Trash Thread

Never in my life have I encountered such a cut-rate, low-effort, detestable excuse for animation. Forget "generic", everything about this show feels fake. The conflict is nonexistent, the villains are evil for the most retarded reason, and every character has the depth of a cardboard cutout. Shoot, aside from a few handpicked gifs here and there, even the fanservice was half-assed!

Literally the only scene that made me laugh was when our MC unconsciously started playing with his friend's hair. Not gonna lie, I'm kinda jealous.

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It's pretty telling when the Funimation dub couldn't eke any life outta this one. I feel sorry for anyone who worked on it.

I expected nothing, and was still disappointed.

I mean shoot, at least Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan made the attempt to be be funny. Aldnoah.Zero might've had crap characters, but at least the action scenes were solid. Here though, nothing about this show seems genuine; from the writers to the artists to the executives themselves, it seems like everyone involved put in a half-ass job and called it a day, likely because that's precisely what happened.

Saving graces? Well, the concept's alright - guy who's obsessed with something he can't have gets the opportunity to become what he's always revered. The girls are cute, when they're not moving anyways. Funimation's VOs got paid, I suppose that's nice. And in the one scene that made me laugh, our MC started subconscously playing with his best friend's hair.

Not gonna lie, I'm kinda jelly.

seel wrote

i heard that umaru-chan anime is getting a second season. i already want someone to put me out of my misery.

I just don't understand what the appeal is, man. Like, one of the cardinal rules of schadenfreude is that the target has to be deserving of the torment they recieve. This is why Kazuma and Aqua have such an entertaining dynamic in KonoSuba, bcause they're both equally-terrible people. But then you've got Umaru here who literally leeches off her brother because she's too lazy to do anything else.

It's not as if the show depicts what it's actually like being an unproductive member of society. Am I supposed to believe people identify with her?

Yuu wrote

Trash
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I mean, at least the character designs are nice. That said, I couldn't even make it past the first episode.

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Aand today we've got Heroic Age! A crappy 2007 sci-fi action anime I snatched on a whim offa my old ratio site. Angling itself as a an action-comedy/space opera loosely based off of Hellenic myth (specifically the Twelve Labors of Heracles), it's really just an incoherent and pointless mishmash of halfhearted ideas laid atop one of the worst stories I have ever seen. Seriously, I'd rather watch Akame ga Kill! than this shit again. No joke, the whole thing culminates in our protagonists giving our villains a portal to another dimension, which convinces them to stop trying to exterminate humanity (which they'd been doing for reasons unclear) and leave the universe in pursuit of the beings which created it. Legend of the Galactic Heroes, this shit ain't!

What really struck me is just how formulaic it got within the first couple episodes. Apparently, despite all the futuristic technologies and elite pilots at its disposal, the Argonaut's fuckin' useless; y'know why? Every single action scene for the first half of the series (which was as long as I stuck with it), can be summarized by the sequence of, "Argonaut and crew puts up a good fight against alien bugs -> Oh no, they're about to be overrun! -> No worries, that half-dressed kid with the power to transform into a giant biomechanical dragon just kicked everyone's ass!"; rinse and repeat, ad nauseum. And the music? Oh, don't even get me started on the fuckin' music. It's not so bad for quiet scenes, but during battles there seems to be a single score that plays in one particular order, and it just so happens to be that curious sort of piece that's both utterly forgettable yet incredibly irritating-to-listen-to all at once. It's like a tuba being played through a cheese-grater. Augh.

From a writing standpoint, I honestly think the biggest failing of this series was making the protagonist's primary adversaries giant alien bugs. Now don't get me wrong, I love a good bug-war, but it has to be executed with nuance. In Starship Troopers, if I recall, the use of inhuman bugs furthered the work's goal as a satire by serving as a metaphor for how imperialist propaganda paints its enemies as scary and incomprehensible. Here, it's just used willy-nilly to give the protagonists someone to fight that audiences won't feel sympathy for. It's a XEBEC series, so my expectations are somewhat tempered, but I was really expecting more from one of their sci-fi outings.

Saving graces? Well, the commander-chick they introduced halfway through the series has a nice rack, and and the show certainly has no shortage of slender babes in skintight outfits. This is nice. I like that, even though they look like they're about to be spaghettified by a supermassive black hole. Too bad it's such a slog to watch, or I mighta stomached it till the end.

Post Scriptum: As you can probably tell, I found myself in somewhat of a foul mood whilst recalling this show. Don't know why, but it felt good. Kinda felt like I was channeling the spirit of one of my favorite old game reviewers from the '06-'09 era of YouTube. Those were wonderful days. ^^