• 2 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 14th, 2023
  • neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoAnime@ani.social•Announcing Winners of the 2025 Fediverse Anime AwardsEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    I adored Apocalypse Hotel and am delighted to see that it won, but CITY the Animation and others are still on my to-watch list.

    I don’t know if this applies to anyone else here, but I felt genuinely unqualified to vote having not seen every one of the series nominated. In fact, I’m not sure if there was any category from which I’d watched all the nominated entries.

    For more participation, I’d ask for perhaps fewer nominees or more time between the announcements and closed voting.

  • neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoAnime@ani.social•Anime with a high death count that's actually good?English
    4·
    9 months ago

    The deeper question here is what interests you about about having a high body count in an anime?

    If it’s about pure numbers, you can’t beat Apocalypse Hotel; every human dies or flees the planet by the end of the first episode. The show itself, however, doesn’t really linger on that. It’s just the setup for how a bunch of robots cope and find usefulness after all the humans are gone. It’s life-affirming.

    If you’re interested in general bleakness and existential dread, where anything can happen to anyone at any time, I’d recommend Made in Abyss and Sonny Boy. These are two VERY different series. Made in Abyss falls into the newly coined “guro-moe” genre (purposely-designed chibi characters dealing with gut-wrenchingly painful situations) where the main characters are compelled to face increasingly dire and morally complex scenarios in service of a Sisyphean quest from which they may never return. Sonny Boy starts with a well-worn “floating classroom” trope, but quickly turns into a dense meditation on existential philosophy. Taken in isolation, you’ll find yourself constantly playing catch-up to understand what the hell is going on. If you decide to try this one out, I strongly recommend following up each episode by reading Steve Jones’ episode reviews on Anime News Network, which really help unpack the action and provides context clues to a lot of the philosophical musings the show gets into.

    These may not be exactly what you had in mind. Two others that I read about that might be up your alley are Death Parade and Alice in Borderland, but I haven’t watched or read either of them.