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We all have them. A series that you feel bad for enjoying, an anime or manga that you feel you shouldn't like. Why do you like it? What makes your feel guilty about enjoying it so? I've got a couple: K-On! and Baka and Test K-on!  For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the series, K-On! tells the story of five high school girls who join the school's "light music club" and form a band. Largely devoid of plot, most episodes are simply "cute girls doing cute things". The majority of the episodes revolve around the girls sipping tea and the main character, Yui, doing idiotic things. There are no male characters (save for Ritsu's brother, who appears in two episodes), which means none of the characters have love interests, which encourages some creepier than usual fandom.   Top: A fan celebrating Yui's birthday Bottom: A Yui Shrine So, why the crap do I like K-On! so much? K-On's possibly the most feel-good series around. Everything is happy and fun; the characters always get along and any conflicts are settled within the episode. The show also has cheesy humor, accompanied by a great (and borderline hokey) soundtrack. Watching a single episode of five girls running around, doing stupid yet cute stuff was enough to distract me from a crappy day. The worst part about this, however, is that I can never tell anybody I enjoy this show in person, no matter how big of a fan they are of anime. Baka and Test  Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts is less well known than K-On!. The anime is about the lives of students at "Fumizuki Academy", a school in which students are split into classes based on their academic performance. The main characters are the idiots in "Class F" (which receives the shoddiest supplies), along with an incredibly naïve genius, who landed in the class for failing the entrance exam. I originally picked up this show because it had an interesting premise: students would battle manifestations of themselves called "avatars" based on their academic ability, in battles for school supplies and facilities. Thinking this would bring back some Pokemon nostalgia, I didn't hesitate to start watching it. I was wrong in this assumption, as the show is actually 80% Romantic comedy, 15% Childish humor, 4% Boob Jokes, and 1% Battling. The main character, Akihisa Yoshii, is a complete idiot and oblivious to the fact that two off his classmates (pictured above) are madly in love with him. The second season is even less relevant to the initial premise (but I have yet to finish it, so I'll need to stop here). So, why the crap do I like Baka and Test so much? Fist of all, I enjoy (most of the) the stupid humor, even though the boob jokes get old fast. The comically large nosebleeds are always entertaining, as well as the suggestive imagery and highly unfortunate situations.   An example of the nosebleeds you come to expect  Why do I enjoy such childish humor? An unfortunate circumstance In this scene our hero realizes he's made a horrible mistake while texting, and his phone is unexpectedly destroyed before he can fix his mistake. (I couldn't find a clip of the moment exclusively, so I've linked to the specific time of the episode, 220 seconds, on a full episode hosted on youtube) So there you have it. Two shows I really enjoy and hate myself for doing so.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 03:21 |
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| # ? May 25, 2013 23:17 |
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For me it'd be Needless, the manga. There's an anime too, but I never watched it. If you don't know what the series is it's set in the future after Japan has been ravaged by WW3. Dead smack center is the Black Spot, an area where nothing works and for some reason people pop up with crazy powers and are called Needless. The whole idea is that each person only has one power; like the ability to control gravity, fire, water, etc. But the hero named Adam can do them all (almost), so long as he can figure out what the ability is or bang his forehead against the other person's. Doesn't sound so bad until you factor in the whole thing is basically child porn. Half of the characters are young girls who lose their clothes every time someone sneezes. And then on top of that you have the main character, Cruz, who's a boy who cross-dresses to the point that even the series creators have seemingly forgotten that he's supposed to be a boy. Oh, and Adam is of course a deranged child molester, so... yeah. By all rights I should avoid this series like the plague, but I'll be damned if I'm not hooked. Luckily the whole series seems to actually be coming up on its end. Also I liked My Balls. Google that one on your own and know it's NWS as hell.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 04:12 |
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Mine is also K-On!. When I watched it, it was just a fun show about some silly high-school kids who hang out, start a band, and do a whole bunch of nothing. It seemed to occasionally really nail just why having close friends to do stupid poo poo with is so much fun and also why both making and just being involved in any way with music is so awesome. I knew it had weird and/or scary fans, but I figured so does everything. It wasn't until I decided to read the manga that I realized the Horrible Secret of K-On. Here's what it said to me: "oh aren't these girls nice? They're not threatening at all are they? see how they are clumsy and don't do anything mean? (not like those other girls, you know the ones) and maybe they're not so smart and need someone to take care of them a little bit, wouldn't that be nice? etc, etc"  The thing is; I didn't pick up that vibe from watching the anime at all, although surely it must be present there as well. Ah well. I still like the show well enough on its own, it is a lot of silly fluff, but it's fun silly fluff. I just try not to worry or think too much about the freaky weirdos who obsess over the characters.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 04:32 |
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Liar posted:Also I liked My Balls. Google that one on your own and know it's NWS as hell. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand now I'm on some government watch list. Mine is Ashita No Joe. I know its considered a classic by a lot of people, but for the most part if you didn't grow up reading it as a kid or teen it's seriously cliche, extremely sappy and dripping with terrible machismo smoked honorable warrior tropes. That being said its sort of infectious and it really did (for its time) put a segment of the Japanese poor working class on the center stage during a time when media largely ignored them and their problems. Thats why he has such a folk hero status across a lot of Asia, Joe wasn't just as working class hero, in his time he was one of the only realistic ones and certainly the best.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 04:41 |
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Kampfer as in it was so bad but I just couldn't stop watching...
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 05:09 |
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Aside from Zettai Karen Children (which I already explained my conflicted feelings about in the OP of the thread on its spinoff), my biggest guilty pleasure is probably Bleach. Something about it (at least in the anime version) is really cool somehow (I suspect the music has something to do with it), even though the setting doesn't really make sense, the fights are formulaic, there are too many characters competing for focus, the manga is way too slow-paced, and the manga art has no backgrounds.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 05:12 |
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Silver2195 posted:Aside from Zettai Karen Children (which I already explained my conflicted feelings about in the OP of the thread on its spinoff), my biggest guilty pleasure is probably Bleach. Something about it (at least in the anime version) is really cool somehow (I suspect the music has something to do with it), even though the setting doesn't really make sense, the fights are formulaic, there are too many characters competing for focus, the manga is way too slow-paced, and the manga art has no backgrounds. Bleach is a guilty pleasure for me too, moreso Kubo's artwork. He doesn't draw much, this is true. But I love what he does draw. It might also be some nostalgic fondness. Drawing's a hobby of mine, and when I started out, I copied a lot of Kubo's style. Also, I love Kaicho wa Maid-sama/The President is a Maid more than I probably should. The male lead is a total Gary Stu, the female lead loses anything interesting about when they interact, a lot of the "romantic" scenes are really sexual harassment, etc. But every month when a new chapter comes out, I'm reading it. The scenes where the female lead is not around the male lead are entertaining, plus I love Hinata.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 05:24 |
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I genuinely enjoyed My Little Sister Can't Possibly Be This Cute. It's a nice little show about two sibling getting to know each other, and no matter how weird your hobbies or tastes may be, if you're honest and not afraid, you'll be able to find people who can accept and care about you anyway. Unfortunately you only find that out if you watch the show, and I can't blame people who haven't for assuming it's about loving your underage sister, because that's how it's 100% marketed.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 05:28 |
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Mai Otome is a complete and total flaming wreck, especially coming off the legitimately fun-to-watch Mai Hime. I still love it and I know that makes me a horrible person. I blame my own masochism and the fact that it just barely skirts the line between irredeemable nonsense and "so bad it's good" throughout its whole run. The sequel OVAs, on the other hand, were just so bad even I had to just say no.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 05:29 |
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Sword Art Online is another guilty pleasure series. It actually explores its setting in a way that most "trapped in an MMO" stories don't, has an actual romantic subplot instead of shipper-baiting bullshit, and it even has a satisfying ending. On the other hand, the main character is kind of a Mary Sue, and the second half of the show goes in some pretty creepy directions.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 06:08 |
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I used to be alright with some gender-bender/"trap" (ugh) genre series, like Wandering Son which I am still really into, but as I checked out the material available under that genre I realized all the works available were primarily fetishistic creepiness.  There's still a few relatively-good ones, but even then they're not much better than Oreimo or something.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 06:52 |
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Yamada and the 7 Witches. It can be pretty funny and entertaining, mainly whenever Miyamura and/or Itou are getting page time, but then it's like Yoshikawa (or her editor) decides that it's time for some fanservice and/or girls kissing girls or body swapping/gender bending stuff and ugh. Although one of these days I'm going to stop being a doofus and start on Yankee-kun because of it so... not a total loss? Suben fucked around with this message at Feb 19, 2013 around 07:06 |
| # ? Feb 19, 2013 06:54 |
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Et Cetera pretty much sucks, but I still have a soft spot for Tow Nakazaki's cartoonish art and his talent for unapologetically lunatic scale. I own a few works of his that aren't translated to English, including his eight-volume Who Is Fuoh, where literally every chapter ends with a nosebleed gag of increasingly horrendous proportions: Victims are painted head to toe with the output of a single middle schooler, and there's a chapter where a football stadium is flipped upside down so that the combined bleedouts of the assembled floods the entire bowl. It's utterly irredeemable, and it probably wasn't the intention, but it's such loving nonsense I can't help but laugh.
Epoxy Bulletin fucked around with this message at Feb 19, 2013 around 06:58 |
| # ? Feb 19, 2013 06:55 |
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Pollyanna posted:I used to be alright with some gender-bender/"trap" (ugh) genre series, like Wandering Son which I am still really into, but as I checked out the material available under that genre I realized all the works available were primarily fetishistic creepiness. Wandering Son isn't really part of that genre in the first place, though.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 07:05 |
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Silver2195 posted:Wandering Son isn't really part of that genre in the first place, though. Prolly, yeah. Still, there were one or two that were similar to Wandering Son that fell under the genre - that might be why I tried looking for anything decent under that designation. I came up with almost nothing, though.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 07:17 |
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Ichi the Killer is an unbelievably hosed-up manga. (I haven't seen the movie.) It's a non-stop sequence of hyperviolent and creepily detailed death scenes. The innocently sadistic manchild protagonist easily overcomes pretty much every challenge he's presented with. Very few of the characters are sympathetic in any way. The only person you'll want to root for is whoever isn't in view at the time, because those are the only people not committing atrocities. And, yeah, it's incredibly harrowing to read; I wouldn't read it just because I'm bored. It's totally draining. It's brutally realistic, apart from the almost surreal violence - the nudity is definitely not fanservice, killing is only occasionally cathartic. But I think most people reading it give up after the first several revolting bits, before some important key scenes, so they assume that we're meant to empathize with Ichi and that it's a normal crime romp that's unaware of how abnormally depraved it is. But if you go through the whole thing, and see just how awful things get, you realize that the whole series is really a way to say some heavy things about extremely violent media. It seems to say to the reader: "Why the hell do you read things like this for fun? In real life, violently living out your revenge fantasies makes you a psychopath. How much viewed brutality will it take to re-sensitize you? Isn't Ichi really just what a lot of heroes would be like in real life? Why do you happily root for people who are just a step or two away from being him?" On top of that, it's genuinely a really engaging Yakuza-themed drama with a ton of manipulation and counter-manipulation. But yeah, you need a really strong stomach to make it through.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 08:45 |
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OP this thread is a set-up to say TRAP SPRUNG to all of ADTRW, right? Anyway, i think Naruto is the guiltiest pleasure i have at the moment. I always derided it and told how lovely it was to all my friends for cool guy cred, but to be honest i haven's stopped reading/watching it since 8 years ago.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 10:10 |
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Pollyanna posted:I used to be alright with some gender-bender/"trap" (ugh) genre series, like Wandering Son which I am still really into, but as I checked out the material available under that genre I realized all the works available were primarily fetishistic creepiness. Pretty Face was actually one of the first mangas I read from first to last in one solid spree. I could never decide if I should feel ashamed of myself for loving that series as much as I did.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 13:24 |
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Loved Baka Test and K-On, in a similar vein to the latter I'm really enjoying Love Live this season. My guilty pleasures: Nana and Kaoru's S&M diary (Rom com ish, but the two main females get tied up a lot for fun and character development) Ladies vs Butlers (Yeah ridiculous boobs only outdone by the female lead's insane hairdo) Freezing (Korean shonen fighting series with primarily female cast and lots of clothing damage, he manhwa is atually really solid IMO)). Highschool of the Dead (Zombie apocalypse anime with highschool students as the protagonist, the artist primeily did hentai and it shows in every single female that's past puberty but the action is pretty good, it's actually sad that HOTD didn't get a season 2). Highschool DxD, (I like the action bits, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!) Anime_Otaku fucked around with this message at Feb 19, 2013 around 14:43 |
| # ? Feb 19, 2013 14:25 |
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Detroit Metal City would probably me mine. It's actually kinda dumb and creepy, but the way it's all presented just makes it impossible to take anything that's happening seriously and the whole thing becomes completely hilarious as a result.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 14:40 |
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Anime_Otaku posted:Loved Baka Test and K-On, in a similar vein to the latter I'm really enjoying Love Live this season. Also really enjoy Nana and Kaoru's S&M diary, Ladies vs Butlers and Freezing. I enjoyed Ladies vs Butlers and HOTD (the manga) as well. I heard the author is finally getting ready to resume the HOTD manga, so I'm looking forward to that. My contribution is an oldie: Trouble Chocolate. I know it's bad, but I love all the terrible puns and ridiculous characters.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 14:42 |
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Possibly not something that would be very high on most people list of 'guilty' pleasures, but the One Piece anime. I know reading the manga would be faster and much better paced and that the anime series has reached new heights of stretching things to their absolute limits and that their stubborn refusal to do 'proper' filler arcs actively makes the non-filler arcs worse, but somehow it's just not the same without the voice acting and music.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 14:45 |
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All of those shows where there's a high school club with one guy and multiple girls and they do funny/cute things. GJ-bu is the one I've been following this season, also the Seitokai Yakuindomo OVAs.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 15:40 |
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My guilty pleasure is definitely Shirokuma Cafe (Polar Bear Cafe). It is a gag comedy about the staff and regular customers at a cafe. The catch is that the cafe is run by a talking polar bear in a world where talking animals live and work alongside humans. His two main customers are a young panda that gets a part-time job as a zoo panda and a penguin that loves trying to tell boring rakugo stories. The cast is full of veteran voice actors that are obviously having a blast, particularly Fukuyama Jun as the derpy Panda-kun. The show is full of dumb jokes, absurdist gags, and terrible puns, but I can't help watching every episode with a big, stupid grin on my face. I leave Shirokuma's mysterious past for your consideration. 
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 16:03 |
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I really genuinely enjoy Sunshine Sketch / Hidamari Sketch. It's a simple slice-of-life show where each episode is a single day of the activities of some fairly ordinary students at an art college, and it's immensely entertaining. Like the similar but more surreal Azumanga Daioh, the humour is mostly character driven rather than plot driven. They must be doing something right as it's up to a 4th season, pretty unusual for something that isn't a shonen action series with swords and monsters. I'm also one of the very few who enjoys sports shows like Cross Game, Princess Nine, Fighting Spirit, Big Windup and even Dan-Doh!. I guess somebody out there must be watching these as they keep getting translated, but it sometimes feels like the western audience for sports anime is a couple of dozen people.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 16:55 |
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Hell, my tastes are pretty much guilty pleasures only. I mean, I don't only watch trash, but for me anime is so childish in the way it gives you almost instant gratification that I don't really bother trying to watch DEEP shows. Sword Art Online is a good example, so are Baka to Test (I thought I was the only guy who watched this, hope they do a 3rd season), Haganai, ZnT, Baccano, Senyuu and more of that type. Just stuff I can watch after a day of work to relax and laugh. And when it comes to manga, it's even worse. One of the first series I followed was Battle Royale, and adolescent me loved it : boobs, gore, muscles, guns, more boobs, more gore, action! Others include Project Arms (maybe one of the best shonens ever imho), Black Lagoon, Gusnmith Cats, Zeroin, Peacemaker, Rosario+Vampire... Now that I think about it, something really has to be trashy for me not to enjoy it at least on some degree. That or just too much moe, I just can't stomach the thing.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 17:20 |
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There is nothing wrong with liking Black Lagoon or Baccano. 
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 17:56 |
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Liar posted:Pretty Face was actually one of the first mangas I read from first to last in one solid spree. I could never decide if I should feel ashamed of myself for loving that series as much as I did. I will never be ashamed of liking Pretty Face because the jokes were so drat ridiculous and over the top that the whole thing just worked. I will never get tired of the scene where Rando makes a teacher bald by picking him up and using him like a human matchstick on the side of a wall.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 18:14 |
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Code Geass is stupid and silly as all get out and turns into a trainwreck halfway through, but I could not help loving every goddamn minute of it.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 18:15 |
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So this is the new honeypot thread? Although it seems to be tolerated here, I absolutely love Bake/Nisemonogatari. Fanservice aside, it's just too funny and clever for me to hate it.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 18:17 |
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I've mostly outgrown anime altogether, but I still have a weakness for checking out anything involving zombies. As a result I've started watching Highschool of the Dead recently. Why I enjoy the genre is because I think the theme of societal collapse is interesting and I enjoy the multitude of interpretations; zombies just happen to be the most prominent embodiment of that idea in recent culture. No, I don't personally believe a cataclysmic event is just around the corner and I don't have a "bug out bag." Honestly, I don't particularly care for HotD but I'm far enough in that it doesn't make since to not finish the series. As for why I hate it... I'm a 30 year old man with better things to do than watch ridiculously oversexualized cartoons.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 18:35 |
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I don't feel particularly guilty about it but given how infrequently good, non-boring sci fi shows come out, the bulk of what I watch is Harem anime. As for why I like it, I think it's an interesting concept that a guy has options and has to (potentially) make a hard choice about relationships, I like it when the girls aren't JUST cliches, or seeing what twists they make on the usual archetypes. As for why I hate it, it's ALWAYS the loving childhood friend character, or first girl in a box he finds. That said, when a show subverts expectations I find it delightful. The first few episodes were garbage trash but I unironically love School Days for not only having the balls to show what an actual person who do if confronted with tons of women that want his rod do them all up and then of course the hilariously over the top consequences to that. Shuffle! was pretty good in this regard as, setting up the (original Eroge premise) and then essentially going the least likely of the routes Avoiding psychopathic kaede, the god / angel girls that basically set up the harem premise, and going after school friend and all around mostly normal person. DamnGlitch fucked around with this message at Feb 19, 2013 around 18:48 |
| # ? Feb 19, 2013 18:45 |
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Cerebral Bore posted:Detroit Metal City would probably me mine. It's actually kinda dumb and creepy, but the way it's all presented just makes it impossible to take anything that's happening seriously and the whole thing becomes completely hilarious as a result. I'm embarrassed you're embarrassed about Detroit Metal City. That show was rad as gently caress.I would have to say my guilty pleasure is Air Gear. It certainly does its job as an over-the-top shounen anime, and it has some of less savory anime troupes (i.e. pseudo-not-sibiling, sibling infatuation, though it tones it down later from what I hear). I was originally hooked to the series by the opening, "Chain" by Back-On. I still don't know why I like that song so much. I still need to read the manga since the show was unsurprisingly cut after only a couple of volumes. Though they did make a few OVAs recently which jumps like a dozen books. And apparently Obama shows up later.  I think the manga is still going on.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 19:19 |
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Fuck'em all!
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Do you mean Blast of Tempest or Familiar of Zero?
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 19:19 |
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Wait... Did a translator honestly not know his name to translate this correctly?
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 20:24 |
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I'm guessing it was an intentionally fake name in Japanese
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 20:31 |
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I like the manga Negima. Literally half the series is a creepy shotacon harem love comedy with naked 14 year old girls, and while that crap decreases in frequency as the manga goes on it never really goes away. However, the other half was a well-drawn and creative shounen fighting manga which was good enough that I read it til the end. I can't really recommend it to anyone due to all of the negative aspects.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 21:40 |
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Starblind posted:I really genuinely enjoy Sunshine Sketch / Hidamari Sketch. For me, a guilty pleasure is Haiyore! Nyaruko-san. The plot is largely stupid, and there is too much fan service. I didn't know this going in, though, as I just knew that Kana Asumi voiced Nyaruko. The completely absurd premise and, more importantly, Kana Asumi's performance are why I like the show so much. Kana Asumi does a really great job playing the high strung Nyaruko, and it really carried the show for me. I also got a bunch of the references they made, but that's just a bonus.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 21:54 |
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Admittedly I haven't watched/read in ages - but I genuinely enjoyed Bleach for a while. I just think the whole 'call out your weapon's name and crazy poo poo happens' was pretty badass, a decent amount of people had interesting powers/ were used in interesting ways, and I thought the action was actually pretty cool when it wasn't just characters taking turns being smug loving show-offs or going through a different gimmick or phase with each page. Other than that, Chip Cheezum did an Anime Theatre on Dog Days a while back, and while I do think it looks kind of stupid and I haven't watched any more than the episode he and Ironicus riffed on...I dunno, it almost looks kind of charming, provided it doesn't take itself too seriously.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 22:02 |
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| # ? May 25, 2013 23:17 |
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I'm a sucker for action series in which a character uses a dumb/weak power in creative ways to beat the competition, which is probably why I keep reading Rising X Rydeen each month. It shows some potential of going that way, but the decent action and humor are sandwiched between horrendous amounts of fanservice. Also, the main character's power is obviously supposed to be semen.
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| # ? Feb 19, 2013 22:19 |
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