Ahh… this brings back memories.

Relena Peacecraft was my very first anime crush.

Since Makeine ended and nothing caught my attention this season, I’m back to browsing and binging the past, and just finished up one of the best series I’ve watched in a long time - Heike Monogatari.

I just happened to come across it on a stack and thought it looked interesting, so I watched the first episode and was immediately hooked. It wasn’t until I saw the Science SARU logo in the closing credits that I realized it was Yuasa (though in retrospect, I probably should have from Biwa’s character design).

The art design is astonishing - a perfect fit for a Japanese historical epic - with backgrounds that look like tapestries and foreground details that look like woodblock prints. It’s easily one of the most visually satisfying anime I’ve ever seen.

The story and characters are sort of underdeveloped, as should be expected from trying to condense a sprawling historical epic into 11 anime episodes, but it doesn’t feel incomplete. It’s as if all of the missing content from the much larger and more detailed original epic are spread so evenly throughout the adaptation that everything that’s there fits neatly together and manages to tell the story anyway.

And the way it’s framed - having the narrator of an epic story of a clan brought down by their own arrogance and cruelty that was popularized by biwa singers be a biwa singer who started off with every reason to hate the Heike but who slowly came to love them in spite of their significant flaws - is brilliant. Biwa is perfectly placed to witness the story as it unfolds, and perfectly suited to recognize both their flaws and their virtues, and the inevitability of their fall.

I don’t know how popular it was with westerners when it was released, so I don’t know if I’m just stating the obvious, but my impression is that it’s one of those that’s not so much underrated as underappreciated - that it’s well regarded by those who have watched it, but that that’s fewer people than it deserves. Thus this post.

You’re faulting a series for a problem that exists because of assholes.

Every medium has its instances that are provocatice or scatological or otherwise offensive.

The difference with anime is that there’s a group of assholes who base part of their identities on their purported superior taste as evidenced by the fact that they hate anime, and there’s enough of them that they’ve formed a fairly significant circlejerk. And they latch onto things like this to which to point as supposed examples of the medium as a whole, while self-servingly ignoring the other 99.9% of stuff out there.

So yes, in a sense, there is a problem with the fact that things like this exist, but the problem isn’t really simply that they exist, but that there’s a fairly significant group of assholes who can and will dogpile on that fact.

If you want to blame someone or something for the problem, don’t blame the series - blame the assholes.

When this was announced, I read part of the manga, then part of the LN original, and thought it might be good. I don’t normally watch currently airing anime, but I was keeping an eye on this. And I finally dove in and caught up on it last week.

This episode highlighted pretty much everything I loved about the series as a whole.

Anna is awesome. Let’s get that out of the way first. She’s easily my favorite FMC in years. And she was especially good in this episode. It’s just been so pleasant to watch her and Nukumizu get so comfortable with each other, and it was nice to see that in full flower in this episode. And I couldn’t help but laugh when she lost her imaginary boyfriend to an imaginary rival.

Kaju is awesome too, and it was great to see a lot of her in this episode.

And the senseis. I would’ve liked to see more of them all the way through, but at least they got a bit of extra screen time in this episode. They’re both interesting characters in their own right, and they have a great dynamic.

Chihaya was especially good in this episode too, even though she only got a few seconds. She’s been a pleasant surprise - she just looks so sweet and naive, and she’s so very much not.

Overall, the only criticisms I might have of the series are that a couple of character quirks were a bit too exaggerated (Komari’s stutter and Yumeko pretty much as a whole) and that it seems like very little was really settled. The pacing wasn’t really a problem in and of itself - I actually quite liked it - but it means that we need at least another season, and preferably a few more.

Overall, I was very impressed, and this was a good cap to the season, assuming another season is coming. Without another season, it’ll be a bit disappointingly incomplete, but even then, it was a good slice of life.

That was more my impression, but I don’t follow ratings or reviews much, so wasn’t sure. I just know that I rarely see it discussed, but pretty much universally positively when it is.

Is ODDTAXI underrated? If so, then that definitely. It’s just quality all the way through.

And Estab-Life: Great Escape. Yeah - it’s sort of contrived, but it has so much heart and tells a satisfying story. And Equa is wonderful.

I too “discriminate against” Chinese animation, and the illustration at the top of this article is a fine example of why - because it all looks the same. It’s like there’s exactly and only one Chinese animation art style, and it’s just regurgitated over and over and over again.

When I go to an anime site without something specific in mind and just browse for something to watch, I narrow my search by, among other things, specifying Japan as the country of origin, and toggling off all Chinese productions, just because I have zero interest in them.

Now granted - this article seems to be focused more on Chinese animators being subcontracted to Japanese productions, as opposed to Chinese productions, but I wouldn’t be the least surprised if the heart of the problem is that Japanese studios believe, and with considerable evidence to support it, that Chinese animators are unable to do anything other than that one endlessly repeated art style - that if they want their art style to be anything other than that one distinctive and endlessly repeated style that the Chinese use, they have to use Japanese staff.

Certainly I have no idea if that’s actually the case, but that was my immediate reaction - if I ran a Japanese animation studio, I would think that I would be generally unwilling to hire Chinese animators, specifically because I’d expect that they’d be unable to do anything other than that one and only, endlessly repeated art style.

Sorry - that whole thing just ended up roo rant-y for my tastes, so I deleted it.

Broadly, for those coming into the thread, it was about the asshole translators and their asshole employers who insist on “localizing” literally everything, including culture-specific things like honorifics that cannot ever actually be “localized.”

And yes - eliminating lgbt issues is another problem. That one particularly irritates me because it’s an issue regarding which the Japanese, traditionalists though they might be, are very open and tolerant - there have been lgbt characters in anime and manga, entirely non-contoversially, for as long as the mediums have existed. Then along come the Americans, who get all twisted out of shape over it.