My daughter is 13, and is getting in to anime, I guess. She’s been binge watching Attack on Titan this week. I know exactly nothing about it because I’m not interested in it, but I’d like to find her some good anime to watch, that isn’t full of the typical borderline porno stuff it seems is popular with G*mers.
Can anyone suggest a couple to get her going? I’d like to do something for her and get a jellyfin server going but dunno what to put on it. What would you suggest for someone getting into anime? Are there services worth paying for? Should I just be sailing the seas?
Asking her she says she likes
No Hero Academia,
Naruto,
Dan Da Dan,
Jojo,
Thanks yall.
ETA - I just gave her the list of stuff suggested so far and she squealed. She says thanks. I appreciate yall. Kiddo is happy then daddo is happy too.
eta2 - I have to go to bed, I was supposed to be asleep an hour or two ago but everyone has given me such a big list to start on that I didn’t want to not tell anyone thanks. Thank yall. I have a chance to give my daughter some media she will like, so I score some points with her for being a good dad, and I have a cheap excuse to sit and do something with her, even if it’s just television entertainment. At some point mom and dad aren’t priorities anymore and I have a chance to bond some more. I appreciate that the most I think.
Just a heads up for Attack on Titan https://www.polygon.com/2019/6/18/18683609/attack-on-titan-fascist-nationalist-isayama-hajime-manga-anime/
Sounds like she watches a lot of Shonen, out of recent series I enjoyed Frieren: Beyond Journeys End and Delicious in Dungeon, both of the creators are women and the closest thing to gross sexualization in either is panty shots of the male dwarf in DiD.
I didn’t know that. Thanks. That’s exactly why I asked here, because someone would know this.
As far as well-made (yet tame) anime that have premiered during the last few years, I’d say Frieren and Dungeon Meshi meet the criteria you’re looking for
Honestly, the upcoming second season of Frieren is likely to propel it into becoming the most acclaimed anime of the last decade
You’re the second person to suggest Frieren so it’s going on the list for sure. Thanks a lot.
FWIW there is criticism of Frieren along the lines of those leveled at Attack on Titan, that is, there is a humanoid race of demons that are ontologically evil and deserve to be exterminated. It’s a simplistic, unexplored theme that sits extremely at odds with the empathetic, personalised narrative of the first few episodes. It’s not egregious like AoT and but it definitely sinks it to the background level of ambient fascism inherent in many anime
This reading of Frieren never sat right with me. If anything it’s the demons themselves who are the fascists in the show imo, it’s explicitely stated that their goal is to kill all the elves, and heavily implied that they’re also out to exterminate or at the very least subjugate every other race as well. When Frieren and Flamme both say they wish they could exterminate all the demons that doesn’t seem any different from one of us saying “the only good nazi is a dead nazi”
Only about halfway through the series at the moment (so no spoilers please!), but it did stick out like a sore thumb and seemed very fash when the demons were treated as inherently evil beings with no ability to ever integrate within society(as this is how fascists dehumanise their enemies), if it was established that demons are raised in a culture of violence and that is why they are the way they are, it could be better, but the show goes out of its way to say that any and all demons are inherently evil and can never integrate with society and must just be destroyed. Which ok, fantasy world, they are literal monsters that just look like people, but it is still a little worrying and weirdly poorly thought out compared to everything else I’ve seen in the show, which is probably why people criticise this part so much. Maybe it gets better later, but so far it’s easily been the only thing I can say is a full on “negative” about the show, it seems at odds with the rest of the show’s philosophy and messaging.
Fair. I tried writing out a whole-ass thing a few times but I don’t really have my thoughts in order and I’m also sleepy.
Agree.
Also their use of language as a means to kill people is very much in line with fascism.
That’s good to know too. The list of suggestions is growing and if I have to move some stuff to the bottom of the list it probably wouldn’t even be noticed. Thanks.
Just a heads up, Attack On Titan is very, very, very, very, very fascist. Not only does it have a character directly inspired by a Japanese war criminal (Commander Pixis in the anime), it makes the viewer root for a military coup, have a lot of nationalistic imagery and aesthetic, specially in some of the openings, paints genocide as the only viable option for the main character to do, and much more problematic stuff. It is genuinely awful in its messaging and I would only recommend to watch it with a very critical look on it all. (This is a very condensed warning, I can expand on it if needed)
Now for recommendations, I see it was already suggested, but Dungeon Meshi and Frieren are genuinely great and can be enjoyed by basically anyone, they are both fantasy stories, the first focusing on making food out of dungeon monsters and the second one about an elf that has lived for a long time in her journey of remembering her footsteps/adventure with her old group of heroes that has now mostly passed way.
Since your daughter likes Shounen anime, she might like Jujutsu Kaisen (about hunting curses/spirits that wreak havoc on the world) and Sakamoto Days (John Wick if his wife never died, but much more light story-wise). I can also recommend Megalobox (about boxing with exoskeletons) and Mob Psycho 100 (about a kid with extremely powerful psychic powers tied to his emotions, I don’t remember much but it is super fun). Also One Piece is absolutely incredible but very problematic in it’s depiction of women and queer characters, some are amazing, others feel like a caricature, but in general politics-wise it’s absolutely amazing, Luffy would free Palestine in a heartbeat.
There’s also Little Witch Academia, although not exactly Shounen, it is protagonized by a group of cool witches. There’s a famous episode about unionizing! I would steer clear of other anime by Studio Trigger/Gainax for a while, even tho I absolutely love their works, they tend to be much more mature in content, this one is an outlier.
For older anime, I can also recommend Trigun and the recent remake Trigun Stampede, which is about a cool and messy bounty hunter in a hostile planet, there’s lots of comedy in the old one too, tho the newer one is much more focused in the story/lore.
If she wants to dab into Chinese animation (Donghua), To Be Hero X is really good! I’m only 9 eps in, but so far it’s very cool and it’s about super heroes working for these big corpos where their powers is directly influenced by their popularity and reputation.
For a horror/suspense recommendation, The Summer Hikaru Died is great and it’s about this teenager Hikaru being replaced by a creature and learning to live among humans, specially with Hikaru’s best friend, Yoshiki. It’s also very gay!
For a more light hearted anime, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! is amazing and it is about animation. I never finished it, but I loved it a lot.
If she’s interested in more competition based stories, Welcome to the Ballroom is great too. As the name suggests, its about ballroom dancing. I absolutely love this one!
For movies, since Ghibli has already been suggested, Wolf Children and The Boy and The Beast are pretty cool. The first one is about a single mother of two half-wolf children that goes to live in the countryside of Japan and the second one is about a boy that stumbles upon a place full of beasts and starts interacting with them.
Also another warning, Dan Da Dan does have a couple of problematic scenes, the most egregious one so far being right at the first episode, but outside of that it is genuinely a cute shounen/romance anime. So you might wanna take a look into it to weight in if you feel like you need to.
I appreciate you giving more of an explanation than others about what makes AoT bad, but calling Mob Psycho 100 “about superpowers” is like saying that A Christmas Carol is about ghosts. It’s technically true, but extremely misleading in basically the same way, as the ghosts and superpowers only exist in their respective works as vehicles to facilitate a story about emotional development.
Yeah you’re right. I was very tired when I made the comment so I ended really simplifying some of the descriptions I gave lol.
I’ll update some of them when I can.Just updated it!Also thanks for appreciating the brief AOT explanation I gave. It is rather simplified too and there’s more I can explain/expand upon if you or anyone else is interested.
Hey! I’ve been at work all day but I wanted to take a second after work to say thanks for the answer. That’s well thought out and you took some time out of whatever you were doing to respond. I really appreciate it. I also appreciate taking some time to tell me why to avoid AOT. She’s been watching the first season this week and I’m going to get her started on The Alchemy Diary, she chose this to start first.
Took me a minute to think of something since the whole “battle shōnen” thing isn’t really my genre, but Inuyasha might be great for her. Teenage girl gets sent back in time to fantasy Japan and fights demons with a dirtbag half-demon boy and a cast of other weirdos.
That sounds like something she would like. Thanks!
I can second that, Inuyasha is a very 13 year old girl show.
I know because I was once 13 and all my friends who were girls were very into it
I also would second Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Meshi. I haven’t seen the show, but the comic is delightful.
Bocchi the Rock might be another good one. Extremely socially awkward guitar prodigy forms a band with other girls at her middle school.
The things she likes are all shonen. This may be because she hasn’t watched anything outside of shonen as it’s the most mainstream genre of anime. Exploring outside of that genre is something she should definitely do but for now let’s just move this away from from male MCs, she’s a 13 year old girl.
It is in essence a shonen, but it is essentially an all-female cast. It’s modern enough to compete with that list of shows that she likes, and it’s going to give her role models that aren’t just boys.
While we’re here I’m going to also say Fairy Tail. She’s 13. Fairy Tail is absurdly popular among this age group. It’s a show that stays at the right level for younger people.
While we’re thinking of shows that really grab 13 year olds… Inuyasha too perhaps. Although this is much older now.
Edit: Stepping outside of Shonen… Fruits Basket is a cozy slice of life and romance very popular with girls. We could go to the very start of the slice of life genre itself and recommend Aria also, which is still to this day one of the very best “nothing actually happens” anime.
Yeah, her older half sister is into the battle Shonen I’ve come to find out. Her older half sister is 18, so maybe that explains it. I’m fairly certain there’s a world of other anime that she would like. You’re right, she probably just doesn’t know there’s other stuff. The theme of the anime she has chosen are a contrast to the other stuff she enjoys, books, movies etc. She is growing up but still very much a typical 13 year old girl in most respects.
I really appreciate you offering up a couple suggestions beyond what she is asking for. I don’t have a problem with her watching battle Shonen but I’d like her to see there’s other subject matter out there beyond fighting and stuff. I’m just kind of a dumb guy sometimes and I don’t always keep it in my mind that she needs more exposure to feminine stuff.
+1 furuba
A Place Further Than the Universe and Mob Psycho 100 are pretty clean as far as I remember, sexual jokes are present (moreso in MP100) but no perverse camera action or chest grabbing
A joke here and there, or the occasional adult sentence or two aren’t a problem. She’s 13, so I imagine she hears and sees worse from the other kids she’s in school with. I’m not trying to coddle her too much beyond something just absolutely obvious it isn’t for young teens.
Thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate it.
I second Mob Psycho 100, it’s very wholesome.
Let’s see, everyone’s recommending Frieren for a reason, so I’ll just expound on that a little: it’s a gorgeously animated show that even at its worst (about the last third of the season) it’s just merely a very good shonen action arc with great animation, good pacing, and female lead characters, and that’s only a step down because at its peak it’s a poignant reflection on time slipping away and the importance of the people around you and the impact you have on them. The early episodes actually brought me to tears more than once and I’d label the first third of the season as the actual best stretch of any anime series ever.
MAL is a depraved hellsite, but it having Frieren as the top rated anime series of all time is perhaps the closest it has ever been to being right about something and it definitely stands head and shoulders above everything else that makes it into the top 10 on there.
To Be Hero X is a new one that just wrapped up in the past couple of weeks and that I’m still only halfway through, but from what I’ve seen firsthand and heard other people here say about the rest of it I would recommend this unreservedly. It’s Boku No Hero Academia with better art, pacing, writing, musical scoring, and driving themes: where BNHA is very lib in its perspective and sort of touches on but doesn’t really take a side on how fucked up its setting is, To Be Hero X knows that its world of belief/adoration based superhero personas is deeply toxic and dysfunctional and doesn’t shy away from both showing this and having characters cogently criticize it. It’s an anthological series that jumps between the stories of different heroes, and the middle arcs that I’m on now have been centered on female characters and have explicitly grappled with things like systemic sexism and being infantilized by it and related biases.
If you want something lighter with no point to make either good or bad but which is an incredibly gorgeous action spectacle with a phenomenal soundtrack, Solo Leveling is exactly that. Someone can correct me if I’m forgetting something horrible about it, but from what I remember it’s an extremely clean (except for, you know, the violence, which is maybe a step above BNHA or Jojo but well below Attack on Titan’s gratuitous violence and gore), completely sexless show with characters who are… definitely on screen, and they say stuff I guess, but it’s all really empty and doesn’t really have a point, but holy fuck does it do visually stunning sakuga scenes like nothing else, all set to the fantastic music of Hiroyuki Sawano (who also did the soundtrack for To Be Hero X, which is also fantastic).
For another completely clean show that in contrast does have good themes throughout, Little Witch Academia is fantastic. I guess I can also throw in Brand New Animal, also from Studio Trigger, which was not as good overall but IIRC it was still decent.
For more borderline classics, both Cowboy Bebop and Gurren Lagann are extremely good with some caveats. Cowboy Bebop I honestly don’t remember too well, but I remember it was weird about a character who was maybe trans towards the end of it? I don’t remember if there was anything else problematic in it tbh. Gurren Lagann on the other hand is a fantastic story about solidarity and revolutionary resistance to what is literally a distilled version of fascist philosophy that wants to crush all life and hope out of the fear that if the vibrant underclass is allowed to keep living and striving it will inevitably endanger the comfortable status quo that the fascists tyrants have built for themselves. It was also made by fucking Gainax and so has a whole lot of weird “physics” and fanservice shots, particularly early on that. Also Kamina is an obnoxious pig and I’m glad he’s not in it for very long.
A list of things to avoid at absolutely all costs, spoilered to completely separate it out from the recommendations, and I'm not gonna link the MAL pages for these:
Made in Abyss - this is repulsive pedophile trash with absolutely no redeeming qualities. Distrust anyone who recommends it ever. I have an old post here tearing into it and watching it through to be able to make those criticisms gave me of all people psychic damage.
Overlord - not as bad as MiA, but it’s still very bad both from a quality standpoint, a theme standpoint, and a fanservice standpoint. It looks like complete ass most of the time, it’s horribly paced and doesn’t really go anywhere, the core conceit is “what if the most boring, vapid guy you know got magically lobotomized and developed ChatGPT psychosis which made him become magic Hitler because he didn’t want the chatbots to be disappointed in him even though he wasn’t really feeling it”, it’s full of extremely cringe and uncomfortable fanservice, it has a random homophobic/transphobic caricature thrown in for no reason, and on more than one occasion it’s just thrown in weird pedo shit. It’s literal sole redeeming feature is that the last season ended with an evil Disney Princess musical number which was so out of left field and bizarre that I actually found it entertaining for a moment.
Attack on Titan - Other people have elaborated on this, and I’m just gonna agree with them about it.
I’m struggling to think of any other mainstream series that I can really comment on to recommend against. Most “do not watch this” series I have are obviously bad and/or obscure anyways, and I’ve also avoided a lot of the mainstream slop from the 2000s so I can’t really speak to its issues.
Made In Abyss was one of those animes I remember people recommending the first season when it came out and putting it on my list of things to watch, but also I can’t remember anyone talking about the later seasons, so I just assumed it had the regular drop off in quality that these shows sometimes have. I’ll be sure to avoid it now though.
tbh, your description of it in that other thread almost makes it sound like “so bad it’s good” schlock. Though it’s multiple seasons of a show, not a single movie or something, I don’t want to watch 20-30 hours of dreck, something that bad as a movie length thing could be a fun hatewatch, but I wouldn’t want to sit through an entire series that starts promising and just gets progressively more fash and creepy as it goes along (Hey, this could also apply to Attack On Titan too!)
tbh, your description of it in that other thread almost makes it sound like “so bad it’s good” schlock.
I cannot emphasize strongly enough that it is not. It’s just kind of dull and gross and it doesn’t really go anywhere. It starts off iffy and just gets gross and then grosser and then also sad and then even grosser and this just goes on at a jerking pace while the whole time you can just feel the author’s quivering, breathless arousal seeping into the story and controlling the pacing in a very uncomfortable way. I have an extremely high tolerance for absolute garbage, I like piling up a big platter of weird, creepy nonsense to watch as a spectacle, and Made in Abyss actually ruined my week when I watched it.
If you want a rubbish spectacle, Sword Art Online and particularly the SAO: Alicization seasons are great for something to hate watch and riff on. It’s problematic, it has pacing problems in the early seasons, and the worldbuilding is literal nonsense through and though, but it does still have some redeeming qualities alongside its admittedly decent sakuga action scenes, and the themes of the Alicization arc are actually pretty good, it’s just that even Alicization is still SAO and has more of the other kind of SA than ever at least one instance of which just actually happens on screen out of nowhere in the middle of a fight. However, Alicization does do the best thing any SAO season has ever done and that’s put Kirito in a coma and just have him sitting there in the background of scenes, vacant eyes staring off into space and drooling on himself, while the female characters have all of the agency and do everything.
If you want a “so bad it’s good” anime, as I said in another comment I just remembered “Misfit of Demon Academy,” which is one of the few times I’ve really enjoyed an anime from that perspective because it’s so ridiculous.
Overlord is a creepier show that you might(?) still like on the same basis as Misfit.
MiA is not that. It will make any remotely normal person sick to their stomach, because it’s only watchable to the most grotesque fetishists. Like, I can ignore bad shit in anime to a degree that is probably unhealthy and MiA physically nauseated me. It’s seriously in competition for the most disgusting piece of “art” that I’ve ever seen, both morally and graphically, and I’m including a lot of bad shit in that.
An example of its repulsiveness you don't believe me. Skip if you do believe me. I'm serious. CW everything
Do you want to watch a naked girl (maybe 13) have her breasts sliced during a surgical operation to cut apart her entire body so she can have her still-functioning vital organs stuffed into a tube while remaining alive and conscious? How about then watching her friends discover the tube, spilling out a mess of gore that was once a kind little girl that is now only able to quiver in incomprehensible pain and die? I am fuzzy on some details that I think make it still worse, but I’m not going to rewatch it.
MiA takes a second to really tip its hand, but it revels in this kind of shit and there are more examples of unspeakable brutality being inflicted on innocent children who may or may not understand what is happening, sometimes in an eroticized manner.
Ah ok. That is a lot. As someone who draws fetish art for a living (though nothing at all as grotesque as something like that) I do sometimes find enjoyment in watching “the writer’s poorly disguised fetish” type of shows sometimes. But not if it is something as disgusting as that and from the sounds of things, isn’t even trying to be disguised as anything other than fetishistic. I think I see why people were singing the show’s praises though. It sounds like it is very intense and “serious and mature” and implies that there will be greater meaning to all the awful stuff later. Which would also explain why the people saying it was great with the first season also all stopped talking about it afterwards.
I might check out Misfit of Demon Academy though, I get recommended a lot of slop by clients and it looks a lot like the sort of stuff they recommend I watch, but if it is so bad even they don’t watch it it must be something really special.
Yeah, Misfit comes off more as something that someone who commissions goofy fan art might write themselves, but it’s so expressive in that silliness that it’s difficult in the first season to determine if it’s meant to be funny or not. Based on the drag in later seasons though, it probably is somehow sincere.
I agree with all points in your “avoid” list. I’d like to add any series where there’s one main male character who’s front-and-centre and surrounded by female characters on promo images.
Thats probably a safe bet. I can just imagine.
MAL is a depraved hellsite, but it having Frieren as the top rated anime series of all time is perhaps the closest it has ever been to being right about something and it definitely stands head and shoulders above everything else that makes it into the top 10 on there.
I don’t like MAL but I think the current top 10 is pretty respectable and it has FMA:B as #2. They’re almost all landmark shows that deserve to be landmark shows (except AoT S3P2, fuck that one to hell). It’s funny that Gintama is on there twice, but I’ve never seen it so I can’t really judge.
Overlord has bad and intrusive sexual pandering (I don’t remember anything you mentioned but I’ll trust you on the basis that I managed to suppress some of my MiA memories that you made me recall when I read your post on it and I got physically nauseated). That’s enough to make it a “definitely don’t recommend,” but I think outside of that it’s a decent isekai brainrot show, though maybe I just think that because it’s one of the first I saw. Like, it’s stupid, but . . . fuck, idk, I remember the golden boy prince was amusing and the goofy powerscaling nonsense is kind of funny sometimes. Like, a spell that has the specific function of letting you crush someone’s heart in your hand is a good bit.
Shit, you made me remember Misfit of Demon Academy, which is a bad show but it’s maybe the best “so bad it’s good” anime ever, even if it drags for 5 episodes at a time before they get back to what’shisname saying “You didn’t think you’d die only once in your life, did you?”
Creep stuff you forgot that is popular: Shield Hero, Goblin Slayer, Mushoku Tensei. That last one gets really hyped up by people who aren’t channers, so perhaps it deserves special mention.
They’re almost all landmark shows that deserve to be landmark shows (except AoT S3P2, fuck that one to hell)
AoT and its various seasons show up so many times in the top 100 and it pisses me off so much lmao. Until recently MiA also took up multiple slots there and it still somehow manages to be above every season of Jojo none of which make the top 100.
It’s funny that Gintama is on there twice, but I’ve never seen it so I can’t really judge.
Three times, in fact. Each entry is a separate season. I’ve also never seen, nor even heard of it apart from seeing it on that list for that matter.
Overlord has bad and intrusive sexual pandering (I don’t remember anything you mentioned but I’ll trust you on the basis that I managed to suppress some of my MiA memories that you made me recall when I read your post on it and I got physically nauseated). That’s enough to make it a “definitely don’t recommend,” but I think outside of that it’s a decent isekai brainrot show, though maybe I just think that because it’s one of the first I saw. Like, it’s stupid, but . . . fuck, idk, I remember the golden boy prince was amusing and the goofy powerscaling nonsense is kind of funny sometimes. Like, a spell that has the specific function of letting you crush someone’s heart in your hand is a good bit.
Ok, it did actually have a bit more going for it than I’m giving it credit for. It was sort of touch and go as to whether it was genuinely bad or actually going somewhere good, and the fact that it just kind of casually got worse in gross ways while treading water colors my view of it in retrospect. Albedo absolutely made my skin crawl every time she did almost anything, though, and the criminal syndicate leader in charge of sex trafficking being a gross homophobic/transphobic caricature was stomach turning.
Creep stuff you forgot that is popular: Shield Hero, Goblin Slayer,
I wanted to limit the list to things that could conceivably be confused for legitimate, so I left out notorious explicit slop. I thought about including SAO in the avoid list too but I genuinely can’t remember the last time someone other than me even brought it up.
Mushoku Tensei. That last one gets really hyped up by people who aren’t channers, so perhaps it deserves special mention.
Mushoku Tensei is wildly inappropriate and does belong in the avoid list too along all the other “obviously problematic” things.
I will say, though, that while it’s something that’s impossible to recommend to anyone without a long list of caveats, it is also genuinely good if one has a strong stomach and goes in with the understanding that it hates its protagonist (and he hates himself even more) and all of his brainrotted gooner bullshit and is resoundingly on the side of “this little shitbag’s sex pest antics that are all typical anime tropes are in fact bad and harmful and gross, they are not funny or harmless, they are crimes actually.” The LNs are even more explicit about that with Rudy explicitly criticizing himself along those lines and at times the PoV shifting to a different character who will then spend a full page outlining exactly why something is harmful and bad (although the first couple of LNs are also more explicit in terms of how repulsive Rudy’s internal monologue is in general with thoughts that don’t make it into the anime). In the “he falls in love with someone he thinks is a man” arc the LNs also have him just going “oh, ok, I guess I’m just gay or bi then? What’s really important is what [other character] wants and his identity,” while the anime makes it some cringe gay panic shit with none of the introspection or empathy of the text. Later on in the story, past what the anime has done so far, he also ends up repeatedly criticizing or being annoyed by the implicit sexism of the world, which is a low bar to clear but it’s kind of surprising that he wound up clearing it given how awful he was in the beginning.
It’s not without ongoing problems later on too and it could have been better in a lot of ways, but it is fundamentally a story about taking the literal worst guy you can imagine, this brainrotted, misogynistic, homophobic, misanthropic gooner with pedophilic tendencies who literally thinks of other people as actual NPCs for him to manipulate and exploit, and slowly beating empathy and respect for other people into him through both object lessons, his actions having consequences that get him or other people hurt, and through positive social relationships that teach him to see other people as people. This is further brought into stark relief by how the ultimate antagonist of the story is entirely a mirror image of the self-centered manipulative sociopathy he started with, and with the fact that ultimately Rudy isn’t the hero and even if he plays a major part in the conflict it hinges on everyone else also being someone with a role and their own agency too. And if you think I’m reading into it too much or giving it too much credit, I’m actually paraphrasing and condensing stuff that was explicitly and directly stated in the text in later volumes in case the reader didn’t get all the themes right.
It’s just also an anime that while making a point of “these common sex pest tropes are bad, actually” also just does them on screen itself and I can’t remember whether the anime even does a good job of conveying the textual “actually this is a serious matter and bad” that the LNs do constantly for the earlier parts when the protagonist is at his absolute worst. I’d still put it as less problematic than something like Konosuba (there’s another one that may as well be thrown in the “avoid” list) though, because the protagonists are fundamentally the same person to start with except Konosuba takes the stance of “haha what a wacky little guy doing his sex crimes! Look, he’s being cringe again! What a funny little rascal he is lmao!” while Mushoku Tensei plays it straight and treats fundamentally the same gags and actions as being gross and antisocial.
Oh, and it also tones the worst of it way back once it reaches the second part of the first season, and after going through that with Rudjerd as his moral compass and Eris’s mix of absolutely terrifying him and being a human being whom he actually starts to worry about and refrain from harassing because he internalizes that sexual harassment is bad, actually, the second season then makes him impotent and takes away all the weird gooner impulses he has left. It makes it way more tolerable to watch, even though it still has its issues. The end of season 2 then has him standing reflecting on what a piece of shit he’s been and how badly he’s failed everyone around him in both his lives, and resolving to still work on being a better person, and if I’m remembering the order of things season 3 will be where he actually starts being halfway decent and the main plot finally begins to come together.
I was going to say that I don’t remember Konosuba being that bad but then I remembered there’s an arc that makes the ship with the explosion girl semi-canon. Yeah, that’s definitely bad, and it’s not even “comedic” at its core, it’s just played straight. I think it’s usually not that bad outside of that, and certainly I think the main conceit of the show is that everyone in the main cast is entirely a bunch of shitheads with brief glimpses of being genuinely heroic. It’s like the core aesthetic of the show that they’re miserable assholes who keep getting in their own way.
Regarding Mushoku Tensei, it was one of those anime where I just try to ignore the bad stuff because I saw a clip of that one fight scene where Rudy almost got killed and thought it was really cool. That said, I do think you’re being too generous especially because of the “just does them on the screen itself” part, which I need to stress it does a lot. Like, the portrayal of him assaulting the red head I think was actually appropriate and handled in a constructively critical way, but that doesn’t change the fact that they have an on-screen sex scene later when she is, at the oldest, maybe 18? (I think her age was a plot point there) and it’s treated as a romantic culmination of their relationship, completely glossing over the part where this is some of the most straightforward grooming imaginable and the dude must be pushing 50 at this point when including his past life. There’s a suggestion immediately afterward that he did something wrong and that’s why she ditched him, but this is revealed to be a fake out contrived just to fuck with him and she’s just his devoted-waifu-in-exile until the plot brings them back together.
And, like, the “shrine” gag is something that I don’t think they ever challenge and they just treat it as a cute little affectation of his, which I’m not sure if he even stops after he fucks the lady whose “article” he stole. By the way, talk about bad attitudes toward sex, as far as I got in the manga, it is completely accepted that she fucks him to “save” him from grief and it’s treated totally uncritically (though the adultery obviously isn’t). One of the last pieces of advice his father gave him before he died was that eventually one “sword” was not enough anymore and that’s why he uses two. Though his philandery is sometimes treated with disdain (and his remorse is a subplot), this statement is never challenged and becomes the premise for what happens after.
It’s funny to me that they contrive an excuse to keep his mother as young as possible by sticking her in that crystal for years. Nothing to read into there.
I think it’s a mix of positive and negative messaging and the positive messaging frequently does not provide a solid basis for somehow reinterpreting the negative messaging. It’s like a worse Re:Zero, which I agree with its fans does have a mostly-excellent arc on this sort of subject matter, but that doesn’t change the harem bullshit up to that point and after that point, and ultimately even the rejected incel catastrophizing spiral is resolved with basically the acceptance of his romantic pursuit continuing and a message to the reader that Subaru will get what he wants eventually, even if he’s less of an overbearing creep about it. This is a weird comparison, but it reminds me of the very last episode of the Sandman Netflix series, which centers on a guy who is suicidal after getting dumped and all his wonderful personal growth is resolved with him getting a waifu on a silver platter, as though this in any way addressed his terrible codependence complex.
That said, I do think you’re being too generous especially because of the “just does them on the screen itself” part, which I need to stress it does a lot.
Yeah, I think I remember the anime being kind of this constant game of “wait, is it criticizing this or just doing it unironically?” and I only conclusively decided that the story was meaning to be critical of a lot of it after reading the LNs. Seeing directly inside the various characters’ heads throughout it recontextualizes it in a way the anime really doesn’t do. I do have to reiterate though that Rudy is way worse to start with and keeps interjecting the most heinous things throughout the entire series albeit with lowering frequency as the story goes on.
Basically my entire perception of the series is based on the entire novel series collectively. Out of those 26 volumes, the anime and manga have adapted 12 so far. So most of the story is with the main cast as adults and Rudy at his least awful, a stretch that the anime won’t start on until the next season.
the dude must be pushing 50 at this point when including his past life.
Rudy is fundamentally a child with memories of a previous childhood where he was a modestly clever kid with what sounds like untreated ADHD, after which he gets traumatized and frozen in place leaving him with the memories of another 30 years of vegetating and gooning until his brain rotted clean through. Early on he’s more heavily influenced and defined by the memories of his previous life and is basically still just the adult __________ (the name is only ever rendered with blank spaces in the text) in a new body, but by the point in the story where he hooks up with Eris he’s more on the side of being Rudy, the teenage son of Paul and Zenith who still has memories and trauma from another life that make him kind of weird because those memories are mostly just like anime and hentai VNs that he references the way Harry Dresden references old movies. Like it’s not quite as clean cut as that, but the separation between the two lives and who he even is gets explored throughout the text in a way that I don’t recall the anime doing (I think it just made the differently-voiced internal monologue clips sparser as it went on), with the culmination of that being at what in the anime is the end of season two where he understands and accepts that he’s Rudy Greyrat instead of __________ and that his family in that world are his real family (this made it into his monologue in the anime IIRC).
Now, is that a good way of handling the concept of age and identity in a reincarnation story and how it relates to what is or is not appropriate? I genuinely don’t know. I do think it works well with the allegory of arrested development from when he was assaulted in his previous life and the theme of having a second chance at life, like he was stuck at ~13 or so until he looped back around and lived past that point again at which point he began growing and developing normally. But yes, basically everything that happens before all the characters are adults is tainted by this issue, though.
And, like, the “shrine” gag is something that I don’t think they ever challenge and they just treat it as a cute little affectation of his,
IIRC he gets a lot of shit for it in the LNs, people explicitly find it creepy as hell or outright call it heretical, and he also does more of the literally-deifying Roxie thing, in which he literally considers himself the prophet of a cult devoted to her and at times actually tries to preach its doctrines which I think only Julie ever actually goes along with (there’s one of the real glaring problems with the later books: almost everything to do with Julie, which falls in the broader issue of the series backtracking on how it dealt with slavery in general from its correct starting point of “exterminate all slavers and free their victims” to its later weaselly “but a conflict like that would be dangerous” and occasional outright apologia).
which I’m not sure if he even stops after he fucks the lady whose “article” he stole.
He doesn’t. If anything he gets even weirder about literally worshiping her as a literal god after they get married, which is by every indication a sincere belief that his internal monologue affirms. She finds it confusing and weird, everyone else thinks it’s creepy, and he does not stop.
By the way, talk about bad attitudes toward sex, as far as I got in the manga, it is completely accepted that she fucks him to “save” him from grief and it’s treated totally uncritically
I think it’s more she wants to do it and cynically takes advantage of him/is egged on by Sylphie’s grandmother whose name I can’t remember at the moment who is the actual, literal worst person when it comes to rationalizations about sex. Meanwhile he also wants to do it and doesn’t care about anything but his survivor’s guilt, and the rest is just him being extremely codependent with regards to both Sylphie and Roxie literally all of the time. Which is also a later plot point when there’s a timeline split and bad things happen, which should be in the next season. Even at his best, he is not a healthy person.
One of the last pieces of advice his father gave him before he died was that eventually one “sword” was not enough anymore and that’s why he uses two. Though his philandery is sometimes treated with disdain (and his remorse is a subplot), this statement is never challenged and becomes the premise for what happens after.
I have to say I generally agree with you here and dislike his polygamy, although his all-consuming and self-sacrificing obsession and reverence for both Sylphie and Roxie is almost enough to mitigate the harem bullshit. Dude thinks about them the way Enver Hoxha wrote about Stalin.
The fact that both of them are their own characters with agency and goals entirely unrelated to him, and who are both solidly established as extremely competent people who each outshine Rudy in some ways also mitigates it a bit. The way it actively criticizes his impulse to keep them out of the loop and shield them from everything as being wrong on every level is also very good: he’s wrong for infantilizing them and trying to unilaterally protect them, he’s wrong for hiding big important plot stuff from them, and he’s wrong for not relying on or leaning on two of the most competent and intelligent people in the entire story.
Like just to contextualize this: I hate straight romance/relationship stuff on general principle, I especially hate harem slop, and the overall treatment this got is enough to make me say that I think it’s actually almost ok and does stuff pretty well, for all that I still don’t like how straight and centered on a male character it is.
It’s funny to me that they contrive an excuse to keep his mother as young as possible by sticking her in that crystal for years. Nothing to read into there.
Oddly, going off the text of the novels that come after that point, there is genuinely nothing more to that. I think the stasis bit was just a narrative device to keep her alive and safe but still missing. With her the focus is either her condition (which eventually has a rather wholesome conclusion*), Norn spending time with her mother, or Rudy’s kids spending time with their grandmother.
*spoiler if you actually care about the buildup and resolution of that
She doesn’t have any kind of brain damage or the like, but instead was blessed/cursed with a more extreme version of the psychic thing the Migurd have that’s locked out her other senses and means of communication, leaving her in a dreamlike state built from the surface thoughts and perceptions of the people around her, whom she believes she is talking to and carrying on conversations with. The only person who can perceive what she’s saying is Roxie’s infant daughter who sits and talks with her, but who is too young to articulate this to anyone else until it’s discovered in a different way.
I think it’s a mix of positive and negative messaging and the positive messaging frequently does not provide a solid basis for somehow reinterpreting the negative messaging.
I will say the story is problematic, very uncomfortable in the beginning (you didn’t mention it, but I assume you recognize how fucked his relationship and attitude towards Sylphie was in the first part of season 1? His thoughts about and plans for her are worse and grosser in the text, to the point that Paul, shitbag that he is, gets to be the voice of reason and decency explaining to the reader why Rudy’s relationship with Sylphie is toxic and bad even from his limited PoV that doesn’t get to see just how bad Rudy’s internal state is) and still fraught with issues by the point the anime is at, and it still does a lot of things wrong in the later volumes too, but it does do some things very well and the books are as well written as the anime is animated. Like I can’t unreservedly recommend the series to anyone, but I do still think it ends up being very good despite its myriad issues, and certainly much better than anything like it.
Again, I’m judging it heavily by the little more than half of the story that hasn’t been adapted yet. I think if the books had ended where the anime is currently at it wouldn’t be very good, it being critical of the things it portrays or not. Those later books do overall do things better and have a better tone than the early ones, especially compared to the first couple of novels, but they do also have their own issues and could have done a lot of things better: they raise a lot of good points about big, systemic problems in the world like how the Millisians are a genocidal racial supremacist cult, and then it just doesn’t really do anything with it or resolve any kind of big picture problems, they’re just stuff that’s in the background behind the more immediate overarching plot of the second half of the series.
Oh yeah, the Slyphie stuff is fucked up, I just thought it wasn’t as clear-cut in terms of the text handling it poorly in the view of someone who is being extraordinarily generous. I think your claims about Roxie rely on really concerning reasoning because the dude is still an adult who, on some intellectual and even emotional levels, is way beyond the kids who are his “peers” and I just don’t think him being stunted is a good excuse for him “romancing” a minor for years in order to fuck her when she’s 18. Lastly in terms of what I mentioned, I don’t know what to make of what happens with the mom in the LNs, but in the anime the dynamic of preserving her as someone more gooners would like on promotional material is clear.
I would also like to say that there’s a problem in your reasoning as you present it, which is that you’re using information that was cut out in the process of making the anime adaptation to interpret the anime, when none of that stuff, none of that extra criticism and recharacterization, actually exists or will ever exist within the anime (obviously the stuff later in the plot might, but that’s not really adequate). imo it makes much more sense to conclude that the LNs are duly critical but the adaptation transforms the work into frequently-uncritical gooner shit, like a parody that is adapted into being played straight. Like I think that happened with Forrest Gump, the book being a satire and the movie being played straight, or some of the later Robocop works not preserving the original work’s intended message.
I just want to say before I jump into these last few points that I’ve wanted to tear this story apart and talk about it like this ever since I finished it, so even if we’re disagreeing on some points I don’t mean to be argumentative or anything, this is just stuff that’s been burning a hole in my mind because I couldn’t stop analyzing and criticizing the series both while and after reading it. Overall I agree with everything else you’ve posted in this thread although I really regret unspoilering the Made in Abyss thing about Bondrewd because I’d managed to block out the specific details in the two years since my Made in Abyss is the worst thing ever made post and just remembered it as being very bad.
Also I just woke up and took my ADHD meds, so I kind of got carried away breaking the story apart and examining it here, sorry about that.
Oh yeah, the Slyphie stuff is fucked up, I just thought it wasn’t as clear-cut in terms of the text handling it poorly in the view of someone who is being extraordinarily generous.
Sorry, I should have phrased it better. Tonally I meant something like “I know this didn’t make the cut of points to raise, but I bet you saw this too right?” To elaborate slightly on the differences between the anime and the novel: the text doesn’t whitewash Rudy’s (or really ________'s, because “Rudy” doesn’t really exist as a distinct person yet) relationship with/intentions for Sylphie the way the anime does, which I think is handling it better than the anime because it makes it completely unambiguously clear that what Rudy thinks and wants is repulsive and toxic which is why Paul conspires to separate them.
I think your claims about Roxie
Roxie’s the middle aged teacher who’s older than both of Rudy’s lives put together. Her relationship with him is problematic in exactly the opposite direction: her own insecurities aside she’s an experienced power figure who was both his teacher and therapist, she takes advantage of him when he’s isolated and melting down with survivor’s guilt over what a complete failure he’s been, and he’s extremely/completely codependent on her to the point that if, say, there were a hypothetical alternate timeline where she died because some jerk who’s Rudy’s narrative and thematic foil conspired to see her dead, he’d be left nonfunctional and never recover beyond being a bitter, violent husk who’s so reprehensible that his perspective and actions would disgust even real timeline Rudy.
rely on really concerning reasoning because the dude is still an adult who, on some intellectual and even emotional levels, is way beyond the kids who are his “peers” and I just don’t think him being stunted is a good excuse for him “romancing” a minor for years in order to fuck her when she’s 18.
Eris’s relationship with Rudy is unhealthy and problematic for a lot of reasons (in fact it’s a pretty close parallel to why Rudy’s relationship with Roxie is problematic, just with the places inverted), but I don’t think it’s as clear cut as just taking ___________'s age and adding it to Rudy’s. Maybe if this sort of memory/ego-intact reincarnation were real that would be a good rule of thumb for determining what’s appropriate for a reincarnated person (although that raises issues in the opposite direction as well).
Rudy has more wherewithal than a literal child, but when he starts working as her tutor he’s stuck in a very weird place of being physically a child, emotionally and socially a young teenager (so still ahead of her in that regard, although he stays there as she does not which I’ll come back to in a second), and intellectually a severely depressed and brainrotted adult who can kind of scrape together lesson plans and interact with the other teachers[1] maturely. Over the next five years the last bit increasingly breaks down and melts into who he is becoming and the things he is learning as he actually has to grow up and see the world as a real, living world instead of thinking of it as an anime he’s watching or a game he’s playing. Especially when he’s trailing after Rudjerd he’s not exactly regressing but replacing whatever malformed adult ego and experiences he had left over from this world with the sort of socialization and maturation that’s typical of someone growing up in that world. In some regards he’s actively stunted and behind the curve there, because his old ego got in the way of him learning and internalizing all the things that people like Sylphie and Eris were seeing and learning as they grew up, leaving them ahead of him in the context of their world.
Eris is, well, an extremely violent aristocratic faildaughter who’s heavily internalized the lessons her family taught her about society and the world (which are bad) as well as the ones Ghislaine taught her (which are less bad, but still not good). She’s also actively being groomed by her parents towards a unilaterally-arranged marriage with Rudy that her father wants to force to happen. I don’t think the anime actually revealed the extent of that, instead just implying that she’d been coerced (she was) into going to Rudy’s bedroom on his birthday and not really exploring what was going on in her head (she very much did not want to be there) or why she came back (she felt obligated to fulfill the social role that was imposed on her). By the point of the displacement incident she’s more emotionally mature than Rudy and has an ego that it terms of matching the world they live in and its societies is more developed than Rudy’s, but she also has a heavily idealized image of Rudy as someone who is smarter than her (which is admittedly true, Rudy’s an absolute nerd who’s tried to learn everything he can just because he enjoys learning new things[2], and Eris is a martial arts prodigy who struggles with more abstract things), more mature than her (he’s not, he genuinely does not have the same context for how fucked things are because he thinks he’s the protagonist in a shonen story and things will just work out), and who’s reliable (he’s not, but he is trying very hard to not completely fuck up and let everyone down).
So her fixation on him is not good, it is absolutely toxic and problematic, but it’s also very one-sided and the power dynamics when they do hook up are really messy and bad in both directions. She has a completely unrealistic idea of him on which she is emotionally dependent, but from the other side he’s been keeping her at arms length and just trying to see her back to her family whom he doesn’t want to be involved with further. She took the trauma of the displacement incident in stride and was emotionally prepared for the worst, while he had genuinely thought everything would just work out and is traumatized by seeing the extent of the calamity and realizing almost everyone he ever knew is actually gone forever. She has institutional authority and social status over him even with the deaths of her immediate family, while he is effectively an orphan (despite his parents still being alive, they’re both entirely absent) with no social structure left other than her. She is socially and legally an adult whereas he is very much not, regardless of what his internal identity may or may not be at that point.
The whole scene is very much not good for a lot of reasons, and I’m not going to claim the text (let alone the anime) did a good job of really articulating all the ways it was bad and problematic for both of them. Should Rudy have kept turning her down in line with the conscience he actually managed to develop along the way, even when she pressured him? Sure, but it’s still understandable why he’s not mature enough to do that. Is literally every single aspect of their relationship unhealthy and completely fucked for both of them? Also yes. I just don’t agree that it fits into the model of grooming because that’s predicated on like institutional, social, and legal inequality and a difference in life experience and capability for personal agency that just isn’t there in the story.
Now subsequently, did the author make a good call by taking away Rudy’s dick and making Eris run away to play samurai with a buff catgirl for the next 8 years? Definitely. Confiscating Rudy’s dick privileges until further notice is one of the best things the first half of the series did and I will only begrudgingly admit that he did ultimately earn the right to have them back.
Lastly in terms of what I mentioned, I don’t know what to make of what happens with the mom in the LNs, but in the anime the dynamic of preserving her as someone more gooners would like on promotional material is clear.
You’re gonna hate this, but the anime actually aged her up visually. She’s like 18/19 (and Paul’s 21/22 IIRC) at the start of the story. _________ thinks of Rudy’s parents as still being kids early on in the first novel. Zenith and Lilia (who’s IIRC two years older than her) both just get rendered as a vague late 20s-early 30s or so in the art and stay that way for the next 16+ years. The stasis bit means Zenith is ~28 instead of ~34, but she’s rendered as looking the same as Lilia who’s ~36 by that point. The art in the LNs also shows Zenith as more like late 30s after the whole incident.
[I hit the text limit, I’ll continue later. I don’t disagree with the rest of your post but I do want to respond to it too.]
Tangential to that, can I say I loved the series’s treatment of language and language learning? Rudy’s earnest interest in learning more languages that started at that point in the story was so narratively unnecessary but such a great bit of worldbuilding and characterization and as a language nerd I really appreciated it. ↩︎
side note: I mentioned ADHD before, but he absolutely reads as someone with ADHD with the way he goes between enthusiastic obsession with anything new and unfamiliar and bouts of stagnation where he doesn’t want to follow up on it. ↩︎
No need to apologize, I can appreciate wanting to discuss a work with someone and jumping on the chance to. I’ll wait for you to write the rest of what you’d like to before I respond to avoid having reply chains in parallel. I don’t have a quarter as much to say as you do, though.
Thanks for the recommendations and the stuff to avoid. With this not being media I consume I have no idea where to start and what to avoid. Thanks for giving me a few things to just outright avoid.
Solo leveling is good slop in the overpowered mc genre. Its not as edgy as some others but it still comes across as incel fantasy a bit. Very watchable though.
I havent finished AOT, I watched the first season I was young and recently (finally) started rewatching. I heard it turns fascist in the last season? but I really like it so far. Apart from the surface level fascist allusions the world building is great and it’s got a revolutionary tone, regardless of how the author intended it.
I dont have kids, maybe I’d feel different if I did but I think if someone is really into anime it’s inevitable they’re getting exposed to some problematic stuff. You shouldnt be getting your worldview from there anyway. But any media can still be good to examine your own beliefs, if you watch somewhat critically
My daughter is only on the first season somewhere, and admittedly I’m not watching it with her but the here and there I’ve watched didn’t seem like I need to baseball slide into the living room and snatch the remote out of her hand but I was also not paying deep attention to it. She’s in bed asleep now, so maybe tomorrow I’ll talk to her about Attack on Titan and it having some stuff in it that maybe she doesn’t need to watch until she can have a more critical eye.
The author is most probably a fascist, but I’d consider it far less problematic than lets say Narnia or Harry Potter. Again I havent finished it, but the enemies are humanised and shown with their own valid motivations. There is also no sexualization whatsoever (extremely rare in shonen) and a some well written female characters. The politics are mix of both anti establishment and deference to authority, but I wouldn’t consider it fascist or think average people would take away that message. It’s far more revolutionary than liberal leaning media.
Im a bit biased I guess cause its what got me into anime. Personally I think it’s great your daughter feels comfortable watching it around you! In my experience kids are gonna watch what they want to watch (or what their friends are watching) anyway.
In my experience kids are gonna watch what they want to watch (or what their friends are watching) anyway.
I agree. She’s going to, and I’m not going to do the same shit my folks did with me. It did nothing but cause strife.
The author is most probably a fascist, but I’d consider it far less problematic than lets say Narnia
Ooh, please expand on this (if you want), I’ve heard a lot of Harry Potter takedowns, but not a lot about Narnia beyond “it’s just really hamfisted Jesus allegory with a lot of underlying racism against muslims.”
it’s just really hamfisted Jesus allegory with a lot of underlying racism against muslims
Yeah pretty much, I remember The Horse and His Boy being extremely orientalist, even as a kid that stood out. Other than that its basically a white saviour story where some british kids are the natural rulers over some lesser beings, it feels very much like a justification of colonialism.
Tbh I watched the movies and read the books as a kid, I’ve never revisited them since so I couldn’t give you a more detailed response, I’m sure other people have done so though
it’s got a revolutionary tone,
It sneers about fat cats, but it never has a revolutionary tone. Being revolutionary isn’t just about being populist. It was, at its least bad, oriented toward the extermination of an acceptably savage Other that the fat cats got in the way of the efficiency of, and then it basically reveals that the main setting, the walled city surrounded by man-eating monsters, was fantasy Israel all along, and the only way for the fantasy Zionists to live in peace is a world-consuming genocide against humanity, but the twist is that it’s heroic and not all of the foreign humans were killed, just 80% of the global population. Now all the humans can live in peace!
Having your reading is actually a good demonstration of how fascists can superficially coopt leftist critiques and then use them to advance their warmongering nationalist brutality.
I meant in a death of the author kind of way both readings are possible, even if the fascist one is clearly the one intended, I shouldn’t have been so charitable. Thanks for correcting me 👍
Everything studio ghibli is fire
I’ve been looking at some SG titles and they all look really good. I think I found some stuff I can watch with her.
Its probably insignificant to a lot of folks but my kids are growing into the ‘hanging w dad isn’t cool’ phase so anything I can use to just hangout with my kids is good for multiple reasons.
I wonder if she’d like Yu Yu Hakusho more than I did, I kinda grew bored with it once it started becoming more action-y, but that seems like the sort of thing your daughter would be into. I’ve also got a fem cousin with apparently similar tastes to your daughter, and she loves the movie Summer Wars, and a male coworker of mine with apparently similar tastes is fond of Shaman King, but I’ve only “vetted” the first two episodes of that. Lupin III part 2 and onward — specifically the dub — is basically a hit with everyone I know, regardless of gender and age.
If Sailor Moon is a hit with your daughter, maybe Cardcaptor Sakura would be a hit, too. Though I would note that there’s some minor age gap BS in it and the main character is aged 10~12 (original) and 13 (reboot), but on the whole Cardcaptor Sakura has long been very popular among young girls, and for good reason. Avoid the Nelvana dub, though.
She’s so new to it- I didn’t show her any of the posts but I just told my daughter vaguely that I’d made a post somewhere I frequent asking for recs for her. Once I mentioned that what she likes I keep seeing referred to as battle Shonen (I’m missing some accents I know) she sorta perked up, and looked up the phrase definition and said something along the lines of ‘yes that’s what i want’.
Thank you for the recs. I appreciate the time you took to give me some.
I’m very biased since I remember being a 13 yo girl obsessed with YYH myself, and in a lot of ways still am, but if she likes tournament arcs in her shonen, YYH perfected it!! But it also reaches far into other tropes and genres throughout its different arcs. The archetypes of the characters are great, Genkai is one of the best mentors and female role models in anime, and it genuinely has some of the best voice acting you can find in English dubs.
battle Shonen (I’m missing some accents I know)
It’s extremely unusual for anime fans to use accents on Romanji (Roman Alphabet transliterations of Japanese). Absolutely no one will give you grief for it or, if they do, you know you can discard them out of hand. No one here would, though.
Part of the reason is that accents are a reading convenience for anglos, because Japanese only has a small number of vowels and they all correspond to one letter each, so the diacritics aren’t actually distinguishing anything, unlike a German umlaut or something. It’s just so someone unfamiliar with the vowel inventory will know how it’s pronounced.Turns out the real reason is people don’t care about vowel length and ignoring diacritics is better for branding unless it’s French or something.
I only know a very little bit about Japanese but I was pretty sure o and ō were actually different things. The ō being like a double o, emphasized sort of thing. Something like that.
Wow, I’m a dummy. I knew about vowel lengthening but I didn’t realize that’s what macrons meant, I guess because when I see “romanji” it’s usually very lazy about that and sometimes even just writes the double vowel out, like “Haikyuu,” if it doesn’t just exclude it completely, like most renditions of “Tokyo,” which is apparently sometimes transliterated as “Toukyou” to signal lengthening, like “Shounen” is (I know Tokyo probably counts as a loanword with anglicized orthography).
Yup, you got it. 東京 is commonly rendered as Tokyo but that doesn’t quite map to the kana which are とうきょう and sometimes written in more accurate Romaji (rōmaji) as Tōkyō or Toukyou. The diacritic for elongation can distinguish words
I appreciate the input. I looked up some things based on your comment. Somehow, I’ve had a minor formal education in linguistics and morae were never even mentioned, just stress and syllabic timing.
I enjoyed reading YYHS more than watching it. The live action is hot garbage
Sounds like she’s interested in Shonen battle anime primarily, as long as you steer clear of Ecchi and Seinen you should be safer from the adult themes you’re worried about and feel free to check for those tags on MyAnimeList.net where they also have reviews and recommendations that can help you more. Off the top of my head Fullmetal Alchemist is a classic (either 2003 or Brotherhood are fine, but some will swear 2003 is not worth watching and I think they rushed the pace of the beginning of Brotherhood too much) and Kaiju No 8 is good for something currently airing.
Edit: *.net not .com
Thanks for the reply and suggestions. I’m getting a list of stuff together, and after dinner I’ll be looking at that site you suggested.
Why not demon slayer? every teen i know likes it
I thought about that one, it’s going on the list.
Are there services worth paying for?
Piracy is always good but if you want to play for a sub service i think crunchyroll is pretty fine.
also for other recomendations maybe she will like some old action shonen like Fullmetal Alchemist and HunterxHunter
Thank you. I’m writing these down so I can start searching for them and torrenting. I’ll look into crunchyroll too.
Seconding this.
The manga (comic) for Fullmetal Alchemist is pretty good, too. I’d recommend checking your library - depending on where you live you might have access to the comics for a lot of the stuff she already likes.
There’s a library a couple miles away which I take her to once or twice a month. I completely forgot about the library. Thanks for the reminder!
Hianime.to works great as long as you’ve got an ad blocker, its got EVERYTHING Tho so if you give it to your kid they’ll have access to whatever anime they look for
also, I cannot second Hunter x Hunter hard enough, watch it with her goddamnit!
If this is on the list my daughter really liked Made in Abyss season 1. She isn’t allowed to watch the movie until she’s about OP’s daughters age. Mature content warning.
Much more tame, Trigun Stampede, SAO, Accel world, Stein’s;Gate, etc…
I wouldn’t recommend Steins;Gate to a 13 year old just because of how misogynist it gets
Thanks. My thirteen year old daughter is exposed to themes like this daily and I’d rather not normalize it via cartoon. That person seems weirdly combative about something. I just blocked them.
You are the weirdest weirdo in this thread.
Is there a reason you feel the need to be like that?
It’s not appreciated.
MiA is so much worse than PG 13. I don’t remember the exact scope of S1, but the movie and probably the last season are solidly deserving of being R rated if banning them is not an option (and the movie seriously has some of the most revolting shit I’ve ever seen. The fight scene at the end is pretty well-done, but it’s not worth the disgusting, sadistic fetishist shit elsewhere in the film).
This is an example of someone who couldn’t handle the movie. It isn’t for everyone. Certainly not for a casual fight anime.
Yeah, I’m sure that the sadistic pedo shit is in the eye of the beholder and I’m just too lily-livered for it.
Pretty much yeah. If you can’t handle Bondrewd go no further. It’s gruesome, nuanced and not for general audiences.
nuanced
lmao
I’ll try to avoid duplicating others’ excellent suggestions. Unless otherwise specified, none of these titles will have gore or excessive violence or inappropriate sexual content. I usually watch the weirder philosophical ones so I don’t know if she’d actually enjoy them, they’re pretty niche. So I’ll just list some that I’d feel comfortable with one of my younger relatives about the same age watching unsupervised.
Eve no Jikan / Time of Eve: a calm and introspective tale about the ethics and impact of AI, told in the form of casual conversations in a laid-back coffee shop.
Serial Experiments Lain: this is deeply high-concept sci-fi. There’s some difficult topics, such as a suicide in the first minute of the first episode and repeated references back to it, and some murders. But it’s never really gory. It’s about a teenage girl who’s extremely neurodivergent-coded exploring her world’s equivalent of the internet, the Wired, and how the Wired is starting to bleed out into the real world. It was made in the mid-1990s but it’s eerily prescient on what humanity really did with 24/7 internet-connected pocket computers. It’s like the 1976 movie Network in that it just keeps getting more relevant with each passing year.
Angel’s Egg: This is a short film that’s more art-for-art’s-sake than a coherent story. But it’s beautiful to watch and listen to.
Arashi no Yoru ni: a movie about a wolf and a sheep becoming friends, and how that friendship earns them the ire of both their peoples. Stock up on tissues. Not just for her, but for anyone in the household who watches it. The cutesy art style hides a deeply serious and sober look at bigotry.
Dirty Pair: an older 1980s franchise, but one that aged pretty well. The adventures of two space cops as they cause a lot more problems than they solve. This is firmly in comedy territory. Don’t let the main characters’ costumes fool you if you google it. Our two leading ladies have agency, personalities, and are never damsels-in-distress or SA victims.
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time: a movie about a high school girl who discovers that she can manipulate time. Slow paced and introspective and melancholic.
Grave of the Fireflies: this is one of the best anti-war movies ever made. It’s the story of a teen boy and his toddler sister trying to survive in WW2 Japan without much help from anyone. It’s not remotely a nationalistic movie, it is scathing of Imperial Japan. It is harrowing. Bring lots and lots of tissues. But I think everyone ought to see it once. Once is probably all you’ll need. You’ll never forget it. Go in blind, be prepared to answer questions on Japan’s actions in WW2.
Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet: the first ten minutes fools you into thinking you’re watching yet another generic “teenage super-pilot of a giant super-robot” war story. Then it reveals what it really is, the story of a child soldier being welcomed by a peaceful community and learning to be a regular human being after they took him in. There’s some PG-13 level violence at times, but for the most part it’s just about a traumatized teen getting the chance to live a normal life with found-family.
My daughter loves to draw, she’s very artistic. I think some of the more artsy stuff she would still like.
You’ve given some good suggestions, and I will get them on the list for her. She’s in bed for school tomorrow so it’ll be after she is off school and I’m finished w work but I really appreciate you taking the time to suggest these.
As a side note, I had to explain hexbear to my 13yo tonite as she asked me where I was getting all these suggestions as she knows I’m not an anime type of guy.
‘Is it like Reddit?’
‘No honey, it’s not like Reddit’
‘Oh what is it then’
‘I don’t know I can’t really explain it’
‘What do yall talk about on there?’
thinking of my post history
‘It’s called shitposting honey’
‘Oh ok’.I didn’t give her the URL. Lol
I think some of the more artsy stuff she would still like.
Land of the Lustrous is absurdly good art, depicts a literal a commune of characters who are all different gems, and is absolutely fantastic. It’s manga and art books are absolutely gorgeous.
It is probably my #1 show. If you want something that will inspire her art put her on the show first, then get her the manga and art books if she likes it.
She would absolutely love that I think. That might be a Christmas present for her. Thank You
It is also historically significant for anime. It was the first anime to really do 3d cg and do it GOOD. There have been a few shows since that now incorporate 3d in great ways none of the good uses of 3d we now see would exist if this show hadn’t shown how it should be done correctly. Prior to Land of the Lustrous/Houseki no Kuni 3d in anime was always a running joke, and always very bad.
only good 3d CG show
To be Hero X was very good
Girl who leapt thru time 10/10
one piece is in many ways a better naruto (more coherent politics, better worldbuilding, better character work).
you should probably be aware that the politics of attack on titan are kind of fucked because the author is a japanese nationalist type that seems to think that every country on earth is best understood as an ethnostate. you wouldn’t know it from the first several seasons of it, but there is a turn it takes that i can only describe as committing actual antisemitic blood libels (although the author is clearly on the side of the stand-ins for eastern European Ashkenazi Jews, who are 1) in a ghetto and 2) forced to wear star of david armbands) where very explicitly Jewish people are portrayed as having a genuine blood curse that allows them to be transformed into the titans to oppress the world and eat everyone’s children. i realize it sounds like i’m exaggerating, but i’m not, it’s an insane thing for a guy to write, present these people as having spent countless centuries oppressing the globe, present them doing a genocide, and essentially present it as a necessity. in other words, in a lot of genuinely strange and kind of confusing ways, attack on titan is a pro-israel work of fiction.
mob psycho 100 is a very thoughtful and fun meditation on being autistic that doesn’t do weird shit.
vinland saga is recent and very good, vikings and an exploration of violence, first season is very high action
orb: on the movements of the earth is a recent one about the development of the heliocentric model of the universe, lot of catholic institutional violence against astronomers depicted, a much tenser and action-heavy than the subject would imply.
i’d also recommend jujutsu kaisen for someone that age, also coming out now, also a battle shonen, no really weird shit.
edit: there’s also a first season of a chinese-japanese collaborative production called to be hero x. kind of like the boys in terms of a world with superheroes that are controlled by corporations, it’s a lot less violent and much more interested in exploring characters and the interplay of essentially superhero megacorps trying to beat each other. does a lot of different animation styles, also lacks any particular weird shit.
I personally don’t care for the way One Piece’s characters are designed. There’s so much variation between the men and the women all look practically the same.
Yeah, Oda’s weird about women for sure
Try to remain strong and dedicated
lmao
I think it’s interesting that he makes much more expressive designs with older ladies, because I guess once wanting to fuck them is off the table for him they are allowed to be designed around literally anything else.
And that’s completely valid, he draws exactly two kinds of adult younger women, ones that look like Nami and ones that look like Robin. Both of these women also basically look the same. It’s a bit ridiculous.
Get her into Fullmetal alchemist
Seconded, one of the best anime series ever created with zero fan service
She has given me a list of stuff to watch first and FMA is third on the list. Thanks for the rec!
The original TV run of Sailor Moon (1992-1997).
Oh yeah I bet she would like that one. Thanks!
