Recs and Wrecks
What are your recent anime and/or movie recommendations or "NO! STAY AWAY!!!!"s (unrecs?)?
Hmm, good question. What have I actually been watching lately 8|a
Magi: Labyrinth of Magic has awesome animation, equal opportunity fanservice and equal opportunity buttkicking, and tends to casually break cliches in half as it goes. It's set in a very Arabian Nights-esque world where there are djinn who lord it over magical dungeons that appear and grant their power to the person brave and talented enough to make it to the end. Well, besides that, there's also your background of politics, intrigue, sexy men (and women), high adventure, and the usual shady organisation bent on destroying the world... the first season finished as of a month or two ago and it's really kind of good. ...okay, the title character has a disconcerting habit of mushing his face into womens' breasts (and considering he looks ten my response is O...KAY THEN), but it's not overplayed and you can ignore that part >_>a Morgiana more than makes up for it. Go watch!
Everything else I've watched recently is pretty old news in the anime world. I've started watching K and that's...very pretty, but I sort of wandered off halfway through the series and haven't returned to it, so while it's a lot of fun it obviously didn't grip me terribly. But it's getting a lot of good reviews so that's something. Puella Magi Madoka Magica is a year old now but pretty damn awesome so if you somehow haven't seen that, do so! Just a warning for the fact that it'll tear your heart out with every episode past the first two. >_>
Moviewise I really liked Iron Man 3 and was pleasantly surprised by Hunger Games. The Rurouni Kenshin live action movie is impressively good given what it is (a two hour adaptation of a 28 volume manga with questionable physics) so I definitely recommend that.
As for things to avoid... wellll. Gosick might have made it on to my recs list, but then we got to the final two episodes of the series and went wait, what? The storyline suddenly jumped in leaps and bounds and made no sense and was distinctly unsatisfying as a result. Up until then it's kinda sweet and fun, if a bit silly... think a gothic lolita female Sherlock Holmes and her harried Japanese exchange student Watson in Europe in the 1920s solving mysteries and generally just hanging out-- but uh. The mysteries are easily solvable by the viewer well before our Holmes tended to solved them. Or maybe the anime was just that obvious. Either way, given it was cute enough to keep watching but then was destroyed by the last two episodes, I recommend avoiding it.
Same with Sword Art Online, actually. The first storyline is actually not so bad! I mean, it has a kickass premise (whoops, you're all stuck in my game and if you die you'll die for real bwahaha!) but it failed to actually do anything decent with that premise. The main character is a Gary Stu, his love interest isn't much better, it's a harem anime (and as of episode 14 or so you can count the protagonist's sister in that harem for maximum skeeve), the love interest gets sidelined into complete damsel in distress in the second storyline (complete with perverted sicko fiances in the real world programming in tentacled security guards and if you google Sword Art Online Tentacles you're bound to see where that goes)--- oh, and the genius who trapped th em all in that game to begin with and the one responsible for hundreds and possibly thousands of deaths? He's hailed as a visionary and a hero eventually. I watched the first story arc with UG and was okay with it (though I got more bored as we went along with the Slice of Life stuff) and then backed away... slowly... some time during the second. The only good thing I could say about it was that the way they showed it was a game was really well done. But ... yeah. u_u Sexist, skeevy, and all round not something I think is worth anyone's time.
And then there's the Your Mileage May Vary Stuff. Hmm. Game of Thrones is not a bad series, but it's getting further and further away from the events of the books it's based on, and sadly the producers are kind of... doing poorly by the female characters in the book (destroying their storylines or giving some of their more intelligent decisions to the men etc) and adding in masses of extra sex scenes and upping violence against women etc etc. That being said, the series is still pretty powerful and there are still powerful female characters (it says a lot that I say they've been unfair to them compared to the book but they're still pretty good), but your amount of enjoyment you get is bound to be reliant on whether or not you read the books first. >>
...and dammit, I had a second one and I've totally forgotten what it is now. BUT. There's a list?
Hmm, good question. What have I actually been watching lately 8|a
Magi: Labyrinth of Magic has awesome animation, equal opportunity fanservice and equal opportunity buttkicking, and tends to casually break cliches in half as it goes. It's set in a very Arabian Nights-esque world where there are djinn who lord it over magical dungeons that appear and grant their power to the person brave and talented enough to make it to the end. Well, besides that, there's also your background of politics, intrigue, sexy men (and women), high adventure, and the usual shady organisation bent on destroying the world... the first season finished as of a month or two ago and it's really kind of good. ...okay, the title character has a disconcerting habit of mushing his face into womens' breasts (and considering he looks ten my response is O...KAY THEN), but it's not overplayed and you can ignore that part >_>a Morgiana more than makes up for it. Go watch!
Everything else I've watched recently is pretty old news in the anime world. I've started watching K and that's...very pretty, but I sort of wandered off halfway through the series and haven't returned to it, so while it's a lot of fun it obviously didn't grip me terribly. But it's getting a lot of good reviews so that's something. Puella Magi Madoka Magica is a year old now but pretty damn awesome so if you somehow haven't seen that, do so! Just a warning for the fact that it'll tear your heart out with every episode past the first two. >_>
Moviewise I really liked Iron Man 3 and was pleasantly surprised by Hunger Games. The Rurouni Kenshin live action movie is impressively good given what it is (a two hour adaptation of a 28 volume manga with questionable physics) so I definitely recommend that.
As for things to avoid... wellll. Gosick might have made it on to my recs list, but then we got to the final two episodes of the series and went wait, what? The storyline suddenly jumped in leaps and bounds and made no sense and was distinctly unsatisfying as a result. Up until then it's kinda sweet and fun, if a bit silly... think a gothic lolita female Sherlock Holmes and her harried Japanese exchange student Watson in Europe in the 1920s solving mysteries and generally just hanging out-- but uh. The mysteries are easily solvable by the viewer well before our Holmes tended to solved them. Or maybe the anime was just that obvious. Either way, given it was cute enough to keep watching but then was destroyed by the last two episodes, I recommend avoiding it.
Same with Sword Art Online, actually. The first storyline is actually not so bad! I mean, it has a kickass premise (whoops, you're all stuck in my game and if you die you'll die for real bwahaha!) but it failed to actually do anything decent with that premise. The main character is a Gary Stu, his love interest isn't much better, it's a harem anime (and as of episode 14 or so you can count the protagonist's sister in that harem for maximum skeeve), the love interest gets sidelined into complete damsel in distress in the second storyline (complete with perverted sicko fiances in the real world programming in tentacled security guards and if you google Sword Art Online Tentacles you're bound to see where that goes)--- oh, and the genius who trapped th em all in that game to begin with and the one responsible for hundreds and possibly thousands of deaths? He's hailed as a visionary and a hero eventually. I watched the first story arc with UG and was okay with it (though I got more bored as we went along with the Slice of Life stuff) and then backed away... slowly... some time during the second. The only good thing I could say about it was that the way they showed it was a game was really well done. But ... yeah. u_u Sexist, skeevy, and all round not something I think is worth anyone's time.
And then there's the Your Mileage May Vary Stuff. Hmm. Game of Thrones is not a bad series, but it's getting further and further away from the events of the books it's based on, and sadly the producers are kind of... doing poorly by the female characters in the book (destroying their storylines or giving some of their more intelligent decisions to the men etc) and adding in masses of extra sex scenes and upping violence against women etc etc. That being said, the series is still pretty powerful and there are still powerful female characters (it says a lot that I say they've been unfair to them compared to the book but they're still pretty good), but your amount of enjoyment you get is bound to be reliant on whether or not you read the books first. >>
...and dammit, I had a second one and I've totally forgotten what it is now. BUT. There's a list?