That anime.plus tool is super cool! Do you know if anything like that exists for anilist.co?

I love Taira. He may look like he’s in pain every time anyone says anything, but actually he’s in pain.

It has always bothered me when anime characters just wave while facing away from the others. Sure, perhaps it reduces animation effort, but it’s so unrealistic.

I actually had a Korean girl do this to me once when I was in college. Maybe it’s an east-asian thing? Not exactly a large sample size here though, so also maybe not.

I have the first 10 volumes sitting on my shelf, but I’m waiting for it to get less hot before I read them; I will want to go camping once I get into it!

I was very amused seeing him and the other old guy he hangs out with, since I mostly knew them from Gintama!

Bang Brave Bangern! is the gayest, and probably the most fun anime I’ve ever seen. Even the year it came out I didn’t see very many people talking about it, so shoutout to the Mother’s Basement youtube channel for making me aware of its existence.

Golden Kamuy is also excellent, but a lot of people got (understandably) turned off by how bad the bears looked in the first couple of episodes. They were rendered in 3d and composited in really poorly. It was not great. And tbh while the rest of the show doesn’t have anything that bad later on the animation never really becomes what I’d call “great”. That said, if you want to watch a bunch of crazy dudes kill each other over some gold in Taisho-era Hokkaido this show is an incredible time.

Edit: The Elusive Samurai is also an absolutely amazing watch. You just have to be okay with a show where one moment they’re making silly jokes and then 30 seconds later people are being beheaded.

I think that’s just because it’s kinda old at this point; people don’t often talk about stuff that’s more than a few years old unfortunately.

In my case, the execution / story-telling of some anime is so awesome that the story being cookie-cutter didn’t matter.

This is a point that I think more anime fans could learn from. It’s all about the execution. When we like something it’s easy to jump to the conclusion, “I enjoy this genre and should thus seek more of it out” when actually we just liked that it had good writing/animation/music/sound design/whatever.

This can be a problem for me sometimes, especially with Weekly Shounen Jump manga. Even if the mangaka tries to have an original thought their editor will often push them towards doing the standard WSJ thing if their originality doesn’t immediately translate into tons of readership. I really loved the first season of Demon Slayer. After a while though it was hard to ignore that every dang fight played out the same way over and over. For this reason I rarely pick up shounen series these days; perhaps originality is lower-priority when the target audience is younger and thus hasn’t seen all the stuff it’s cribbing on anyways.

Of course, this isn’t only a problem with anime, or even with bad writing. I used to read a lot of classic sci-fi 15-20 years ago because that’s what I could consistently find in libraries, or in thriftstores for ultra-cheap (think $0.25 per copy). At some point I was about 10-15% into some Isaac Asimov book and realized that I was pretty sure I knew roughly what was going to happen for the entire remainder of the story. TBH I don’t even know if I was correct; I lost interest and returned the book to the library without ever having finished it. I don’t think this happened because Isaac Asimov was a bad writer, but he wrote a lot of books and I had already read a lot of those books.

As for whether there are stories I can enjoy despite this, certainly there are! Phineas and Ferb is one of my favorite American anime, and it’s about as formulaic as it can get. The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, REALLY Love You is also very formulaic, yet it’s zaniness rarely fails to amuse me. You and I Are Polar Opposites is pretty straightforward about what it’s going to be doing, but it’s just the sweetest thing so I enjoy it nonetheless. Heck, most Gundam series follow the same few basic formulae and yet they still are (usually) an enjoyable time. Most of Golden Kamuy is just “let’s see what kind of insane dude we meet in Hokkaido today” and I’m absolutely here for it.

The best example of this I can think of is Ashikaga Takauji from The Elusive Samurai. Dude is completely insane, and IIRC is canonically possessed by a demon. He himself doesn’t even realize this, nor do most of his men. Apart from his brother, who realizes something is up, he just seems like a really skilled and charismatic military leader to them.

Most of the characters from Golden Kamuy are insane on the surface and also insane behind closed doors, but a few of them manage to put on normal faces when it suits them. The taxidermist comes to mind.

I’m not at all surprised to see WHA near the top of a list like this. One of the things about the magic system that works really well is that it relies on the ability for the characters to draw these shapes quickly and perfectly under high-stress situations, and that’s a skill that a normal human can actually relate to. When Naruto beats up some dude I mostly just think, “I guess the author chose for Naruto to be stronger this time” or “holy shit the fight is finally over that took so loooong” but when one of the characters in WHA dips their shoe in some ink and draws a massive magic circle on the ground using their whole leg or something crazy like that I can actually imagine how difficult that would be to do quickly and accurately.

That’s a great one to start on though; it had such an aesthetic!

The first anime that I watched that I thought of as an anime was Cromartie High School. My college roommate called me over to his desk and in the end we watched the whole show on his monitor with me looking over his shoulder. I really enjoyed it, but I didn’t think too much about it and didn’t watch another anime until I saw Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood about 4 years later. It was all downhill from there.

I’ve read the manga for this one. It was fine. Not particularly good, but certainly not bad either. Just a very “okay” slice of life gag manga.

I know Cardcaptor Sakura was doing it long before FMA was, but I doubt they were the “first” either.

particularly the Alchemists who were fond of sophisticated patterns and diagrams, as well as celtic runes and even some Chinese sorcerors.

I’m sure that’s a huge part of it.

It’s gotta be LOOK BACK. It’s a very human story.

I love the freak that is Sadamune. He’s such a weirdo, and the anime is portraying that perfectly. As I recall from having read the manga, there are many such freaks waiting for us in the future. Lots to look forward to.

I’m using AL-chan, which is a frontend for anilist.co. Of course, there are various other frontends available, including just using anilist itself directly.

My biggest gripe is it doesn’t let you know when new episodes are out for anime you’re watching

AL-chan does this. It can also notify you when new seasons of shows you’ve seen have been annouced.

I also don’t like the numbering system for watched episodes - it starts at zero instead of one so it shows the last episode you watched vs the next episode you should be watching.( It’s relatively minor I know but that’s how I prefer my show tracking)

I’m guessing you’ll have a hard time finding an app that displays the number of episodes you’ve seen +1 instead of just showing the number of episodes you’ve seen. As far as I know, AL-chan can’t be configured to do this.

Features it does have that I need are displaying English titles

This is configurable

the ability to rank series (even if it’s just locally).

No problems there either

There are some crazy choices here. I’m not sure I’d call any of the anime listed here perfect, but Death Note? Really? A show which people generally agree falls off after the first half?

TBH I suspect Frieren is going to have that same issue unfortunately. Reading the manga has given me a strong impression that the author has no idea what they’re writing and is just coming up with it as they go. I don’t expect Season 3 to be as well-received as 1 & 2 were. Honestly I think a show boasting an incomplete story should be disqualified from lists like this anyways. How can you say something is perfect if you haven’t seen large parts of it yet, and those parts may never even exist?

Nippon Sangoku had incredible art, and incredibly one-dimensional characters. Maybe this author found its political storyline fascinating; I’d say if you want that you’d be better-off watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

Even most One Piece fans will admit the anime has horrible pacing at times.

I could probably go on, but I’ll refrain.

The Elusive Samurai’s first ED was incredible.