Japanese TV is shite. Not just mind-numbingly shite, but claw your eyes out with your fingers shite. It's so shite, that as soon as I got a Skypa capable TV, I subscribed to their basic package and have never gone back to Japanese TV. Now, Skypa make available several Anime specific channels of which AT-X is by far the better.

Compared to Japanese TV, AT-X is brilliant. They show a lot of decent anime -- more so than terrestrial TV does. But sadly, even those suffer from the current money grab of anime producers. That is, they will "censor" near anything to do with females. Despite what some may have you believe, this is not a legal requirement. It's purely done so they can sell DVD/Blu rays at thousands of dollars. Ultimately, the entire industry here is a fucking money grabbing con.

So, back to the question, do I like anime? There's a fair few titles I enjoy watching; but none that I would ever buy here. It's significantly cheaper to import them from the UK/US. Too bad, most of the decent anime I watch doesn't get a US/UK retail release.

Goes from infinitely bad to supremely genious.

Just one form of entertainment.

I tired watching Hellsing (both of them) and I just got bored. It starts out cool, but the it becomes a drag of either people standing in awkward poses and having pretentious dialogue, or vampire heads being blown to pieces. The series constantly pulls vampire powers out of its ass, like one villain has the power of an infinite supply of razor sharp playing cards he can make fly at any angle.

OK, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief to some point, but even something like vampire powers has to make sense in its own world. Can other vampires do the same thing? Could he do it with something other than playing cards? Where do those playing cards come from? How did he even get that power? What are the limits of his power?

I know you're not supposed to think about this and that the writer just shoved it in because it's cool, but my brain has this thing called logic. Other vampire powers include magic homing bullets fired from a musket, creating illusions and bringing up repressed memories, or replacing your arm with some weird goo stuff while all other body parts seem to just regenerate normally. Don't even get me started on the human regenerator thing that is never explained or Walther's ability to pull piano chords out of his ass like he's some sort of piano spider.

Then halfway through the series they decide to just send the coolest character on a fetchquest and we are stuck with Lady Sir Stick-Up-Her-Ass and Police Girl. Police Girl is the most useless character and just there to give weirdos spank material with her constant "Master...". Then they turn her into a mad killing machine with a fingersnap by the end of the series.

Another thing that really bothered me was the "dramatic moment" where two characters have an emotional scene. While everything is breaking apart around them. I mean, what are the villains doing during that time? Are they just standing there politely because it would be rude to interrupt? This isn't a video game that pauses the action whenever someone triggers dialogue. It's just stupid. It's like how in a J-RPG characters with guns will just stand there and wait for the heroes to run up to them with their swords instead of shooting from a distance, but at least in J-RPGs it can be excused as part of the game mechanics.

And don't get me even started on the plot itself, it makes about as much sense as the great master plan of the Emperor in the new Star Wars movies. There is so many points at which it could have totally broken apart and ended immediately, but it didn't because the script said so.

Reading the manga is the only way to experience Hellsing. The OVA's (Hellsing Ultimate) have some cool fight scenes, but yes as a whole they are very boring, you can tell basically they have to make each OVA 40 minutes long, adapt a part of the manga, and on a limited budget, so what you get is these really long "speeches" as I call them by the characters, it's so obvious they do it to string out the episodes as long as possible.

I have mixed feelings. It's so hard to find a GOOD anime that doesn't end on a cliffhanger (and never gets resolution) or a totally depressing ending. I don't want to ruin the storyline to see if the ending is good and I'm sick and tired of watching anime just go go "WHAT THE (Insert expletive of choice for that day) WAS THAT ENDING!? SERIOUSLY!?"

I like to ask 2 questions to you bansama



1. I never understood why Anime has so many male character that look very female, yes I know there are male looking characters like these guys:


http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20121027220349/protagonist/images/d/de/LuffyTimeSkip.png

http://media.animevice.com/uploads/0/1/1522-shinji.jpg

http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20121210021542/mcleodgaming/images/7/7e/GOKU.PNG

But the point still stands, and I notice it all started in the 90s.

2. And why most of the time when I see what is supposed to be Japanese (as in ethnicity) characters that does not look oriental, just asking I mean no offense.

1. Without clear examples, I'd have to guess it's the drawing style. But FYI, Japan really doesn't have many hang ups with homosexual or transsexual characters. Not just in anime, either. Many so-called "talents" are transsexuals. For the most part, sexuality isn't a big deal -- except when it comes to love hotels. A lot of the staffed ones will refuse entry to same sex couples.

2. The old technical reason was that different inks were more expensive than others. Black ink, for example was very expensive -- so most anime had few African/African American, or whatever the PC term in your country is, characters. Standard "flesh" tones were cheaper than the more tinted ones, which is probably why, most characters would appear to be "white" to you.

That said, the same skin tones appear "Japanese" to Japanese. Japanese aren't really "yellow" as old US propaganda would have had people believe anyhow. That's all I'll say on the subject though as it can be a rather heated one, depending on those taking part.

Fascinating, thanks for the info :)

I used to watch them a lot, as well as read manga, back at uni. When I moved out to Belgium, with a very limited bandwith, I had to give up on video and stick to comics. Lately, I've been watching a few, mostly because I recently realized that my language skill in Japanese had dropped so much I wanted to hear it a bit to refresh it.

So basically, I like it. I like that they are limited stories, with a beginning and an ending, even if the ending often sucks. I don't particularly care for the ones that last hundreds of episodes, but I like the sense of discovery of getting a random series and seeing what they can come up with. So many different stories. This said, I still prefer manga as a rule of thumb, except when it comes to mechas and such. That usually sucks on manga.

As for these harem half erotic 'romantic' comedies and the like, they still work for me as work motivators. They are not so boring by themselves that I would absolutely hate watching it, it's hardly interesting either. So I often do watch these series during my work breaks, it works like "you either go back to work or watch another episode of that crap". It tends to keep me working, and it sometimes (when there's a lot of work) makes me watch/read a lot more crap than things I actually enjoy. Heh.


Edit: Forgot to mention it, but I hardly ever buy any anime. I bought the original DB series to get it on my original Basque language dubs (which I then ripped and shared), and a couple Golden Boy DVDs I got on a bargage bin, but that's it. I like it enough to watch when I'm bored, but nowhere near enough to pay for. Specially at the prices that they were being sold, IFRC it came down to 5€ per episode on DB.

I hate hate hate anime with a passion. All girls look like little school girls with giant boobs. That is just disturbing.

http://alltheragefaces.com/img/faces/large/misc-are-you-fucking-kidding-me-clean-l.png

Some anime tends to strike an emotional chord which other mediums can't touch for me, I can't really explain why considering how detached it is thematically to normal life, but it does. This is why I watch it alone now, people don't understand and my gf made fun of me for a long long time after witnessing me getting slightly choked up at what would understandably have been ridiculous to someone who hadn't been following the series.

She cried at the episode of Futurama with Fry's dog though. Double standards etc.

lol. We got ourselves a troll.

And there was much joy.

I don't know if they are a troll, or just genuinely that ignorant. Considering I can think off hand about 10 anime series that don't remotely involve that stereotype.

Also, now I want a pineapple upside down cake now. >.< FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED me, Seymour!

Does Neon Genesis Evangelion and Blood+ fall in that category?