Top Gun

ITT ben complains that HxH explains too much while simultaneously complaining about the world-building it does via showing instead of telling.

Yeah, the 2011 adaptation didn't really nail things until Yorknew City, or maybe Heaven's Arena. The Hunter Exam as a whole was far better in the 1999 series.

I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell Oda ever works on anything else substantial. This is his magnum opus. Then again he's probably a robot, soooo.

I kind of want to pat most of you on the head and say "There, there..."

120-ish is probably a far safer bet.

I like how Ben is still salty that his own beloved shounen got put down early because of its incompetent writing while Togashi can trickle out a single volume per year and still pull off huge sales because readers actually enjoy his world-building.

That Opening Ceremony should go off with a bang, then?

The best kind of boob.

Oh yeah, that's clearly right out. Totally.

All of this is exactly why I was never able to suspend my disbelief from the get-go. People piloting giant robots fueled by manly spirit, people eating magical fruits that turn them into rubber or smoke or fire, people able to shoot beams out of their hands that can blow up a planet, those things I have no problem with. They're set in the realm of pure fantasy, so I can accept them implicitly. Even something like Ghost in the Shell that describes a 2030 very detached from the reality we will most likely see in another decade is completely forgivable, since it was written in the late 80s and joins a long, proud tradition of sci-fi that's a bit too over- or under-ambitious about what the future will bring. But if you're going to set your story just a handful of years in the future, based largely on technology that already exists, and you make a ridiculously-implausible setup with logic holes one could fly a 747 through, you deserve to be ripped for it.

Plus that tentacle plant that licked the loli waifu.

I don't really give a shit whether the picks are obvious or obscure, as long as they're enjoyable.

Glad to know the franchise continues to be irredeemable garbage.

*sees like 20 Ben posts in a row* *nope.avi* Oh good, I see he's doing the whole "I have a massive IQ yet can't read basic social cues and have no ability to analyze a text" thing.

I hope you literally choke on your rage.

The only series that air in the mornings/prime-time are mainstream family-friendly series like Doraemon, Sazae-San, and Detective Conan. One Piece has locked down a coveted Sunday-morning timeslot for well over a decade now. Pretty much every otaku-targeted series airs in a late-night slot. In fact they essentially act as their own infomercials, since the production committees pay networks to air them in the hopes of earning money via merchandise and home video sales. Streaming has started to change this a little bit, but the Japanese corporate world is notoriously averse to big paradigm shifts, so that remains the main model.

Seriously though, where's my actual fucking curling animu.

I read a pretty cogent argument a while back that Bleach essentially supports fascism. Apparently in the final chapter, there's a shot of the Soul Society, and the giant execution device that Ichigo destroyed, the one that nearly killed Rukia for no reason has been rebuilt. She has to look at that thing every day. Nothing has changed in the Soul Society. The leadership is still incompetent. Most souls are still treated like shit (which, by the way, Rukia flat-out lied about early in the series). It's all garbage. Kubo had so much opportunity in his setting, but just like every other potentially-interesting element he totally squandered it in lieu of shitty fight scenes that went nowhere. Like, can you even imagine how Luffy would have reacted if he'd been the protagonist instead of Ichigo? I don't even have to imagine, because he's done it so many times in his own series: he'd punch his way through the entire Soul Society until he got to the asshole in charge, and then he'd punch him hardest of all. Yet what he sees barely even fazes Ichigo in the long run. He's one of the most limpdick shounen protagonists I've ever seen.

Seriously. I doubt Hulu gives two shits about whatever winds up on linear TV.

SAO lost me right from the get-go by its premise alone: A) The idea that a single person could both do all the core design and coding for a massive, sophisticated MMO AND singlehandedly engineer a sophisticated piece of custom hardware. Hardware that throughout all of manufacturing and retail apparently escaped any sort of inspection or teardowns that would expose the unnecessary massively-powerful microwave emitter plopped up against the user's skull. Because this is how game and hardware development works. B) The idea that, over two goddamn years, no one managed to reverse-engineer the headset to figure out some way to safely deactivate it. They couldn't fire off an EMP to fry it? Find a critical circuit connection and do something to disable it via brute force? Slip some protective shielding underneath the headset to mitigate the microwaves? Nope, let's have our comatose patients continue to be held hostage because we're total dumbshits! And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The climax of the SAO arc is one of the most spectacularly awful narrative cop-outs in anime history.

To be fair they had that chemistry in the anime too, before Kubo shat all over everything.

They would if they were a fuckawful writer. Every single element in this show has been done far better in at least a dozen other shounen. There is no reason whatsoever for it to exist. Also I love how you attempt to talk shit about shows without having the slightest grasp of why they do what they do. Lie down before you hurt yourself.

I genuinely want the rest to be animated because I want to see what a colossal clusterfuck it becomes with my own two eyes.