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Post by Zarnium on Apr 11, 2017 17:13:17 GMT -8
While "anime hair" and distinctive clothing and whatnot has it's uses, I think the more basic and realistic character designs really adds to the horror, since seeing a bunch of real-looking people getting brutally eaten is more shocking than seeing a bunch of Final Fantasy characters getting eaten. One of AOT's best features is that it makes every death seem impactful and horrifying whether it's a beloved character or a no-name redshirt, and the character design has a lot to do with that. This does have the result of practically every character having a "twin" given the level of detail present.
Isayama has said that he spends about one week writing each chapter and then three weeks drawing it, so I reckon he could release almost twice as fast if he hired an artist and only wrote the story. One chapter a month is pretty standard though, isn't it?
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Post by Jay on Apr 11, 2017 19:43:49 GMT -8
The way AoT handles deaths is one of its best features. I remember the horror in one of the earlier episodes/chapters of having the shading and angles just right to let you know that one person was performing CPR on another's torso, and that there was nothing below that.
Output on manga varies, but I would say that weeklies predominate more than monthlies. One would think that with the kind of money and licensing rights the property has and all the people who do spinoffs or what have you, Isayama would be able to hire an assistant. I know weeklies with far more visual appeal than what AoT presents.
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Post by Zarnium on Apr 11, 2017 22:41:36 GMT -8
For better or for worse, I imagine he likes to have as much control over his work as he possibly can, and manga/graphic novels are one of the few mediums that can be produced entirely by a single person. That can lead to some pitfalls, but there's also something I like about occasionally seeing a writer's complete vision, unobstructed by anyone else's. It just seems very personal and genuine, warts and all.
I should really get around to reading the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, since that might be an interesting comparison, having been written under essentially the same conditions. Complex mythology, one author/artist, monthly chapters, runs continuously for nearly a decade...
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Post by Jay on Apr 12, 2017 5:01:25 GMT -8
I rushed through the manga for FMA around the same time as Brotherhood was announced and the two managed to end less than a month apart from one another, which is a kind of crazy production schedule. Having watched the first anime all the way through, I was surprised by certain small arcs and standalones being anime-only, like the encounter with the two other alchemist brothers, but overall the adaptation of Brotherhood was so tight and so close to what the manga depicted, I don't know how worthwhile it is to go picking up the manga for its own sake.
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Post by Zarnium on Apr 12, 2017 14:57:54 GMT -8
My sister said that the one big difference between Brotherhood and the manga is that Yoki's introduction story gets cut, so his appearance later on comes totally out of nowhere. I have to admit, his whole presence really confused me in Brotherhood because of this.
Anyway, if you have any suggestions for anime I should watch after Assassination Classroom that you see on the Funimation catalog, I'm all ears. I'm sure Bikini Warriors is a classy show, right??
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Post by Jay on Apr 12, 2017 16:48:50 GMT -8
Oh yeah, Yoki, I always forget about that chump. Yeah, he's one of the few stories that was in the original anime and the manga and was interpolated poorly into Brotherhood...
Hell, I'll just poke through the Funimation catalogue, I ain't doing much... Black Butler, Blood Blockade Battlefront, Darker than Black, Desert Punk, Durarara!!!, FLCL, Gungrave, Hellsing Ultimate, Last Exile, Mushi-shi (which has no overarching plot), Samurai Champloo, Shiki, Tokyo Ghoul, and Trigun are all ones that I've seen and approve of in varying capacities. I've had BBB, Last Exile, and Shiki on my "to re-watch" lists of late, with Shiki probably headlining it. Here comes an all-caps disclaimer: I'M SURE THAT YOU ARE AWARE OF SPOILER INTROS CORRECT WELL SHIKI HAS THE SPOILER-IEST OF THE SPOILER INTROS AND IF YOU DECIDE TO WATCH IT YOU ARE FORBIDDEN FROM WATCHING THE INTRO BECAUSE IT WILL RUIN EVERYTHING.
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Post by Zarnium on Apr 12, 2017 18:11:59 GMT -8
I'll keep those in mind, thanks. I did see Trigun some years back... I liked it a lot, though the whole trope of "I use guns but I never shoot to kill!" always tends to bother me. I get that crazy trick-shots are cool and all, but I can never entirely get over the fact that a firearm is the worst weapon you could possibly use to fight someone without killing them.
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Post by Jay on Apr 12, 2017 19:02:02 GMT -8
Trigun is one anime that veered far far away from its source material, finishing way before the manga did, and Nightow, the mangaka, said that he felt the anime was complete unto itself and so they're never going to do a true adaptation of the second half of the material. Sigh.
Oh, I keep forgetting to mention this but one weird thing about the new AoT intro is that you have the Beast Titan running through a field surrounded by other large animals including a giraffe and a whale I guess and while the Beast Titan does sort of look like Sasquatch, he doesn't have the power to control animals? I am confused by this development.
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Post by Zarnium on Apr 13, 2017 6:30:56 GMT -8
One thing I've always found amusing about Trigun is its hilariously bizarre depiction of Christianity, which operates entirely on its own logic apart from any Western tropes or reality. Wolfwood is supposed to be some kind of Protestant priest, but he's the violent and harsh contrast to the pacifistic Vash, and carries around a gigantic gun in the shape of a cross while also partaking in all kinds of vices like binge drinking. Oh, I keep forgetting to mention this but one weird thing about the new AoT intro is that you have the Beast Titan running through a field surrounded by other large animals including a giraffe and a whale I guess and while the Beast Titan does sort of look like Sasquatch, he doesn't have the power to control animals? I am confused by this development. From the way it's depicted, one would assume that each animal represents a different titan-shifter... but other than Beastie-boy looking like an ape, there's not really an animal motif in the franchise. So, I'm lost too. I dig the theme song, though.
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Post by Jay on Apr 14, 2017 15:01:36 GMT -8
That odd handling of Christianity is more or less part of Japanese culture, which often (see Ninja Gaiden) can't distinguish between pentagrams and Stars of David. The depiction in Trigun is fairly out there, but by no means the weirdest. The culture just likes having systems of symbols to play around with as texture and don't mean all that much by it. It's one of the reasons Shin Megami Tensei and the related series feel so Japanese to me because let's make all the mythic beasts real, but you could argue even Final Fantasy is doing it to some extent with their summon systems.
As for whether the other animals are supposed to be titan shifters... uh.... well, I'm at the point in the manga where I have an idea of what all the titans look like, more or less, and the beast titan is definitely the most animal looking by a wide margin and I'd have to stretch a bit to interpret some of the others as being animal-like. It just seems like nonsense given how there's nothing in the manga to support that symbolism.
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Post by Zarnium on Apr 15, 2017 19:02:45 GMT -8
That odd handling of Christianity is more or less part of Japanese culture, which often (see Ninja Gaiden) can't distinguish between pentagrams and Stars of David. The depiction in Trigun is fairly out there, but by no means the weirdest. The culture just likes having systems of symbols to play around with as texture and don't mean all that much by it. It's one of the reasons Shin Megami Tensei and the related series feel so Japanese to me because let's make all the mythic beasts real, but you could argue even Final Fantasy is doing it to some extent with their summon systems. Looking back at one of Wolfwood's big scenes, I noticed he says at one point that he's never had a confessional before. Now, I'm no expert on any denomination with a priesthood or formal confessionals, but I'm pretty sure that to be a priest who gives confessionals, you need to have done a confessional at some point? Of course, most priests don't carry around a tiny church with them in order to give confessionals on the road, either. But yeah, Japanese media is full of Christian symbolism that doesn't really make any sense, like Neon Genesis Evangelion where Hideaki Anno said that the cross-shaped explosions and cross-shaped graves and cross-shaped transportation platforms are just supposed to look cool and don't actually mean anything. There's also the litany of NES/SNES era games that had Christian religous references censored for American release.
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Post by Jay on Apr 22, 2017 20:30:52 GMT -8
An animated series often serves as a review for me, since I don't as frequently go back and re-read manga after finishing them, so I was glad to watch the latest episode of AoT's second season with its return to Utgard Castle, which despite having nothing to do with the wall narrative, was one of my favorite little arcs in the manga. There was a lot going on there the first time around, but now that I've read much further ahead, I can see that some of the stuff I wasn't quite sure what to make of then actually ends up being useful to my understanding of what's going on now. It's mostly world-building stuff over character stuff, but it's still neat.
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Post by Zarnium on Apr 22, 2017 22:55:22 GMT -8
I've been watching them as they come out, and I've liked it all so far. I loved Sasha's little side-story with her fighting the small titan in the abandoned village, that was one of my favorite bits from the manga. The whole accent thing is a little... awkward in subtitles, though. I presume that there's some kind of Japanese dialect difference between Sasha's natural accent and her learned accent and that needed to be demonstrated somehow, but putting it into a phonetic English rural accent in the subtitles ends up looking kind of silly in a way that it didn't in the manga, since there was no audio component originally and it wasn't blatantly obvious that the characters weren't really speaking that way. Well, something to look forward to in the dub, I guess. I'll probably watch it again dubbed after the whole thing has been released.
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Post by Jay on Apr 23, 2017 7:37:59 GMT -8
My guess is that in those bits, Sasha speaks in Osaka-ben or the Kansai dialect, which American translators have defaulted to translating as "southern" or "rural." While the Kansai dialect does sort of have that "provincial" quality to it in that Kyoto was the old capital and then Tokyo was the new capital and everything shifted over to the Edo dialect being standard, Osaka isn't exactly isn't exactly the boondocks, so it's weird that translators would have picked that. If Sasha did speak in Kansai, then it would be a peculiar instance of the American translation practices influencing how the original is made, but then despite the existence of multiple regional accents in Japan, Kansai is usually the only one that makes it regularly into standard media. That said, I ran a quick search of the Wiki and wasn't able to come up with anything that specifies what her accent is supposed to be in Japanese.
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Post by Zarnium on Apr 23, 2017 9:51:42 GMT -8
I thought that the Kansai dialect was mostly used for gangsters?
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