Top Gun

Poke they're trying to fix the entire site. Of course they're goddamn busy. Honestly I'm good for right now myself. The only part of the site I use is my list, and that's back up. I could do with the history working too, but that's a minor inconvenience.

From everything I understand the last part of Bleach was a hilarious clusterfuck, so I genuinely want to see it animated and revel in the trainwreck.

He'll be having some fun.

Haa...I just tried that Anilist site because I was mildly curious as to what other options are available, and there's a big banner emblazoned across the bottom saying, "A modern browser is required to use this site." Really great sign when the assholes can't even properly detect a browser's feature set.

The list itself is back up, though half the site's functionality is still down.

Not really. No one uses forums in a sustained manner anymore except for old-school netizens.

What do YOU mean, you people?!

I don't think they were trying to make it look 2D in the first place anyway, at least not entirely. I don't think a lot of the explicitly crystalline shots of the characters would have worked nearly as well in a 2D style.

Yeah, but I suck balls at doing that. Seriously, I have well over 100 anime series on BD/DVD that I haven't so much as touched. The block actually makes me do shit.

"Do you find this difficult to understand?"

Not at all. Being presented with entire seasons of stuff piled up all at once is even more of a turn-off for me. The reason why I still enjoy watching the block and linear TV in general is that the once-a-week structure provides natural pacing. So long as I'm watching at least one episode per week, even if those episodes are piled up on my DVR, I know I'm at least keeping pace and not "falling behind" (and yes I realize that means nothing in the practical sense given that most of these shows have already finished, but it does the job mentally). (Have I mentioned how much I fucking hate the very concept of binging?)

Do people actually want to be locked into watching 52 weeks straight of block premieres, without any sort of breather? Is that really it? Because that sounds like a living hell to me.

Plenty of license-rescued series have been re-released with far worse dubs on them. At the very least it's adequate. FUNi's not going to spend any money doing a redub of an obscure late-90s sci-fi series that already has a dub in the first place.

Just watched it for the first time a couple of months ago, so yo. The dub for Crest was pretty raw, but I didn't mind it too much. The cast got substantially better at their roles by the time of Banner.

Kids today watch a shitload of anime, most of which at least looks good aesthetically, so maybe US animators collectively decided "fuck it we can't compete with that let's make goofy pudgy balloon people." (This is nothing against overly-stylized shows, there are any number of fantastic ones out there, many with great animation, but there has to be something else to back it up.)

It's another sign of you being a complete tool who has no goddamn idea how to program a television block.

Yes ben they were totally going to premiere a new series at 3:30 in the goddamn morning.

The only TV I had in my room growing up was this ancient little thing my parents used to have in their bedroom, complete with a single mono speaker, rabbit ears, and channel dials. I didn't have cable in my room at home (still don't), so I had to scrabble for the few broadcast channels it could pick up. It was hooked to an ancient mostly-dead VCR which was only really good for using the input ports to hook up my PS1. I didn't have my own computer until I left for college.

I'd feel much better about this if it was still Shingo Natsume at Madhouse. I think the new director has...worked on Shippuuden?

It sure as hell isn't 95%. I mean I know it happens, but I figured it'd be limited to jobs where that's a specific issue. Hell, I work around kids all day but I sure as hell don't need to. Pretty sure our union would never stand for it anyway.

The hell do you people all do that you're subject to drug testing?

The fact that the series is ready to go in Japan in no way implies it is also ready to go in the US. Dubbing may be in-progress but not completed. There are almost always delays in getting material for the series from Japan. Approval has to be granted for casting choices and translations. Why wait until both largely-independent seasons are finished if you already have one ready to go? And the anime industry is NOTORIOUS for not having shit done until the last minute. If a production is falling behind, as they often do, it's not uncommon for tapes of episodes to ne sent out to the Japanese broadcaster on the same day they're due to air. That Paranoia Agent episode was essentially a documentary. How the hell do you not know shit like this?

Ben do you have any evidence whatsoever that Alternative will even be ready to air as soon as Progressive finishes? No, you don't. You're just sperging. Per usual.

All I can think of:

Poof probably isn't even reading this anymore, but I just found it, so imma megapost anyway. Beats doing shit for work. A lot of big anime fans seemed to get into it by being attracted to something that felt culturally "different," but I came into the fandom via a different path. I've been an animation fan for as long as I can remember; I think I have to thank/blame my grandmother for this, since she always had a bunch of dollar-store VHS collections of old Looney Tunes and Famous Studios shorts. (She had to be one of the few grandmothers at that time who owned Fantasia on home video. ) I loved cartoons as a little kid, and even a bit later on when most people my age were into the likes of Saved by the Bell or Full House or Nick's live-action stuff, I pretty much ignored them in favor of the Disney Afternoons and the DCAU and One Saturday Morning and all that good shit. I watched a bit of live-action TV too, mainly nerd stuff like The X-Files or Star Trek, but it was mostly cartoons. Even then, although I loved a few of the traditional huge Disney musicals, I don't think they were ever my absolute favorites: I tended to lean towards more serious-minded movies like The Great Mouse Detective, or some of Don Bluth's works, or The Iron Giant. So I think in that sense anime was a natural fit for me: it was animated, which I loved, but it was a very different sort of animated than the vast majority of American offerings, generally focusing far more on serialized storytelling and serious character development. As for why I've always preferred animation to live-action in general, it's hard to say, but in a strange way I think I've always been able to relate more to animated characters than live-action ones. To me live-action acting requires a much greater suspension of disbelief: what you're seeing is a real person pretending to be a character, so it's very easy to see the actor first, and the person they're portraying second. It takes a very rare sort of performance, something at the level of Heath Ledger as the Joker or Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, for me to feel, "Okay, that person really IS that character." That isn't to say I don't enjoy a whole ton of live-action television and movies, but it's generally the actor's identity and personality that are foremost in my mind. With animation it's different: the person you're seeing on-screen really IS that character, because they were originally created as such. What you're seeing is the "reality" of the situation, for lack of a better term. Sure, you're still hearing a real person's voice, which is especially noticeable if it's a celebrity or a voiceover artist you're familiar with, but that's a big step removed from seeing the actual person, so it's much easier to maintain the illusion. Even today, whenever I hear Steve Blum's voice in something, there's a part of my brain that'll go, "Hi Spike!" Another big reason is in the storytelling format. It's common for anime series, at least ones that are original works and not adaptations of a manga or novel, to be planned from the get-go with a defined final length, which I feel is hugely beneficial to telling a well-structured story. I'm of the firm belief that good writing requires knowing your end goal before you ever put pen to paper, and at least having a general idea of how you're going to get from point A to point B; that's way easier to do if you know in advance how long you have to say what you want to say. (Most of my favorite anime series tend to fall somewhere around the 26-episode length, which I've found was a great timeframe for them to tell a good story without overstaying their welcome.) Contrast that with American television, which at least until very recently has always been based on the seasonal model: shows keep getting renewed as long as they're successful, often for far longer than the original creators ever envisioned, and can be canceled at the drop of the hat if their audience falls off. It was a very rare show like Breaking Bad that had an overall planned length and was given the creative freedom to tell its entire story successfully. Most of the time, you wind up with a complete clusterfuck in the vein of Lost, where it became blatantly clear to everyone as time passed that the original creators had no goddamn clue where they were going. Not to say this doesn't happen a lot in anime as well, but there's far more opportunity for a shorter self-contained story there. At least the rise of streaming seems to be allowing for more that sort of storytelling in live-action productions. One more thing to toss on the pile is genre preference. The vast majority of Western live-action TV series have tended to fall into a few broad categories: you have your half-hour sitcoms, your police procedurals, your medical dramas, and...not a whole lot else honestly. More niche shows like Star Trek stepped beyond those boundaries, but they were few and far between. I tend to not be super-interested in real-world-focused fiction in whatever guise it takes, so that never left me with many options. In contrast, anime deals in a huge range of genres, many of which you'd never see in live-action outside of a big-budget movie (and some of them not even there). You're not going to scratch an itch for space-opera or hard sci-fi or giant robots or high fantasy or psychological horror in many other places, and anime has been doing a lot of that stuff from its very beginning. For a general nerd, it's hog heaven. Now granted, live-action TV has been making some significant strides in that regard, especially when it comes to streaming, but as I'm not a huge fan of consuming media via streaming (and loathe binging) I'm not even aware of much of it. Plus I already have a massive anime backlog, so I don't really need to pile anything else on my plate. There's a lot more I could talk about here, whether it's how I got into anime in the first place and how that informs my tastes today, or even little things like preferring the half-hour TV format to the full hour that non-sitcom live-action almost exclusively uses, but this is already way too long and no one's going to read it anyway. Long story short: I've always liked cartoons over live-action, and anime tells more of the sorts of stories I prefer, so that's pretty much what I stick to. I can't even remember the last live-action series I watched in its entirety...Firefly, maybe?