Welcome to another general discussion thread! Feel free to use this thread to talk about things you have watched recently, questions you have, or recommendations you want to give!
As always, remember to be mindful of spoilers. If you want to know more about how to handle spoilers in this community, check the guide here (also linked in the sidebar).
This season:
I dropped My Friend’s Sister - not deliberately - I just realized somewhere along the way that I hadn’t seen the latest episode, and realized that I didn’t care. I might try it again after it’s finished.
May I Ask for One Final Thing is still entertaining me. The characters are especially good - I’d watch it just for the dynamic between Scarlet and Julius, but luckily, it’s much more than that.
And since it looked intriguing, I caught up with Gnosia, which is… odd. It’s very stylish - a bit too self-consciously so for my tastes - but it’s fascinating. The way the story is unfolding is strange though - it’s a mystery at heart, and it seems that every time the main starts to get a handle on what’s going on, an additional element is added, effectively moving the goal posts. If that ends up having some logical context, then it could make the whole series that much more interesting. If not though, it’s going to just make it stupid and contrived. We’ll see.
Past seasons:
Finished watching Bokurano, which was excellent. It’s a tough watch - as I noted last week, not only is the overarching story tragic - each of the individual episodes deals with a different person, and their stories also tend to be tragic, or at least bittersweet at best. But still, it was well worth it all in all.
And along the way - every time it started to overwhelm me and I needed a break, I switched to Sono Bisque Doll, which was also excellent. The mains have tremendous chemistry and the whole thing is just vibrant and uplifting and very enjoyable. And a perfect antidote to the bleakness of Bokurano.
I finished both up at more or less the same time, then went on to Sono Bisque Doll season 2, which was a disappointment. The biggest problem I had with it was that they Flanderized the characters. What had been interesting individuals who happened to have some tropish traits morphed into basically nothing but those traits, repeated endlessly (and generally in chibified form), so it was just a constant stream of chibi Marin being loud and excited and chibi Gojou being tediously self-conscious and panicking at the proximity/sight of any exposed flesh. I watched 3 1/2 episodes, then gave up and skipped ahead to the end of the last episode to see if they at least made some romantic progress.
spoiler
They didn’t, which made not watching the rest of the season that much better of a choice.
Then I had a strange experience. After that disappointment, I was in the mood for a sure thing, so I went with a series that has been on my TBW for quite a while, and that has a great reputation - Kaguya-sama. And I hated it. I don’t recall the last time I bounced so hard off of a series. I loathed both of the smug, insufferable, manipulative asshole mains, and I just could not possibly care less what happens to either one of them.
In order for a romance to work, I have to be able to cheer for the people involved - I have to want to see them happy. And with these two, I just don’t. I don’t want to have anything to do with them at all.
So… since I needed something fairly radically different from that, I started just browsing MAL stacks and following suggestions and the like, and watching lots of episode 1s, just trying to find something interesting and comfy and upbeat and low key. And I ended up on Henjin no Salad Bowl (A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics), which was a near-perfect fit. It’s about a magic-using princess and her superhumanly skilled knight/retainer who escape the destruction of their kingdom on an alternate Earth through a portal that takes them to our Earth, where they end up in Gifu, separated, but adapting fairly well, if oddly, to extremely different lives from anything they were accustomed to. It’s bright and upbeat and pleasant and it leans heavily into the “eccentric.” Nearly everyone they meet and everything they end up doing is odd, goofy and/or bizarre, but it all manages to work out one way or another in the long run, mostly because they’re genuinely good people.
Then I happened into a movie - Hotarubi no Mori e (Into the Forest of Fireflies’ Light) - and it was beautiful and highly recommended. It’s easily one of the most touching and heartfelt things I’ve seen in months.
And I’m currently about two thirds of the way through Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko, which is pretty good all in all. It’s a Shaft, so it has a certain amount of that “trite comment accompanied by a head tilt so it seems more profound than it actually is” thing that annoys me about Shaft, but it’s nowhere near as overbearing about it as Monogatari or Mekacucity Actors, so it’s okay. And I quite like the characters.
I think maybe you misunderstood something about Kaguya-sama as a result of having watched just the very beginning. What the narrator says the show is about and what the show is actually about are two completely different things. The narrator tells you the show is about these two using bullshit tactics to try to make a relationship happen. What the show is actually about (among other things) is those two learning to lay down their pride so they can actually be happy. So yes they’re extremely prideful, but the story treats that as each of their greatest flaws. There are still bullshit tactics sometimes of course, but one of the themes of the show is that those never get the characters anywhere and obviously never will. I promise you that as you see more of these characters you’ll find that they really are easy to cheer for - even if they just come across as prideful jerks at the beginning.
No - I understood all of that, and went into it fully aware of it. It just doesn’t matter, because who they are right now is, for me, so completely and thoroughly unpleasant that I have no more desire to sit in front of a screen and subject myself to them that I would to punch myself in the face.
I know it’s not uncommon on anime forums to treat this as some sort of personal failure, but that’s just the way it goes - I cannot tolerate asshole protagonists. I have no sympathy for them and no interest in them. They just fill me with anger and the desire to see them suffer (or as I’ve often phrased it, they make me want to somehow reach into the screen and kick the shit out of them) and that is, for me, an entirely unpleasant experience that I will not willingly subject myself to.
I can handle a character like that if their awful qualities are sufficiently balanced by good ones, and not at some tentative point in the future, but pretty much from the start. A great example of that, and particularly appropriate, is Kana in Oshi no Ko. She’s only really awful in flashback - by the time we meet her again, she’s already gone through a lot of torment and soul searching and already made significant headway towards being a decent person, and is in fact probably my favorite character in the series.
But if there was a side story about that process - following Kana from the point at which she was awful and self-absorbed and cruel and through the period during which she started to change - I wouldn’t watch it because even knowing who she becomes and liking her as much as I do, I’d have an immediate and visceral and entirely unpleasant emotional response to her then.
And that’s just the way it is. Think of it as something akin to an allergy.