
16. Near space
17. Inner space
18. Vaguely-defined megastructure
19. Recycled backgrounds from a failed isekai
20. Elaborate fantasy world revolving entirely around whatever social class has the powers and does the fighting.

Aesthetic

1. Realistic, mostly
2. Magical girl
3. Gonzogrot excess
4. Cyberpunk
5. Solarpunk
6. Techno-gothic
7. Duct tape and a prayer
8. Ink and watercolor
9. Superdeformed
10. Incredibly detailed
11. Very simplistic
12. Western comics
13. Very unique house style
14. Everyone is gorgeous, all the time
15. Those chins are sharp enough to open cans with
16. Huge eyes, even huger hair
17. Experimental as hell in places
18. Woof, this did not age well you can count each cut corner
19. Has aged like fine wine
20. Dada surrealism

Side Characters

1. Laconic, superpowered teacher
2. Edgy loner rival
3. BEEFSTRONK
4. Absolutely too pure for this world
5. The bookworm
6. The genki one
7. The one with no powers, who gets by with other means
8. That one motherfucker you're amazed hasn't been arrested for harassment yet
9. The hero's mom
10. Boisterous and over-the-top himbo
11. The hero's sibling
12. Love interest - next - door
13. The mysterious foreigner
14. The loaner from a different school/organization
15. By the book! ONLY BY THE BOOK!
16. The really hot one
17. The unexpected combat expert
18. The lazy one
19. The crazy one
20. The lovable idiot duo

Positives

1. Kickass fight scenes
2. OP / ED slaps
3. Surprisingly good characterization
4. Surprisingly in-depth worldbuilding
5. Monster designs
6. Compelling villain
7. Good side characters
8. Keeps a steady pace
9. Avoids harmful stereotypes
10. Meaningful stakes
11. Makes chuds angry
12. Fanservice (the good kind)
13. God that's some good sakuga
14. Excellent dub
15. Pulled off a successful major status quo change / timeskip
16. Author is actually a pretty cool person
17. The humor actually translated over
18. Has some meaningful things to say about real life
19. Keen eye for scene composition
20. Nothing in this plot makes sense, and I love it

Negatives

1. Filler
2. Too many characters
3. Bonkers morality
4. Rampant sexism
5. Just looks bad to watch
6. Lost the plot (jumped shark, spun wheels, etc)
7. Too by the book / too safe
8. Most annoying character in the world
9. Bland main character
10. Character death (cheap)
11. Is never going to actually end
12. Obnoxious fanbase
13. Fanservice (the creepy kind)
14. Impossible to find / stream
15. Author has an obvious kink and is real weird about it
16. Author is actually a horrid person
17. I literally can't tell these characters apart
18. Pretensions of grandeur with a failing grade in intro to philosophy
19. Just up and forgets the background a lot of the time
20. Nothing in this plot makes sense, and it's terrible

Other Features

1. Tournament Arc
2. Main character rivalry
3. Weird laser focus on one particular hobby or topic the author likes
4. Shit has gone FUBAR Arc
5. Romantic subplot (actually pretty good)
6. Romantic subplot (groan inducing)
7. Harem of some vareity
8. No arcs; mostly episodic
9. They lost the originals so there's no proper blu-ray release
10. Ha ha! You thought X was the main villain, it was in fact Y!
11. There's an elaborate fan theory that makes the whole thing make a lot more sense
12. Manga was never finished
13. Show has a complete different storyline from the manga
14. Very small, very devoted fanbase
15. Got a movie (the good kind)
16. Got a movie (Netflix live action)
17. A pointed critique of modern society
18. I know authors who use subtext and they're all cowards
19. Shit yeah, yokai!
20. Is really just another series with the serial numbers filed off

Cowboy Bebop Rewatch Post

Vincenzo Riccardi

 

I think it's time we blow this scene, get everybody and their stuff together...

As with my Avatar and Lord of the Rings revisit-reviews, there's no real end goal or organization to this. It may or may not go in chronological order. Spoilers ahoy.

**

I can't remember when I first watched Cowboy Bebop. The oldest piece of fanart I have saved in Ye Olde Archive of Wonders is dated to 2010, which sounds about right. My last rewatch would have been around 2014-2015.

**

The first thing we see in the series (and the last, but we'll get to that when we get to that) is space infrastructure - space stations, orbital mirrors, solar collector arrays, guidance satellites. Our first episode takes place in an O'Neill cylinder inside an asteroid. A couple times in later episodes there are locations just drifting in space near a planet, I tend to imagine them as lagranges. Few are the sci-fi properties that remember things like this.

**

I love the signs in Bebop - everywhere you look there's signage, and it changes depending on where you are. Signs on Mars are normally Chinese and English. Signs on Venus add Arabic, French, and Spanish. Signs on Callisto use Cyrillic. Every time there's a tv show shown there's "This program is broadcast in 12 languages". There's a menu in episode 4 that features Futhark runes. In episode 2 there's "PIZZA LANDS" and hell yeah, I'd buy a slice from PIZZA LANDS.

**

Over the course of the series, the crew spends 11 episodes on Mars, 6 episodes in the Jovian moons (3 on Ganymede, 2 on Callisto, 1 on Io), 3 episodes on Earth, 2 episodes in the Belt 2 episodes in interplanetary space and 1 episode on Venus.

Several other locations are named but never visited - we know that there was a war on Titan, Europa is settled, that there are scientific outposts around Uranus, and there's a prison on Pluto. Nothing about Mercury though, which is strange. Likely the desolation of Earth has stunted colonization attempts downwell.

The episode where they visit Venus is also a bit of an oddity, because their initial targets (Huey, Dewey and Loiue, ha!) were on their way there on a commercial flight. I can only assume that there's not a whole lot of work to be had in the bounty business on Venus. Clues elsewhere make me think that it's actually the capital planet of the system, rather than Mars, but that's relying on "if there are no bounties it means either enough gov't that it's not needed, or not enough to fund it."

**

Laughing Bull is not a sterling representation of Indigenous Americans on screen. Not the worst, but no awards either. But, I think he's vital for what Cowboy Bebop is and a building block of an element that sets it apart from other sci-fi both then and now.

In order to have an old Lakota man in space (His nation is not mentioned, but since he invokes Wakan Tanka I will make this presumption.) you have to have other Lakota in space. Somewhere off screen there's a community. And if there's a Lakota community in space, it's only logical that other nations have enclaves there as well. And if that's the case...everyone is here. And Bebop does that constantly, casually, naturally - with a clear recognition of "well yeah, people like that exist". And in a genre where praise can be meted out for doing actually nothing (Firefly) or for undermining your own point (Star Trek), this is noteworthy. Most everyone else is trying to play catch-up.

Everyone's here, and they brought their culture with them.

**

While it's said multiple times that the money's only good if the target is brought in alive, the crew really don't seem to pay attention to that a lot. Maybe that's why they're always broke.

**

The fact that, chronologically, I would have gone to college with Faye Valentine has upended my world. Please stand by while I crumble into dust according to the ravages of time.

**

An inescapable current in this show is that of poverty, presented with the simple and blunt honesty of "sometimes it's bell peppers and beef with no beef for dinner." It's always there, in rust and peeling paint.

 

**

Jet is an enormous loser, and I love that about him. He likes pretending that he's the big man in charge but the moment anyone pushes back, he folds. He'll tell meandering stories with no point to put on airs of wisdom. His one romantic relationship fell apart because he was a condescending paternalist and he's internalized that as "it must be the intrinsic fault of women" - yet still the way he talks about it has some genuine grief.

**

Nothing like a really good Ave Maria to tug at the heartstrings.

**

Sci-fi aesthetics peaked with 90s anime, this we all know and agree upon. And those gunshot sound effects!

**

The 0 G segments in Bebop remain some of the best around. The cleanness and slight exaggeration of the animation allows them to pull off some really appealing acrobatics with thrust and momentum.

**

Ha, they make fun of Uri Gellar in the episode with the AI.

**

Ed could have been awful, but they remembered the important lesson: gremlin doesn't mean stupid, and it doesn't means "source of everyone's problems". That's a guaranteed way of making someone hate a character, make them responsible for making everything worse by being dumb, and they keep doing it and getting away with it.

**

We never get a reason for why there was a war on Titan. I suspect it would either be outside forces fighting over it for colonization rights (which seems less likely, given how each planet seems to be independent) or a colony collapse scenario (more likely, considering how Callisto is falling apart and Io's land rush never seemed to materialize)

Callisto itself, as we see it in "Jupiter Jazz" is a masterpiece of storytelling through setting. Enormous gleaming skyscrapers left half-finished and empty. Towns where it's possible to go six months without seeing a woman because the only folks there are the men who came for work and now there's no more work to be had. It hasn't fallen into anarchy - we see municipal trash collection in one shot - but time are bad and they don't appear to be changing any time soon. An earlier episode mentioned that Ganymede is in a recession, and Io looks to have been expecting a land rush that never came.

There are so many potential stories to living there

**

The most gratuitous cheesecake shots we get of Faye are when she's in Gren's apartment - a man who has no sexual interest in her (though he does have his moments of not understanding personal space. Come on, Gren.) Faye uses her body as a tool to get what she wants with gleeful abandon in much of the rest of the show, so the fact that the scene is shot like that in a moment where she explicitly isn't doing that is worth noting.

**

Vicious has a Nokia flip phone. Fucking love it.

**

"Speak Like a Child" might be my favorite episode in the series now. Looking back at yourself and not recognizing or remembering what was there starts to hit different once it starts happening to you. My appreciation for Faye in general has skyrocketed on this watch - she's been through a lot of shit (brain damage from cryo) and has built up a persona to deal with it. It slips from time to time, and we see who she is / might have been.

Judging by the timeline, Faye's video would have been shot ~2004. I wonder, if I saw video of myself from back then, would I remember what was going on in it? Or would I watch myself on the screen going through actions that have long since melted down into the simmering, fuzzy pool of childhood? Faye doesn't even have that sense of continuity. That tape might as well be a message from the dead. Which, as time goes on and more VHS tapes are lost to damage, decay, or lack of backups, there will be more and more Fayes out there.

Leave it to this show to make a fucking betamax tape a precious thing that keeps us anchored to ourselves.

**

Engineered life shows up a couple times in the show, all of it aquatic and most of it on Ganymede. I figure it was part of the colonization push that's been falling in on itself.

**

I love the little bit at the end where they see the guy from Big Shot meeting his mom at the airport. The ordinary guy behind the corny act on TV.

**

Spike is a real shithead. A loveable one, but he's gone and found himself a niche where no one can effectively counter his aloof coolness + deathwish. Jet is a pushover, Faye can't get through to him. The episode with Andy is noteworthy because of just how angry Spike gets over meeting someone who is like him, a mirror of his great flaws of bullheadedness and assholery.

**

"Pierre le Fou" is, of course, a fantastic episode. And a large part of that is the absolute refusal to use music or even traditional scare chords when Pierrot is on screen. In the first encounter it's dead silence in the background until you realize the growing anxious tinnitus drone. In the second, it's all diegetic music from the amusement park rides.

We also get a premonition of the end: Spike's deathwish manifesting itself, Faye being asked up front if she would save him. We saw this play out in the episode with the harmonica kid (which I don't like all that much)

And, interesting to note, Spike is nearly completely absent from the following episode - a welcome breather.

**

"Brain Scratch" first aired April 3 1999. The members of Heaven's Gate committed suicide just barely two years prior in march of 97. the Aum Shinrikyo gas attacks were in 95. Time capsule of an era, that episode - less important for its plot than for the look and act of the cult within it. Crude late 90s website and all.

**

No one in this show can communicate, no one in this show can form connections. Spike is trapped in his past and refuses to let go and move on. Jet tries to bury his past without ever having to come to terms with the uncomfortable truth. Faye is always looking for her past and finds no comfort in it when she finds it. Ed's probably the most emotionally mature member of the cast - she comes to terms with the fact that she can't stay with the Bebop and its suffocation-of-self, and in heading off is the only one who is able to look towards the future.

"Hard Luck Woman" is just a killer episode. The absurdity of the hard boiled egg chow-down highlighting how Spike and Jet cannot handle any of this maturely is just chef's kiss.

**

The ending comes rolling in out of nowhere and vanishing just as sudden. Its big and awkward and empty in places and that fits. With Spike dead and the Bebop inoperable, Jet and Faye are guaranteed to go their own ways. Faye might be able to move on. Jet's probably going to drink himself to death.

**

Top songs: "Bad Dog No Biscuits", "Waltz for Zizi", "Gotta Knock a Little Harder", "Call Me, Call Me", "Blue"

 

 

**

 

What else is there to say? Probably more, I have quite a bit more in the notes, but a ramble-review like this needs only so much. 

Let there be impeccable vibes.

Dan Reviews Anime

This is (likely) not going to be a repeated series like my book review posts (as I read a lot more books than I watch anime), and it's not going to be recent, either. A lot of these are just going to be recollections of shows I watched ages ago.

I will do my best to avoid spoilers unless they are absolutely necessary for context. If you happen to be reading this and are not huge into anime / into anime at all, I'll mark the ones that I would consider "good for people who are not huge into anime" with (*)

The list is not complete, but it will be sufficient. 

Cowboy Bebop (*)

If you read this blog at all, you already know my feelings about Cowboy Bebop.

Samurai Champloo (*)

Actually my least favorite of the Watanabe shows I have seen, but that's like saying something is your least favorite thing that you like.

Dorohedoro

A comedy mystery action romance cooking slice of life show about hyperviolence, grot, the wizard mafia, magical drugs, meddling devils, the inevitability of chaos, the malleability of identity, and very buff ladies. It was designed to pander directly to me.

Space Dandy

This is a special show. Just as soon as you think you've settled down into the hilarious adventures of this goof at space hooters, you are treated to some truly fantastic animation and some retrospective episodes that are way deeper than they should have any right to be. It has time for reflection and quiet and beauty among all of its (excellent) gags, less as punctuation to the wackiness and more just as aspects of that world that it's all jumbled up in. Now that's a part of basically all of Watanabe's work but I find it the most pronounced here, given how far up the absurdity dial has been turned.

Baccano! (*)

This show is just concentrated fun: an ensemble cast of supercolorful characters jumping across plot threads and timelines in Depression-era America and more manic hijinks than one can reasonably know what to do with. It's got bootleggers and alchemists and mobsters and solipsist murderers and goofballs and it maintains all the spinning plates all the way through and it just don't stop. Everyone is cool, everyone gets to shine, dub's fantastic, it's chaotic without being a mess, it's short and funny and worth your time. A show to recommend to non-anime people.

Kekkai Sensen / Blood Blockade Battlefront (*)

I had an acquantence in college who did poetry. He centered one work on fernweh, which he defined not as wanderlust but as "homesickness or nostalgia for a place you have never been". That's the feeling I get with this show. It feels like it belongs in the 9:30 PM slot on Toonami, on a Saturday evening half a lifetime ago now (not surprising considering it's an adaptaion of another work by the man behind Trigun). It's comfort food.

It's also a rollicking good time. New York City is now Sigil Hellsalem's Lot! Magic and monsters everywhere! Everyone is cool! Everything oozes style, top to bottom, and each episode is some new crazy adventure.

Impossible amounts of bonus points go to the fact that the first season has an anime-only romance subplot and it's actually good. Could have been terrible, but it's just a couple teenagers being sweet on each other and it's wonderful.

Main downside is that this show goes hard on dimming the screen when the effects are going off as an anti-seizue measure, which can be quite annoying. Definitely watch the dub.

Bokurano

This show could easily be written off as a janky, ugly NGE ripoff, and that would be correct. It is jank incarnate, lord of high house jank, ruler of all the janklands, but...my biggest issue with NGE has always been the contrivances to ensure terrible things happening - contrived tragedy isn't tragedy, it's farce. Bokurano avoids that thanks to how it treats its characters.

So there are 14 kids who, each in turn, have to take the pilot's seat of this giant alien robot. This is going to kill them. Just getting the thing to move does one of them in, but they've got to get it moving because there are other robots out there and spoilers to boot. Every episode is just a roulette wheel, and one by one you check off the characters in the OP. Dead and gone, or just waiting for their number to come up.

That's some big woof already and it's made worse by the fact that the cast are a pretty mundane and believable cross-section of middle school kids. Some of them are real shits, others are god damn heroes, a lot of them are in between, but all of them get their spotlight moment. So when things go bad (and they will go horribly bad), it hurts. Even the shit ones.

Also worth mentioning at how the adults involved in this whole giant robot thing are actually not horrible monsters. When the giant robot shows up the government immediately tries using adult pilots. When that fails they do their best to take care of them, and here's where a  huge shoutout to Capt Tanaka, who feels like a direct rebuttal of Misato in NGE.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

Where do I even begin on this one? There are other shows on this list that I like more as stories, there are characters that I enjoy more, but thematically TTGL has aged like fine wine and has only grown more relevant with age. It's also super difficult to talk about because everything I want to go into detail on hinges on plot developments that are better off

Yes it's a show about shouting and explosions and giant robots and hot-blooded men making  nonsensical declarations of hot-bloodedness, but it's also a show that hinges on the power of positive male relationships and role models as a means of surviving existential despair and avoiding self-destruction.

There's a sequence about coping with grief that...yeah. I appreciate that part a whole hell of a lot nowadays.

Plus Sorairo Days is a banger.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

Man, I had no standards in high school. This show is terrible and the more I think about it and its undue influence on anime as a whole, the more hterrible it becomes.

Planetes

It's got mid-aughts shlock to it (mostly endearing) and the ending / how the main relationship plays out is blah (not endearing at all), but the science is solid, the goofs are fun, and it's trash collectors in space. I am a simple man with often simple needs and this show delivers on a lot of them.

Death Parade

One season in an afterlife bar that was fine enough. Left a lot to be desired in the end, especially considering the opening theme is one absolute jam...if terribly nonindicative of both tone and how much we are actually going to deal with those characters.

Kill la Kill

If you stop watching at exactly 15 minutes and 0 seconds of episode 1, this is one of the most solid 8.5/10 shows out there. Then you get to the 15 minute mark and to call that particular event both heavy and cackhanded is unreasonably generous.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (*)

I never watched the original FMA, but I watched Brotherhood week to week over the course of a year as it was airing, and recently rewatched the entire series. Good news! It has held up like a rock over the last decade (sans some very not-great stuff involving a major VA)

If you know, you know. If you don't know, I encourage you to get to know. That's the review.

It's real good.

Attack on Titan

I checked out when they revealed that the implacable incomprehensible horror was spearheaded by teenagers with superpowers, and I had been thinking I was watching a different kind of show.

Ergo Proxy

I swear I watched it at some point but I'll be damned if I can remember it.

My Hero Academia

I watched up through the tournament arc and it was fun, but around that point I started getting real uncomfortable about how Bakugo is one step removed from being a murderer and the school does nothing about it, and disappointed that the plot would not aim itself squarely at tearing down Endeavor (abusive parent and eugenicist). But it's fine. Filled a niche, no desire to return.

Erased

God I am conflicted about this show. It starts off strong, it starts off SUPER strong. The premise is strong (time travel murder mystery!) It does a fantastic job of setting up characters and their relationships and the situations of their lives, and actually handles some really rough subjects with exceptional amounts of understanding and tact...but the process of actually solving the mystery is so limp that I barely remember it now despite being all-in at the time. There are some properly heartwrenching scenes that I had completely forgotten until I started looking up refreshers for this post because of how blah the ending was. And that's a damn shame.

But it's also got Sachiko in it, and she's a shoe-in for Best Anime Mom of the Century

Mob Psycho 100 (*)

Easily the best representation of an autistic protagonist I've seen in media in general, beautifully animated, legitimately hilarious, excellent dub, I recommend it without hesitation to anyone whether or not they even like anime. Wholeheartedly devoted to doing its own thing and impossibly refreshing in its themes of "power and privelege are overrated, find self-worth in making yourself better"

The Body Improvement Club are the best, and will remain the best unto the heat death of the universe.

Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress

Gotta give it credit this show gave you a super clear warning to jump off the bandwagon when that pink-haired sephiroth-looking guy showed up.

Vinland Saga (*)

It's probably one of the only "out for revenge" plots I have seen that I can really get behind and enjoy - Thorfinn's obsession with revenge is so single-minded and narrow that he has effectively destroyed his life in pursuit of that goal. He could have had his revenge and gone back home ages ago, but he's blinded himself to any reality that doesn't play out according to the narrative in his head. He's a one-trick pony and it's killing him inside.

If it were just Thorfinn, it would likely be unbearable. Thankfully, we get a robust cast of secondary characters that not only break up the monomania of Thorfinn's revenge, but also actually move the plot forward. Askeladd gets shit done, and Thorkell might be the funniest son of a bitch on this list. Every scene he is in gets torn up by the roots and stolen.

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

All reviews of JJBA are tautological.

Carole and Tuesday (*)

I've been writing this for like six and a half hours now. Just watch the opening, that's my review. It's good. Music is good. Rotoscoping is good. It's on Mars.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes

I stalled out around episode 60 of the original due to external factors. A very slow burn, but I say it's worth it. The plot is always moving forward in some way, because the plot is not necessarily handcuffed to the characters - they move and shake things, but the big sweeping movements are founded on the greater social picture. Things happening cause other things to happen not because that is the plot on its own, but because those are the natural consequences of that thing happening.

It's like Star Wars (it is not subtle when it wants to rip it off), but if Star Wars is actually about an actual war in the stars. There are plotlines that hinge on supply trains and it is engaging as hell.

The remake is very, very solid on its own and a good place to start: you can easily jump back to the original if you want more.

Keep Your Hands of Eizouken! (*)

I was sold on this show in less than five minutes, before the theme song of the first episode even ran. Here, I'll link the clip.

You see it, right? It's The Moment. This show gets it. There are a whole lot of anime about highschool girls in a club doing a thing and I find no appeal in them as a rule, but Eizouken is the exception. Eizouken gets it.

And it delivers. The visuals are excellent throughout, from the fantastic mindscapes to something as mundane as the laundromat. The main trio of chuckleheads (Asakusa the small ADD worldbuilder gremlin, Misusaki the medium-sized energetic animator gremlin, and Kanamori the tall pragmatist manager gremlin play off each other masterfully. And through it all there is the sense that this is a show made by people who really care about what they're doing, celebrating but not fetishizing anime as an artform.

Eizouken gets it.

I got interrupted before I could finish this show and haven't been able to get back into it, but five episodes is more than enough to recommend it

Final Thoughts

Wow I am an absolute mark for ensemble casts living in chaotic super-detailed magical cityscapes WHO COULD HAVE POSSIBLY PREDICTED THIS.

2017: The Year In Review Adventure Setting

Favorite TV of 2017

The rogue city-state of Hellsalem's Lot sits like a madhouse on the borderland between worlds. It is a city of chaos and crime, of uncontrolled magic and regularly scheduled existential threats. Terrorist cells breed like fruit flies, cults pop up like weeds, rogue sorcerers lurk in every unattended alleyway, gang wars are so regular they're made into serialized television, and the eclectic members of Libra have to, as their name suggests, keep the balance of it all.

And deal with the vampires.

• It's very easy to die and very difficult to stay dead in Hellsalem's Lot. Don't question it, it stops working if you question it.
• The Blood Breed don't fall prey to typical vampire weaknesses: you're going to need a true name and some potent blood magic to seal those bastards away.
• It's easy to tell if Femt is behind the current disaster; The King of Depravity loves hacking into video billboards to make his announcements. What a ham.

Favorite game of 2017

In the harbor there is an island: a prison that once housed the city's criminals, now overrun with beasts and monsters. The prison's layout is ever-changing, kept a-flux by the weakened dimensional boundaries of its parent city. Creatures within are often possessed of dead cell mutagens, which may in some cases become self-aware and capable of puppeting about corpses as their own bodies.

• A mad inventor is known to live on the Island, trading powerful magical weapons for dead cells harvested from the bodies of fallen monsters.
• The great eldritch Watcher still keeps its post in the Insufferable Crypt, guarding the depths of the island from any intruders or would-be escape artists.
• There's an assassin up in the Clock Tower - who was she sent here to kill, and why is she still here?

Other favorite game of 2017

Beneath Hellsalem's Lot there is another city: the ancient grounds of Hallownest, home to the old insect-folk. But the city's time has passed, and the lonely tunnels are now filled with the remnants of that lost civilization. Spelunkers and treasure-seekers are still found every so often in the caves, uncovering the mysteries of the long-dead and long-forgotten.

• The caves are filled with undead husks, possessed of a terrible infection. The vessel within the Temple of the Black Egg is breaking apart, but none can get inside without releasing the Dreamers' seals.
• The moth-shaman in the Resting Grounds knows how to cut ones way into the dreams of the dead.
• The fungi are not to be overlooked. Simple-minded they might be now, but with the leadership of Mr. Mushroom they will inherit the age to come.

Favorite game-book of 2017

Further below Hallownest, in the furthest dark abyss, there are the Veins of the Earth. Here there are no friendly faces, there is no bench to sit awhile and listen. There is only darkness and death and unimaginable hunger. There is only cold, blood-slick stone.

• In the terrible black abyss did the Pale King and his five great Trilobite Knights discover the Radiance ages ago, and build the city of Hallownest by her light. When they turned from her, she delivered a terrible infection upon their dreams, and Hallownest was no more.
• Fossil vampires, older and more cruel by millions of years than the Blood Breed, still lurk in the stony dark. They are feral and mindless, and can smell blood spilled even miles above.
• The dErO conspiracy seeps outward, like lead in an aquifer. Rumors of it have even reached the Thinking Machines of the surface world. Tell us what you have seen in the Thinking Machines. There are no Thinking Machines. Tell us what you have not seen. We know what you have and have not seen.

Other other favorite game of 2017

Far beyond the walls of mist that wreathe Hellsalem's Lot there is the Downside: a purgatorial landscape of great beauty and great danger. Bands of outcasts make a rough life here, partaking in the holy Rites that might see them returned to civilization

• The Nightwings have been broken apart. In their absence, the Liberation Rite atop Mount Alodiel cannot be held, and no one may be freed from this hellish land.
• The bog hags of Flagging Hands have gathered at the Pit of Milithe, to call forth Yslach Astral-born. The stars are not yet right, but soon they shall be so, and the earth ripe for its devourer.
• "I hear that bastard Volfred Sandalwood is trying to fix the Rites, just to stick it to the old Archjustice. And get this - he knows how to build a machine that can make books! Can you believe that?"

Other other other favorite game of 2017

Out past even the Downside there are ruins of an older world, green with life and brown with dust. Here the YoRHa androids do battle with the alien machine lifeforms over a world that has lost both its human and alien masters.

• Broadcasts from the secret human moon enclave are a regular occurrence, but lately they have been a bit irregular: they've always lacked specific details, that came with the territory, but now they keep mentioning something about dErO machines, and YoRHa hasn't got a clue what the old humans are on about.
• A pacifist machine enclave has emerged in the forest out near the old amusement park, and to everyone's surprise they've decided to focus their single-minded obsession with imitating the humans of old through the study of existentialist philosophy. YoRHa hasn't got a clue what they're going on about.
• And now a message from everyone's favorite immortal gay teenager junk salesman, who is also a magical skeleton and has definitely seen some shit: "Every day's a sale, ever sale's a win!" 

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Man, it's been a big year. A pretty rough start and a lot of shakeups throughout, but you know, it turned out pretty okay. The blog's going strong (Seven months now? Holy guacamole.) and I feel like I'm in a better place than I was this time last year, even if only for having a place to yell about games online.

Happy new year, folks!