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Dec. 21st, 2014 01:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI was supposed to do five favorite anime/manga for cinaed on the 14th, a full week behind on my December meme posts! I am shamed. :( ALSO this is a hard question to answer. Five? Only five?!
OK, I can muster up a pretty clear top five, but I refuse to rank them! REFUSE. Here goes:
- Revolutionary Girl Utena was not actually my first anime (that was Evangelion, about which I have now forgotten most of everything) but it was definitely one of my most ... confusingly formative. And it's so good! So often inexplicable, but so good! Just such an amazingly incisive and scathing condemnation of everything that is toxic about gender roles and savior complexes, wrapped in twelve layers of metaphor and boxing kangaroos.
- and Princess Tutu was my fourth anime! I started out strong, well done self. Perhaps part of the reason I love it so much is because it is in direct conversation with Utena, and not arguing with it exactly but providing a different slant -- a less brutal but no less incisive look at the kind of stories that shape people, and how they do it. Also it's SO ADORABLE. EVERYTHING IS ADORABLE.
- meanwhile Fullmetal Alchemist, in a different category, is emphatically my favorite shonen. It's a theoretically straightforward quest story, which is actually a nuanced exploration of sacrifice, responsibility and loss, dealing solidly along the way with issues of genocide and national guilt and national healing. Also, Hiromu Arakawa is one of the most charming mangaka that exists IN THIS WORLD.
- rivaled only perhaps by Yumi Tamura, author of 7 Seeds! I am a little bit obsessed with 7 Seeds, a post-apocalyptic manga that manages to be incredibly brutal and incredibly optimistic and INCREDIBLY HILARIOUS all at once, because Yumi Tamura's character development is a beautiful, complex thing and Yumi Tamura's plotting and worldbuilding are like Jurassic Park on crack. "And then we found these things in the desert and poured water on them and it turned out they were DEHYDRATED DINOSAURS!"
- I don't actually know enough about Naoki Urasawa himself to know if he is charming? Anyway, 20th Century Boys is my other all-time favorite manga, about ... a bunch of people running around to thwart the apocalypse! This wasn't an intentional theme. Anyway what it's really about is the way that the things that absorb you as a child do and don't continue to affect you as you grow up, and the power of things like music and stories, for good and for ill (also perhaps a theme running through this list, OK, I never said I wasn't predictable.)
OK THERE THAT'S FIVE. Honorable mentions go to Baccano!, Gokusen and the first 200 or so chapters of Skip Beat! as well probably as several other things I am forgetting. (I can safely leave Twelve Kingdoms off the list though because I like it best as a light novel series. SO THERE.)
cinaed on the 14th, a full week behind on my December meme posts! I am shamed. :( ALSO this is a hard question to answer. Five? Only five?!OK, I can muster up a pretty clear top five, but I refuse to rank them! REFUSE. Here goes:
- Revolutionary Girl Utena was not actually my first anime (that was Evangelion, about which I have now forgotten most of everything) but it was definitely one of my most ... confusingly formative. And it's so good! So often inexplicable, but so good! Just such an amazingly incisive and scathing condemnation of everything that is toxic about gender roles and savior complexes, wrapped in twelve layers of metaphor and boxing kangaroos.
- and Princess Tutu was my fourth anime! I started out strong, well done self. Perhaps part of the reason I love it so much is because it is in direct conversation with Utena, and not arguing with it exactly but providing a different slant -- a less brutal but no less incisive look at the kind of stories that shape people, and how they do it. Also it's SO ADORABLE. EVERYTHING IS ADORABLE.
- meanwhile Fullmetal Alchemist, in a different category, is emphatically my favorite shonen. It's a theoretically straightforward quest story, which is actually a nuanced exploration of sacrifice, responsibility and loss, dealing solidly along the way with issues of genocide and national guilt and national healing. Also, Hiromu Arakawa is one of the most charming mangaka that exists IN THIS WORLD.
- rivaled only perhaps by Yumi Tamura, author of 7 Seeds! I am a little bit obsessed with 7 Seeds, a post-apocalyptic manga that manages to be incredibly brutal and incredibly optimistic and INCREDIBLY HILARIOUS all at once, because Yumi Tamura's character development is a beautiful, complex thing and Yumi Tamura's plotting and worldbuilding are like Jurassic Park on crack. "And then we found these things in the desert and poured water on them and it turned out they were DEHYDRATED DINOSAURS!"
- I don't actually know enough about Naoki Urasawa himself to know if he is charming? Anyway, 20th Century Boys is my other all-time favorite manga, about ... a bunch of people running around to thwart the apocalypse! This wasn't an intentional theme. Anyway what it's really about is the way that the things that absorb you as a child do and don't continue to affect you as you grow up, and the power of things like music and stories, for good and for ill (also perhaps a theme running through this list, OK, I never said I wasn't predictable.)
OK THERE THAT'S FIVE. Honorable mentions go to Baccano!, Gokusen and the first 200 or so chapters of Skip Beat! as well probably as several other things I am forgetting. (I can safely leave Twelve Kingdoms off the list though because I like it best as a light novel series. SO THERE.)
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Date: 2014-12-22 03:28 pm (UTC)With good reason.
---L.
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Date: 2014-12-23 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-22 04:01 pm (UTC)All of these are so delightful! Well, four of the five; I believe you about 20th Century Boys but can't speak to it myself. BUT THE OTHERS ARE ALL SO GREAT.
Every so often I get this deep desire to rewatch FMA. And/or Utena. And then I look at my free time, but still. FMA!!
(Also Becca okay so I have a Les Mis fandom friend who loves Revolutionary Girl Utena and has for years and occasionally we have gushed about how it's a great show but I just found out the other day that she never...
she never actually twigged to ANY of the roses-and-swords symbolism or the shape of Ohtori or any of that Freudianism at all somehow
and so she was going "oh god with the swords cutting roses off duelists OH GOD I NEVER REALIZED"
and that's it that's the story. I can't believe I forgot to mention it to you a day or two ago because I can't stop laughing every time I remember. POOR HER AND AHAHAHAHA.)
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Date: 2014-12-23 02:45 am (UTC)(...
....
all I can say is that I am so happy for you that you got to experience the joy of her experiencing this for the first time *DYING*)
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Date: 2014-12-23 03:03 am (UTC)(Pretty much the entire conversation after that was me going "No, and, um, this other thing--" and her going "OH GOD YOU'RE RIGHT OH GOD THAT MAKES EVERYTHING SO MUCH WORSE"
It was so great and now I'm laughing again.)