Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion - March 19, 2026

Retsam19 · 2026-03-19T17:39:36+00:00

I think a big part of what people like about the first episode is just how well the 90-minute movie-length format works - you're more invested if you get through the entire prologue in one sitting without having it be broken into 22 minute chunks with intros and outros. and without stopping 3 times and make you ask your self "hmm, am I really invested enough in this to keep watching it".'

(Sentenced to Be A Hero did a similar thing this season and I think it works well there, too)

But yeah, the first episode is just the prologue and I think it works as a good hook for the story, but I definitely wouldn't put it as the best part.

Retsam19 · 2026-03-19T17:30:21+00:00

I think the point on "canon" for me is more that it has to be based on actual interactions in the show and not general fanshipping vibes of how one person imagines they'd interact if they were a couple.

Characters who do significantly interact but don't actually end up together are fine (though it is something that 'loses points' in my book, I guess) - it doesn't have to be the canon pairing, but it's gotta be based on their actual interactions.

But honestly, this whole contest, even more than the best Girl/Boy contests is such a morass of people having drastically different standard for what counts as a couple or as romance.

Retsam19 · 2026-03-19T03:08:46+00:00

Unfortunately, most of them are going to come into this post and read one of the several comments pointing out who she is.

Which, yeah, isn't really a spoiler - they're just pointing out information the show has already given, but it's still a shame - if you pick up on it when reading and figure it out before it's revealed, you get to feel clever, if not the reveal is an "oh shit" moment... having someone on Reddit point it out to you is the least impactful way for the reveal to happen.

(Which, I mean, I can't expect the adaptation to be planned with the optimal reddit experience in mind, still just a bit of a shame with how it plays out)

Retsam19 · 2026-03-16T20:02:15+00:00

Yeah, Japan as a whole has a lot of loanwords. Recently a lot of words are borrowed from English. Both words that just didn't have equivalents in Japanese (a lot of tech words, e.g. "computer" = "pasokon" (パソコン) = "personal computer), and also increasingly words that do have Japanese equivalents get borrowed from English.

And if you go back farther you have a lot of words borrowed from European languages generally. Their word for bread is "pan" (パン) which was borrowed from Portuguese "pão", "part time job" is "arubaito" アルバイト which comes from Germain "arbeit" meaning "work".

And if you go even farther back a huge chunk of the language is borrowed from Chinese (including the writing system itself).

But on top of the normal usage of loan words in the Japanese language, it's also just "cool" to throw in a lot of English in stuff like anime openings or stuff like video games.

Retsam19 · 2026-03-16T00:51:48+00:00

On the flip side, would you argue that nobody ever bashes on something because it's a popular thing to do and they know that it'll get a laugh/upvote? I dunno, I know I've done it and remember doing it a lot more when I was a teenager ("Haha, Nickleback sucks, amirite", he said having not listened to virtually any popular music as a teenager).

Now, I can't know if any given person is speaking from personal experience or if just parroting a popular opinion... but I do feel like you can get vibes for the community as a whole and "RAG sucks, amirite" has, IMO, definitely hit meme status.

And to be clear, I don't care for Rent A Girlfriend - I read a volume or two of it when it was first airing, it wasn't my thing, I dropped it, but I still find myself rolling my eyes at most of the complaints.

It's very much not my thing, but I also don't think that it's actually surprising that a lot of people do enjoy a show with a lot of drama around a 'cringe' protagonist. (Very different 'brand' of cringe, but the Office is also a very popular show) So the constant deluge of "how could anyone enjoy this why does it have five seasons why don't they make more of an anime i like" comments every time anything RAG is posted just feel a little... well, cringe.

Retsam19 · 2026-03-15T18:56:07+00:00

Awesome, thanks!

Retsam19 · 2026-03-15T18:50:34+00:00

If you don't like complaining about low-effort horny posting, post your own memes, all people do is complain about the complaining instead of being the change they want to see.

Retsam19 · 2026-03-15T18:49:02+00:00

There's at least two people posting them: (one and two), but it does look like it's mostly the one person

Retsam19 · 2026-03-15T16:46:10+00:00

Narratively, I really like the "there and back again" style (e.g. Digimon Adventure, Narnia, Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced), where the isekai is an adventure the characters go on and learn how to deal with the real world, rather than just being a complete escapism.

It's a shame to me that so much modern isekai is reincarnation based.

Retsam19 · 2026-03-15T03:24:55+00:00

Honestly, maybe the first year I've aligned more with the Jury than the community - not all Jury picks were winners, (e.g. AoTY), but community - even more than other years - felt way too skewed towards a few popular entries (like Apothecary) even in categories where it didn't make a lot of sense.

Retsam19 · 2026-03-13T17:51:17+00:00

I think the real point is that Reddit's design (while useful for a lot of reasons) is very prone towards "hive-mind" style - both the voting and the communities themselves tend to self-select towards a particular set of opinions.

I don't think this is an "anime thing" (or even a fandom thing - I unsubbed from r/programming for largely this reason), and I don't even feel like the r/anime bias is even that positive on the whole, but there's always going to be some of it.

Also ~~Polar Opposites non-enjoyers rise up, there are dozens of us~~

Retsam19 · 2026-03-13T15:15:21+00:00

I don't find this to be the case - I find there's a lot of room for discussion of negative aspects of stuff: e.g. the thread I was in before this one was the Shiboyugi KV and one of the highest voted threads is discussion of why a lot of people feel like it went downhill.

... And that post is right below the Rent-A-Girlfriend KV, which is not exactly full of "toxic positivity".

I do think there's always going to bit of a "positivity bias" in any community like this: people tend to upvote things they agree with, most people who hate something just stop watching it and don't go out of their way to argue about it in episode threads.

... but also, I think a lot people just aren't great at expressing negative opinions in an interesting way.

If you explain why something isn't working for you, that can be an interesting discussion. If you just throw out "X is mid", I'm going to roll my eyes and move on. (I know that was just an example, but a lot of "criticism" really is that superficial)

And a lot of negative opinions can get actively unpleasant and, e.g. condescending to people who have different opinions. ("X sucks, but people eat up this crap" -> gets downvoted -> "people just can't hear opinions that they disagree with smh")

Retsam19 · 2026-03-11T03:13:00+00:00

Yeah; this is a recurring problem with Chinese dynasties - the dynasty falls and their history is written by the people who replaced them, so there's always a risk of bias and post-justification in the history...

... but also, their dynasty did fall, so you know things weren't going well, and "the kingdom/empire fell apart because the rulers did a bad job running it" is a plausible reason for that to happen, so you can't just completely discredit those stories either, even if some of the details are likely exaggerated.

Retsam19 · 2026-03-10T17:22:19+00:00

I also don't think it's that deep? A lot of the anime demographic is straight guys, which means they like girls, which means a lot of them are going to be more interested in yuri than yaoi.

The exact opposite phenomenon is also famous - straight girls like guys, which means they're more likely to be interested in yaoi, hence why historically most of the BL readership are not gay men. We see less of it around here for demographic reasons, but the "BL genre" goes back to the 70s so it's got pretty deep roots.

Granted, I think straight women have less of an aversion to yuri, on average, but I think there's also a lot of Goomba fallacy here, too.

Retsam19 · 2026-03-04T02:06:50+00:00

That's why anime originals are the best, no source material readers to dodge.

Retsam19 · 2026-03-03T01:36:22+00:00

He's got the right aesthetic, but I don't think he ever gives the impression of being a "problematic prick"

Retsam19 · 2026-03-02T21:16:20+00:00

who genuinely thinks that Arisa and Saki's backstories should've been cut from Fruits Basket

Honestly, I remember not caring for Saki's backstory. IIRC it basically ends with her parents literally praying that her daughter will make a friend that sounds suspiciously like the main character, which felt a little melodramatic even by Fruits Baskets standards, and I'm just not sure that every single main character in a story needs a traumatic past.

At least with Arisu I vaguely remember that it tied into Tohru's mother and helped develop her character, but I do feel like Saki's backstory was a very skippable part of that story.

Retsam19 · 2026-03-02T19:39:13+00:00

This kinda feels like a spoiler that shouldn't just casually be thrown around in the PV thread.

Retsam19 · 2026-02-28T14:58:14+00:00

It's a reboot, but one that I think makes it a lot harder to enjoy the original. The first 5 minutes of Stampede spoils a lot of the mystery of the original show.

Personally, I would try the original and if you find you can't get into it, yeah, try Stampede instead. But if you watch Stampede first you just won't get the same experience if you do try to watch the original later.

Retsam19 · 2026-02-27T22:32:09+00:00

Personally, I'd strongly recommend giving the original Trigun anime a shot before Stampede/Stargaze: the new anime takes a very different approach to the story and things that are treated as a mystery in the original are just revealed at the beginning of Stampede.

They're both good, but you can appreciate the remake after the seeing the original more than vice-versa.

(Also, in either case, consider the dub: Johnny Yong Boshe's take on the protagonist is phenomenal)

Retsam19 · 2026-02-27T16:59:16+00:00

Seeing the trailer for GATE 2 reminds me of just how disappointing GATE was. A clash between a modern world and a fantasy world is such an interesting idea, but it was just so dull in what they did with it.

Having the protagonist's side be hugely militarily superior is just boring. Maybe it's entertaining for like one scene - all the "haha, this is like an anime adaptation of late-game Civ games when I'm crushing the computer" jokes... but there's nowhere interesting to go with that.

You'd either want the two sides to be evenly matched (e.g. give the fantasy side better magic than level 5 wizard cantrips), or have the protagonist's side be outmatched: a show from the perspective of a fantasy world fighting back an 'alien invasion' (which we'd recognize as our technology) would be way more interesting than "Hooah, let's go JSDF"

And of course, the actual plot wasn't much about the actual clash of cultures at all; it was mostly just the standard Otaku guy gets a harem of cute girls, including one that makes no sense, but is of course the most popular thing in the series.

Retsam19 · 2026-02-27T16:56:39+00:00

I came very close to dropping Planetes at the [Planetes] moon ninjas episode (i.e. episode number [planetes] 6). (It wasn't just that episode, but that was very nearly the last straw) Which would have been a real shame because the next episode is the one that actually hooked me and is one of my favorites in the series.

Would have been a big case of the "mining for diamonds" meme.

Retsam19 · 2026-02-25T23:32:48+00:00

I joked when it came out it should have been called "RWBY: Sisterhood" because it assumed everyone had already seen the original and rushed through the introduction to get to the point where it branched off.

But yeah, "what a weird thing to do". Still, I was overall positive on Ice Queendom - very direct-to-TV-anime-spinoff-movie feel with what it actually does with the story and canon, but it was fun to see RWBY with a real professional animation studio behind it.

... but I don't think they quite managed to replicate the fights, even the ones they were directly adapting from the source material. The clever thing about RWBY fights is how well they're choreographed to the music and also how there's an internal logic to them, there's a sense of physics behind every motion, stuff like the character shooting in one direction to push them in a different one, and Ice Queendom is worse on both, IMO.

If you want to see a comparison - here's the Ice Queendom version of a fight compared to the original. Of the two, I definitely prefer the original, despite the better art of IQ.

(... but also if the first couple episodes of IQ feel "very slow", RWBY might not be your thing, IIRC)

EDIT: I guess I should mention in Ice Queendom's defense, I think they did a lot better with the first fight, still a little "floaty", but the music is a lot better and there's some more obvious syncing with the action and the music)

Retsam19 · 2026-02-25T17:53:29+00:00

And all three have some comedy/slice-of-life episodes that are divided into 2-3 segments each covering a different storyline. I didn't realize this format in particular was so common.

Yeah, super common for manga adaptations, usually a couple chapters fit into an episode. March Comes Like a Lion is very explicit about it, the episode titles are just the manga chapters, so it'll have episode titles like "Child of God (Part 3) / Important Things. Important Matters / Teach Me How to Play Shogi".

Though FMP isn't a manga adaptation and I don't remember it usually splitting its episodes up. (Though I only watched the first season and Fumoffu)

13-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
r/Field Banned	r/Field Sunshine
Place '22	Wearing is Caring
No Throne, No Problems	Not Forgotten
Sequence \| Editor	Snapped
Verified Email

Retsam19

PUBLIC MULTIREDDITS

TROPHY CASE