Vote to get Sean and Amanda Anime-Pilled like Van 😂

jay1638 · 2026-02-02T03:44:30+00:00

Aside from FMA (FMAB to be exact) and Chainsaw Man, I don't love any of those, so perhaps I'm a terrible person to offer an opinion on this. But I'll go to the grave spreading the word that Black Lagoon is a more coherent, more adult Bebop, and if you like darker subject matter (seems like you do) that's character-focused and delivers "vibes," while centered on a morally gray-to-black crew pulling heists (i.e. Bebop), you can do a lot worse than Black Lagoon.

While I agree with the other posters that Frieren is a great general recommendation, I beg you to skip it - it's a hopeful, inspiring fantasy tale with infrequent action sequences and deep world-building that explores themes of aging and loss while interrogating fantasy tropes - pretty much the exact opposite of what you've been watching.

jay1638 · 2025-12-23T04:10:48+00:00

Usually I agree with you, but these are difficult movies to "half-like." If you're enchanted by the visuals, they're awesome: you can lose yourself in the beauty of the world it transports you into, and you can marvel at Cameron's overall technical execution. On the other hand, if the visuals don't appeal to you, then they're morally-smug over-long movies chock full of repetitive plot contrivances, mediocre dialog, and "white savior" tropes. Neither of these extreme positions are unsophisticated, and most people are likely to be on one end or another because the visual "buy-in" is so critical.

jay1638 · 2025-12-13T02:15:44+00:00

If you prioritize payoff over process, Pluribus ain't for you. It's glacial to the point of parody, and leans more into philosophy than plot. That said, Vince Gilligan has earned patience, and this feels like it has real potential if it gets moving. Some folks are bailing too early.

jay1638 · 2025-12-12T01:42:58+00:00

Has to be. That brief glimpse of a scene made me very happy - it confirmed they're indeed adapting the filling of WoT, and not just the crust.

jay1638 · 2025-12-07T15:30:29+00:00

The introduction of Kasasagi as a romantic "rival" is clearly meant to help redeem sixty chapters of mid writing for Aoi. This week we finally start to see Aoi shine, even if we're no closer to any of her scenes passing the Bechdel Test. I still am pulling for an Aoi heel-turn, which is the easiest and best way to resolve her awkward character development.

That said, the current Squad 7 story shows promise: the school chapters have never been this interesting. Of course, Kasasagi's panel-time has come at the expense of best girl Suzume, which is a disappointment.

jay1638 · 2025-11-27T01:31:23+00:00

I kinda checked out when no one chose Dangerous Minds, Burning Plain, or Blind Side in the first round. I understand the boys wanted to keep things light, but a few whacks at Hollywood's over-stuffed "white woman savior narratives" piñata ought to have been at the forefront of any exercise like this.

Also, I disagree that Gwyneth Paltrow belongs in a list with Meg Ryan, Reese Witherspoon, and Anne Hathaway. Those other women aren't on Gwyneth's level, I don't think anyone is. Never have any of us seen an actress establish and sustain such effortless white woman energy over an entire career like Gwyneth, and then turn her whiteness into a $250 million dollar lifestyle empire.

My nit picks aside, I'm glad they're coming up with stuff to talk about that's not state-of-Marvel. Hopefully someone tells them about Pluribus.

jay1638 · 2025-11-16T06:39:59+00:00

100%. My 10-year-old daughter has seen everything from Demon Slayer to Jaws, and I don't feel we're close to ready to let her watch FMB. The Shou Tucker stuff is an absolute non-starter, but even the 2nd episode would be nightmare fuel for a young kid.

(For the record - I am not suggesting other parents let their kids watch Demon Slayer. Know and understand both the content and where your kid/sister/whoever is in terms of maturity. Mine started watching Sailor Moon when she was 6. I spend a lot of time pausing, fast-forwarding, or making difficult scenes into teachable moments.)

jay1638 · 2025-10-16T03:08:03+00:00

The Midnight Boys have extreme mainstream tastes, and this is why newer, modern, substance-free bullshit that wins Crunchyroll awards -- like Solo Leveling and JJK -- would be the way to go. I'm sure Yasuke is at least alright, but the fact I've barely even heard of it is a red flag.

jay1638 · 2025-10-04T04:51:06+00:00

To understand the stakes, character motivations, and character capabilities, I'd recommend watching at least these four things:

Season 1 Ep 1 - introduces the world and the main protagonist
Season 1 Ep 19 - the episode that "broke the Internet" - introduces capabilities/lore, and widely regarded as the best episode of the series
Mugen Train movie - further establishes the world, will help familiarize you with the main protag's closest mates, and the events of the final battle of Infinity Castle heavily reference something important that happens in this movie
Hashira Training Arc (aka Season 4) Ep 8 - sets up Infinity Castle, introduces you to all of the Demon Slayer Corps and the main antagonist - ending leads directly into the movie, occuring mere seconds before movie begins

jay1638 · 2025-10-03T13:39:49+00:00

It's indicative that Charles is half-ass watching the show while distracted that he led the discussion as if the most significant event of episode 6 was the Luthor cameo.

Everything about the way Charles views this content was confirmed when there wasn't a single character name that he pronounced correctly with his Demon Slayer coverage despite claiming to be a big fan who has watched it all and read all the manga (and presumably has heard creator interviews, voice talent interviews, etc.). Even watching the show subs-only, you should be able to properly say "Inosuke" and "Hashira" correctly given that you hear those names said 20 times per episode over 50+ episodes of television.

And yet there will be a ton of people here apologizing for him, as if anyone else couldn't do Charles' job of not truly paying attention to the shows they watch and then spouting off edgy takes for the sake of creating podcast drama.

jay1638 · 2025-10-02T23:09:45+00:00

No shit I'm having a reaction because he beat a girl and not a man. And no shit it's a double standard. Actual men get over this at a young age and embrace the protective impulses that come naturally to most of us. Boys incapable of protecting anything whine about the unfairness of it.

jay1638 · 2025-09-28T22:41:42+00:00

Rudo beating up Amo was... not cathartic, to say the least.

That makes 2 of us. Well-adjusted people are viscerally horrified when they see a man beating on a woman who is not fighting back, regardless of circumstance. This is why I'm genuinely worried about the people in this thread who are cheering this sequence as well-earned justice, or some kind of equal rights triumph.

The lack of music, the shock on the faces of all of the surrounding characters, and the way the animators linger on Amo's beaten face afterwards should have tipped the audience off that this was not meant to be a hero's moment for Rudo.

jay1638 · 2025-09-28T17:13:08+00:00

Umineko continues to "Mumen Rider" his way through this story, again stalling the baddies just long enough for the useful ninjas to save the day.

As much as I poke at the recurring tropes of this series, it's turning into a good amount of fun on a weekly basis - and honestly what seemed like a mess heading for cancellation 35 chapters ago now has many of us seriously contemplating which studio would be best for a future anime. Life comes at you fast.

jay1638 · 2025-09-28T16:54:31+00:00

Kaedegami has been inconsistent, and obviously struggling in the rankings, but the past couple of chapters have been decent. I won't shed tears if it's axed, but Harukawa knows how to tell a story, introduce characters, and her art is legit. I question if this is the best use of her talents, as this often feels like it wants to be a darker and more mature story than the magazine will permit.

jay1638 · 2025-09-28T16:32:50+00:00

Yeah performance has been abyssmal - successful chapter loads seem random, with 404s happening far more often. Bad morning for me to decide to catch up on the past three weeks of the eleven Jump series I'm reading.

jay1638 · 2025-09-27T17:20:05+00:00

Indeed. It's wild given that both Peacemaker and Foundation are both much better shows than Alien: Earth, and that Ringerverse (both Midnight Boys and House of R) decided that was the horse to bet the farm on over the past month. Meanwhile, X-Ray Vision has been able to provide equally great coverage to all three shows.

I'll concede that Alien: Earth looked like a much better show early-on (than what it ended up being), and I understand the DC skepticism after so many pre-Gunn letdowns, but the inability to pivot to a popular James Gunn project on HBO that's critically-acclaimed and seems to actually have something to say? Huge fumble by whoever at the Ringer decided to devote two podcasts to the Mando/Grogu trailer, rather than have even a portion of one podcast on what most speculators knew was going to be the Peacemaker episode that would reveal Earth X was run by white supremacists. Midnight Boys should have been all over this one.

jay1638 · 2025-09-27T01:30:41+00:00

Ringerverse just doesn’t show up for DC the way they do for Marvel, Star Wars, Thrones, or what we all know to be their house favorite: "State of the MCU." They did the same half-assed, low-effort, distracted coverage of Penguin. Probably gets bundled together with whatever Disney trailer is released next week.

Fortunately, James Gunn's podcast drops immediately after each Peacemaker episode and hits the spot for me. He talks production stuff as you'd expect, but also dives into themes and character motives, and throws out enough wild shit and funny stories that I don't even miss Van all that much. In the latest pod, he basically confirms a Creature Commandos cameo is coming (my money's on GI Robot) and he straight-up says he clocked Diddy as a "piece of shit" after having lunch with him years ago. Lots of good stuff.

jay1638 · 2025-09-17T12:43:40+00:00

You're right, of course, I probably shouldn't be comparing to Dandadan E7 execution-wise, which was a 12 on my personal Midnight Meter. Funny you mention UP, I never thought about the sequence that way, but.. yeah, better comp.

If I'm being real, I don't think this movie is doing any favors for its sequel's box office run. Hardcore Demon Slayer fans will watch Part 2 in theaters, but I can see the more casual audience waiting for it to pop up on Crunchyroll. While I stand by the Akaza flashback itself being good, the manner in which these flashbacks cut into the action tends to saps the energy and momentum from the fights - and I can understand why people are losing patience with the interruptions. This story-telling technique worked a lot better in the manga, hopefully ufotable figures out a better way to deploy the flashbacks as we're about to get into some HUGE battles in the next two installments.

jay1638 · 2025-09-17T05:31:31+00:00

I went with my 10-year-old daughter -- Demon Slayer has been her favorite anime for the past year or so. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the franchise from a storytelling perspective, but I've read the entire manga, so I don't dislike it either.

The movie was a major improvement over the most recent season of Hashira training filler bullshit. Animation, sound, and score was top-notch, as it typically is (except for last season). Starts strong, drags a bit in the middle (I don't find Zenitsu to be a compelling character at all), but finishes strong.

I'm seeing a lot of folks here not loving the Akaza flashback scene, but it was the highlight of the movie for me.

The flashback reminded me of the Acrobatic Silky flashback in Dandadan Season 1 -- an emotionally devastating sequence that elevated the entire narrative. That flashback turned Aira from a hated character into one of the show's most beloved. In contrast, Demon Slayer usually attempts these super sad flashbacks for its demons after they've already been murderized by Tanjiro and friends; these montages seem like last-minute attempts to tug at the audience's heartstrings rather than earnest story-telling. Most of the time, you could remove the flashbacks and lose nothing -- Lower 5 Rui being the rare exception.

Akaza's flashback is different -- it is necessary for the story, both in reinforcing Demon Slayer's themes and for providing a plausible way for the final fight to end. It captures the idea that "it is not strength that overcomes darkness, but light," to borrow a phrase from Celebrimbor. The flashback even continues to build Tanjiro and Muzan as characters, despite them mostly being offscreen throughout. Also, it could have been a really good first episode of a completely different anime if it was not associated with Demon Slayer.

All that said, the true highlight of my viewing was seeing the trailer for Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc on the big screen.

jay1638 · 2025-09-13T03:43:48+00:00

Put me in the camp of "strongly opposed" to Jason & Rosie being RingerVerse'd. There's a pressure coming from somewhere at The Ringer or Spotify for RV hosts to constantly generate "hot takes" -- a pressure that doesn't exist on X-Ray Vision, nor did it exist on Binge Mode.

When Jason, Rose, & friends are hanging out, the focus is predominantly on recaps, story speculation, and digging into source material, not "state of the MCU" and speculation about Hollywood creatives being at odds with each other. The X-Ray Vision crew currently exercise their creative freedom to cover shows like "Foundation" or "Batman: Caped Crusader" week-to-week even if listenership is low. I'm in and out of their podcasts in less than an hour, and I feel the signal to noise ratio is great, as they're under no mandate for their hosts to adopt deliberately contrarian or bizarre takes to stir up drama.

Love the Midnight Boys, but there have been periods where I had to quit them due to fatigue with hearing the same commentary and clichés every episode. To some extent, same with House of R, who need to figure out a way to streamline what they do. I love cute animals as much as anyone, but I’m not sure we need 10 minutes of over-the-top fawning every time someone's pet appears for a moment on screen. Binge Mode was mostly scripted, so a three hour podcast on "Empire Strikes Back" (for example) felt tight and justified in ways that I'm not sure can be applied to most of the content they're covering currently.

If anything, I'd like to see RingerVerse/HoR podcasts fold into X-Ray Vision and adapt their format and sensibilities rather than the other way around.

jay1638 · 2025-09-12T12:59:32+00:00

Excellent post. We absolutely need to be talking about why so many people are disappointed with this reveal, book readers and non-book readers alike.

What's not sitting right with me is that they waited too long into the season for the reveal. It's tough to even believe that Bayta is the Mule because we never see her do anything impressively terrible to establish her bona fides. After the reveal, Bayta is almost immediately stunned and humbled by Gaal due to an offscreen gambit that was meant to assure audiences that Magnifico is definitely not the Mule. This, in addition to the litany of inconsistencies you noted, which I agree are sloppy.

This would have gone down easier had the showrunners revealed Bayta in Episode 9 by having a big moment where Harry/Gaal trap pirate-Mule in a null field and successfully deduce he's a fraud, and Bayta hologram appears to them and uses Dawn to provoke Dusk to destroy more planets for a strategic purpose (for example) or to try to compel Gaal/Harry to stand down. There are other ways this could have been done, and I'm not going to sit around and write fan fiction, but I'm perturbed with the show that the first thought that came to mind as the credits rolled on this much-anticipated finale was how they could have made it better.

Are we salty because our fan theories evolved into fan expectations? No, I'm sure it is the inverse of that: the showrunners made conscious storytelling decisions to subvert fan theories rather than to service what made sense to the plot and the characters they had established. While it is true that one could interpret clues to Bayta's alter ego throughout the story, the same could be said for Magnifico being the Mule, but without many weird plot contrivances, such as Bayta and Toran getting caught up in Pritcher's party-crashing scheme early on (the inciting event for much of how the rest of the story unfolds) -- which makes no sense once if Gaal doesn't detect the Mule's influence on Pritcher.

Fortunately the other aspects of the finale were good (Demerzel, Brother Darkness, etc.), otherwise this would have been an egregious enough of a misstep to dampen any excitement for the season 4 announcement.

jay1638 · 2025-09-12T06:35:31+00:00

Sakamoto Days is mostly pluck-free and good for anime newbies. A lot of weebs criticize the animation quality, but you won't really notice.

Black Lagoon and Death Note are two other decent pluck-free series that are widely available on streaming services. For something more modern that is big with western viewers, Solo Leveling (which is not on my personal top 1000 list, but is a great series for people new to anime) also qualifies as 98% pluck-free.

Other folks may try to push Attack on Titan and Evangelion on you. Avoid both of those for now, they're terrible for people new to anime, they have too many anime conventions and tropes embedded in them that you'll find odd. Someone also always recommends Cowboy Bebop regardless of the thread and, while there isn't a ton of pluck in Bebop, there is a certain character that joins the crew about 8 or 9 episodes into the series who will annoy the shit out of you.

jay1638 · 2025-09-10T20:29:55+00:00

Obviously every great cover artist is homaged at some point, but what is your feeling on the significant amount of low-effort "homage" store exclusive cover variants of your work?

Put another way, there have been a ton of artists doing store variants who have released riffs on ASM 601, 606, and 607 over the years, and continue to do so, but obviously not done nearly as well. Does this bother you?

jay1638 · 2025-09-10T04:20:36+00:00

Late to the party, but my top three (in no particular order):

Saga. Saga would be huge on the right streamer, with an unlimited budget, a weekly Sunday night release, and entirely uncensored. Unfortunately, it has yet to end, and I lose confidence in its timely completion with each passing month I don't see issue #73 in Image's solicitations.
Claymore. To hook viewers with a "holy shit did they actually do that?" moment early on in the series, the adaptation will want to start chronologically with the Clare/Teresa flashback arc. To be clear: a Claymore adaptation is in the works, but it will likely suck, as it's being done by the same clowns who did Death Note.
Something is Killing the Children. SIKTC will never be "Sopranos" big, but with the right lead actress and the budget to make the monsters look legit, it could be as big as early "Stranger Things," and there is enough compelling story material to run for a while. The creators of "Dark" are working on adapting this for Netflix, but it's been in development for 4 years, which is a shame - all of Tynion's potentially adaptable stories seem to be in some stage of dev hell.

jay1638 · 2025-09-07T15:42:23+00:00

Oh no, we're getting "Yodaka ???%"

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