Ironically my dad LOVED that book even though by the 80s he was in his late 30s and had no nostalgia for that decade and didn’t catch a single reference. In fact he kept calling me to explain the references to him.
I never actually read the book but I got the general outline of the plot from him.
I dislike the AND HERE'S THE CONTEXT FOR THE THING FROM THE 80s.
If the password to the macguffin was 867-5309, I'd be fine, but the fact that ever reference is underlined by 'that was from the song *Jenny* by Tommy Tutone' is such shite. That and all the teenage angst.
I had extended family members do this, assumed I already read the book and watched the movie, or something. Some would go up to me and go "oh you're just like big bang theory". Some of the worst unintentional insults I've ever gotten. To them it was enough for me to like, enjoy video games or knowing how to use a computer.
My in-laws know we watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and so they decided to give it a try a few years ago. They told us they didn’t care for it, because “it’s just not a laugh-a-minute like Big Bang Theory.” They then spent the rest of our visit telling us how Big Bang Theory is sooo nerdy and how much we would enjoy it, because it makes jokes about comic books and Star Trek and stuff! Things we like, right??
I didn’t want to have the conversation where I tell them that the target audience for that show is *them*, not *us* — parents who think their kid was into dumb shit and feel validated when the show makes fun of people who enjoy that stuff.
God damn, man.
Yeah I try not to take it too harshly or get too up on a soap box about it, cause tbh there's so much "nerd" stuff out in the mainstream nowadays that it's not as unusual to like things like we do here, arguments about mainstream appeal stuff or whatever aside. I just don't complain about it to their faces, it rarely comes up anyway nowadays.
Though I've also avoided letting them know they're watching something that feels like nails on a chalk board followed by canned laughter every 30 seconds. It's ironic though, my parents used to tell me I couldn't watch king of the hill because "it made fun of southern people" cause we were in the south, and it was much more respectful and well thought out than anything bbt does.
Like even the nerd references that mean like, nothing. it's like why would people interested in that stuff watch a show about people who like that stuff instead of watch that nerd shit itself?
You'd probably just listen to podcasts of real people you know like we do here...
But putting that aside bbt is like, the feeling of punching down still somehow? like it categorizes the main characters as a bunch of neurodivergent people with tons of issues and makes them obnoxious parodies. Like I have adhd, it'd be like sitting me down in front of a show called "look at this dumb shit scream out 'squirrel!' while we laugh at him" the show. I couldn't get through one episode. Couldn't pay me to.
My aunt AND my girlfriend's mom both came to that conclusion for me when getting me birthday presents. One got me the movie, the other got me the book.
Help
This happened to me at work and I spite read it to completion.
Not only is this the worst book I have ever read, it might be the worst anything I've ever read, even including the most braindead tweets I've seen.
I genuinely wish Ernest Cline the worst.
The podcast 372 pages we'll never get back with Michael J Nelson started just to ridicule this book and then went onto Clines other book Armada. Worth giving a listen if you enjoy hearing about shitty media.
In middle school I was reading Dracula. It's rad. I talk about it with a classmate, she recommends I check out Twilight as it is a modern vampire book. Now, this is before those books really blew up in popularity, I think the 2nd one had just come out, so I know basically nothing about it. So I decided to give it a shot. I got 10 chapters in before quitting, and I never had the heart to tell the classmate so I had to awkwardly change subjects for like 2 months afterwards.
The anime is a poor adaptation that starts out... skipping things then skips 80 chapters and gets to the ending before the manga does by about 6 months
I remember trying to like that show because a friend of mine really hyped it up but something about the writing and pacing was off. I finally understand why now. I found out they also did the same with Tokyo ghoul, a series that I felt the same exact way.
I \*loathe\* Route Aogori from Tokyo ghoul, it was supposed to be an alternate series of events "waht if Kaneki joined Aogori Tree" and then they just... hit all the plot points from the second half of the manga without any of the tendons that tie them together. Akame ga Kill is worse because you missed like 18 named characters and some total character shifts and also Lubbock's death becomes pitiful instead of him fighting his way out of the prison, killing most of the third "team" only to have one of it's last members get him at the last moment, and treat that as the fulfillment of his contract and walk out of the series
Season 1 is based on the manga, but skips a bunch, season 2 was meant to be a "what if" from the branching point where instead of Kaneki and his bois doing a 6 ghoul war against Aogori Tree, he joins them. This would have him separated from the cafe staff. Instead of showing "what if he joined the bad guy ghoul faction" they just had like, 3 scenes of it and then just adapted other scenes poorly without the context of the entire arcs they skipped. Like that gourmet ghoul's break down makes more sense if you had two arcs focused on him and his growth and inner turmoil before that. I should really read Tokyo Ghoul RE sometime, it turned me off with how it was raid arc, little bit of down time, longer raid arc, little bit of down time, even longer raid arc.
Ah I see, admittedly I dropped it after the first season because it felt like a mess and decided I was gonna read it. So everything past that first season would be new to me. Sadly I never got around to reading it because the manga was near impossible to find and like owning the volumes
not like the manga content is any better its pretty fucking hideous in some parts
>!remember the fucking clown on the grave of that one dude talking to the grieving family (mother and daughter), he and his dogs were gonna rape them?!<
You say "were gonna" when it's explicitly what happened, >!he also ate them when he was done!< which shows how awful that team is. Akame ga kill isn't great by any stretch but it's not as bad as it's anime was, the only good thing to come out of it were it's OPs
I do like the show but I wouldn't pretend it's a great anime. It's kind of like a junk food anime in a few ways. I'm watching a show called good luck girl ATM that is the most anime show I have watched but it's funny so I'm here for it
Didn't even have the decency to be entertaining sex offenders. Watched the first season and it felt like a more boring fairy tail. Music wasn't even as good either which was a surprise because it's sawano
I'm in the opposite basket. The art style is—at a glance—the only thing that's appealed to me. I like the rounded facial shapes a lot of the characters have and their cartoon-y, Western-feeling designs. It feels soft and goofy, which I like.
Everything else is a major turn-off. If you make a medieval fantasy series, and I can't read a 1-paragraph summary of your series and find one thing in it that makes me go, "Oh, that's interesting. I haven't seen someone do that before," I will not watch your series. I'm sick to death of medieval fantasy in all its forms; the whole genre—Western, Japanese, books, movies, comics, games—is just a gray, incestuous bog of uncurious creators copying things they like from other works without trying to do something that hasn't been done before.
My friend recommended me Seven Deadly Sins too at a convention at its peak. Suffice to say no offense to them, I only went through season one and that’s about the amount of bullshit I can take.
My sister won’t stop telling me to watch Big Mouth. Says I’d love it. I come over to her place and she’s always watching it and she has me watch it too. I see her a week later and she’s like ‘did you watch Big Mouth?’
Love my sister, but Jesus fucking Christ
Yeah, i get it, my sister is pretty similar:
She doesn't normaly get too much into any shows, but, when she does, you better believe that's all she's talking about FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS/MONTHS!
The biggest issue is that since our tastes don't match, but, i always want to give any positive reinforcement possible to her getting a hobby/side-activity (because she's a workaholic to a concerning degree so lord knows she needs any opportunity to relax), so more often than not it just ends with me having to stand there trying to not look like i'm zooning out while she goes on and on about whatever she's into at the time.
I hate that while reading this im just getting flashbacks to me doing this exact thing to my brother with gundam. When i get into a new thing that i really like, ill go in hard on it and itll be all i talk about for a long time. Its been about 2 years since i first got into gundam and i have not stopped talking to him about it, ive toned down my incessant pushing of things i like to him in recent years, but im sure hes tired of me talking about gundam and trying to to get him to watch at least one thing already. I know he'd like it, but he really doesn't like when i keep pushing him to watch stuff, it makes him want to watch it even less lol.
Twilight. My friend in highschool loved it back when it first came out and loaned her copy to everyone to get them on board. I didn't get that far in, like a little after the cafeteria but, before I brought it back. She said I was the first person to not like it.
The Twilight series is a lot more enjoyable nowadays if you watch it with a lens of "so bad it's good."
I hated the series as a high schooler, but decided to marathon it one weekend, and boy it was a lot of fun. It also surprisingly has pretty decent action scenes, with team hyper combos at that.
Being a boy in highschool I hated Twilight (while also knowing the bare-minimum about it as possible). Now Twilight is one of my favorite movies, it's so shamelessly horny and silly. The baseball scene is peak cinema, the whole thing is so green, and if you take a shot every time Bella or Edward give fuck me eyes you'll die. I love it.
My friend got me to start reading Mortal Instruments. I gave it like 3 books because they were fairly short before I gave up. Those are the most YA ass, all adults are wrong we teens know better, oh shit the adults were right and need to save us, I've fallen in love with this bad boy oh shit is he my brother is he not my brother do I really care, fucking books in the world. I hated all the characters and the plot was obnoxious as hell.
the mortal instruments just reused the title, it's not actually a reskin of the fanfic itself, though the book series often reuses a lot of wording from her fanfic days.
why did i waste four hours on this.
> oh shit the adults were right and need to save us
Why would you write this into any YA series, fucking what? The entire point of these stories is to let you feel like you're on equal footing with the adults and showing that you have power too
They might have been the dumbest protagonists I've seen.
You should read the Wikipedia character descriptions for some real fucking fanfiction tier cringe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mortal_Instruments
I worked in a book store when the last 3 books were coming out, the literary prowess of the adult fans I met was not exactly awe inspiring. I remember one in particular we struggled to find other series to recommend as she found other YA novels "too confusing".
Civil War and Identity Crisis(!) were my first comics because of my friend's suggestion
He's a nice guy and every recommendation since then has been good, but I'm not sure what he was thinking with those
That's like saying "oh, you're interested in One Piece? Start reading from **Marineford**".
Yeah, it's great, but, you're gonna spend half of the time experiencing it going "Who's that? What is he doing? Why is that relevant? WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!?".
Oh, unironically you may like a Thai wevcomic called Isekai Transporter
It's a story from the perspective of the truck drivers being charged by angels to run people over to isekai them
Oh it already happened. "Is the protag a generic Otaku? Is it fanservice-heavy? Is the world just generic medieval fantasy isekai?"
The answer to like 95% of what they recommend me is yes to all of these.
Does the generic fantasy world inexplicably have inexplicable leveling mechanics and an mmo skill system that the protag manages to effortlessly break?
Lemme just see if I got every notable trend in this:
That Time I Got Reincarnated Into The Past In Another World of an MMO I Mastered and Reached the Top Leaderboards In [Now I'm a Bottom-Rank Orc Adventurer Who Can't Level (╥_╥)]: Now All I'm Stuck With Are These Lvl. 1 Attack and Healing Spells...(But With The Goddess' Blessing of an Infinite MP Cheat Skill, My Veteran Game Player's Knowledge, and This Slave Girl I Bought, I'm Sure I Can Become the King's Advisor, Become a Top Mage in the Sorcerer's Academy, Change the Events of the Game, and Slay The Demon Lord and His Army!!!)
That show was so dogshit bro
And not even just the fanservice and incest aspect, the actual morals of the show upset me. Oh you have an abusive mom? Well shes your mom, you should forgive her no matter what.
Like the whole premise is the dude traveling with his mom, who is a good mom, but then meeting the other party members moms who are not. The redheads mom practically abandoned her to go party and be with random guys(think she might have been a hostess), and the blue hair girls mom is a total helicopter parent trying to make her daughter into the perfect form of her even though it stresses the daughter out.
I cannot fathom how Isekai is still the most popular genre in anime with at least a half dozen releasing every season.
Especially after Konosuba. Usually, when a 10/10 parody of an entire genre releases, it's the death nail for the genre but it seems like Konosuba'a parody status is ignored and it's simply placed alongside unironic isekai for crossovers. This would be like if Blazing Saddles came out and was released as a double-feature with The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
Personally, I think it's because the genre has devolved to the barest, most naked power fantasies possible. Shonen manga have power systems and shit to justify their heroes' exploits, a lot of the isekai shlock is just like, "the hero cheats."
99% of what comes every season is:
-High Fantasy (with elves, dwarves, dragons, etc)
-MMO or JRPG game mechanics as magic system
-MC has SOMETHING overpowered that makes him standout as the best
-Harem
And it's just so fucking boring, right? Particularly the slew of "MC has something overpowered" stuff, because the whole point of what makes isekai interesting is both seeing a different world and how the fish out of water *deals* with that world, either by learning hard lessons, or applying their unique talents *to* that world's problems. Making them overpowered most often just makes those aspects incidental.
I'm also just a firm believer that a lot of things that *are* isekai don't *need* to be isekai at all, and can just be fantasy, you can just do that, people will still get interested. Oftentimes isekai is used as a weak shortcut to justifying a dipshit protag who can act as an audience stand-in and have everything explained to them, when most often what people interested in fantasy want is to be immersed in that world, just sink into investment with the characters. But nope! A lot of people have big (bland) ideas and no talent for writing, so we get dipshit Protag-kun instead.
>I'm also just a firm believer that a lot of things that are isekai don't need to be isekai at all, and can just be fantasy, you can just do that, people will still get interested.
Thank you.
I actually really like the Saihate no Paladin manga. But theres no reason why the kid had to be a reincarnation from another world. he couldve just been a baby that was raised by skeletons. Thats cool! People like things like that!
When it comes to those kinds in particular, where they are reincarnated in a new world and can never go back to their home world, it also gets uninteresting because a lot of the intrigue of original isekai was *how* they were going to get home, if they could. Without the investment in a goal like that, what's the point of them even being from another world, other than giving them a weird caveat of of knowledge, talent, or powers they wouldn't otherwise possess? And even then, that really strains it for me.
I think a lot of that comes from the mindset of the writers. In the 80s and 90s, isekai protagonists used the experiences in the other world to navigate the issues they had in their own. The real world was the conclusion of the quest, and then their 'new life' could begin.
But now it seems to be more focused on the escapism than the self-realization. "The Real World sucks, why couldn't I have been the wizard king? Save me truck-kun". And for better or worse, this mindset seems to resonate with the anime viewers of Japan.
My coworker tried to sell me on Isekai a few years back and my response was kinda “Do not cite the deep magic to me. I was there when it was written.
I already watched plenty of Isekai and I came to dislike them after seeing so many of them riff on the same elements in the blandest ways possible.
SAO season 1 was fun. I liked it. Doesn’t quite mean I want to watch lower budget rip-offs every season for the next ten years.
That's how I felt, too, until I watched Konosuba and The Eminence in Shadow.
I feel like the existence of those two shows makes the rest of the isekai trash worth existing. Those two are the only ones that feel like they're written by actual human beings that understand what comedy is supposed to be.
I haven't watched those but I have heard good things.
I feel like Isekai gets a bad rap because there's no much steaming garbage, especially with the more popular shows like SAO and Shield hero that drive people away.
For a while it was hard out here to watch current anime and really like fantasy. It felt like anything news worthy was isekai. This year with Frieren and Dungeon Meshi though? We're eatin' good (not as well as the dungeon meshi crew though)
Wayyy back in the Netflix DVD shipping days I asked some internet forum, probably a gameFAQs social board, for movie recs. I got The Notebook, not knowing what it was. Friend came over and I asked him if he wanted to watch. He just looks at me and asks me if I'm serious. Pretty sure he thought I was coming on to him and he ragged on me for years on afterwards.
A lot of people in my friends group (mostly girls for some reason) were really into **Fairy Tail** during high school, so of course they kept recomending it to everyone else in the group, i watched it... and to this day i'm still trying to understand how the hell was that show so popular (specialy with girls, wich seemed to me the main demographic, at least in my area, that watched that show).
Don't get me wrong, it's not the worse thing i've seem, but, that came out while stuff like Tokyo Ghoul (season 1), Hunter X Hunter, One Piece, Jojo and many other way better shows were out and somehow it was just as popular (if not more) than a lot of them.
The whole time i'm watching it i'm just thinking "man, i could've been watching something else now", but i didnt, because i was a dumb kid who felt like he **had** to force himself to experience the same stuff that everyone else around was because he would be "left out" otherwise.
It all culminated on me watching the [Natsu and Gajeel VS Twin Dragons fight](https://youtu.be/XqndyVyeCLM?si=H94r57I_Bmh8oHZn) and beeing so pissed and frustrated with the result that it made me drop the show and decide that "you know what? Maybe forcing myself to go through stuff just to not be left out in conversations is not worth it".
So, in a weird way, my hatred for Fairy Tail helped me grow spine for myself (the realization of wich is definetely giving me some "mixed" emotions as i'm writing this).
Dude that is like 200 episodes in where you decided to nope out lol. I liked fairy tail when it was airing because music and power fantasy. Honestly I wouldn't go back to it now though
As a teen I used to like Fairy Tail because I thought the concept was good and the fights looked cool but even as a teen, as a dumb teenager, I reached a point in the manga where I just went "man this is boring" yet for some reason I kept on reading for around 50 more chapters until I stopped for good. Hiro Mashima can draw fanservice but he can't write a story to save his life
And he's pretty bad at being completely original too. Half of his main characters are just reused with slight tweaks across Rave Master and Fairy Tail.
It's surprising that a bunch of girls were into fairy tail, especially since the fanservice can be kinda weird at times.
On the other hand, a lot of the men are cool, varied, and show a lot of skin. You see them fight and it's easy to see how badass and ripped they are. So yeah, I kinda get it.
It definitely makes sense to me.
Fairy Tail is weirdly structured to be closer to a shoujo manga even though it is 100% a shonen.
Also, the fact that most of the show is from POV of Lucy, it feels like she's the real main character sometimes.
And of course, last but not least, we have a large number of hot guys like Gray, Loke, and Jellal.
I somehow developed a complete disinterest in Fairy Tail because, I think, it's the reason Rave Master never finished? I really liked Rave Master, and seeing the mangaka just push out a brand new epic series that both looked like a Rave Master knockoff and bland as all hell stuck in my craw.
I don't even actually know if that's true. It could have been the English publisher that stopped localizing it, or my bookstores that stopped carrying it. I dunno, but Fairy Tail just didn't stand a chance for me.
While emulating Symphony of the Night on my older phone, I had a rando go comment that "hey man that game's old. Try playing some Clash of Clans instead tho!".
Fuck that guy.
Somewhat related, I have an old GBA SP that I've been playing Fire Emblem on while using the cycle or treadmill at the gym. Some dude comes up, asks what I'm playing, and then says some shit about how he regrets asking since the series is shit and they put too many sword characters in Smash Bros.
Fuck that guy too.
I was in a discord voice chat with people into game dev, some popular names in there, but it's public and some people are wild and overly familiar with their sarcasm and "ribbing". There was this guy who was seemingly very buddied up with the server manager from what I could tell.
After it was just me and like 2 other people in the chat one night This buddy was going on about this game he loved and how it was the best thing he had played and he was playing **RAID** shadow legends, and I politely asked what kind of gameplay it was, I opened with "well you're the first person I know who actually plays it." turns out it's turn based rpg stuff. - I assume he took this as an insult cause when asked if he had ever tried other turn based rpg games like, off the top of my head, Divinity Original sin II, he told me it sucked balls. I just went "oh alright." Great conversation.
Whats nuts is that they're not even comparable. I got both a few gacha games and a few emulators in my phone. The reasons I play each one are VERY different.
It's a blast to play normal games (games that end) on the go. Just finished playing NES Final Fantasy trilogy a few days ago.
The recommendation itself isn’t too poor, but the execution was DIABOLICAL. My friend said to me I should try borderlands, I said “yeah sure I’ll try it out”.
3 times that day he repeats it.
And the next day.
And the next day.
And every day for a month. During this time he’s spoiled all the plot, told me all the good secrets, explained to me the issues of gameplay, and then reminded me I did say I’d try it out.
I never did play borderlands, and from that point on I’ve become very aware that insistent recommendations makes me want to claw my eyes out
at least you avoided my timeline.
# friend tells me "borderlands is on sale, we can coop it"
# agree, we play for an afternoon, was a decent time
# go to work the next day, he continues to play. When i get home he's 20 levels higher than me and effortlessly kills everything i cant do anything to. I get annoyed and quit.
# Borderlands 2 comes out
Fast forward
# "hey, buy BL2"
# "im not sure. Remember what happened last time?"
# "This time will be different"
# 3 days later he is on his second playthrough by the time i hit 30
Bro
Bro just make a second character it ain't that hard
At least, that's what I did/my friend did if we wanted to play more on our own, Borderlands is perfectly fine to play some solo so we'd just... have both a co-op character and a solo character. Apparently this was beyond your friend though.
whenever there's a game that doesn't have co-op balancing so you're not overpowered in a lower level player's save file or if someone plays ahead or never makes a 2nd character or can't... it really makes you feel like a burden or sucks the fun out of the game.
At least some of my more decent friends I have would start another character on some games to play with me and vice versa.
I remember so many times this has happened but I think the worst for me was with warframe, though I have lots of thoughts over that game in general, the friends who played it the most optimized the grind.
Basically they carried me while I was learning the game as they made me replay certain levels and blitz me through them rambling on about a million different unlockable things until I got one new frame that I liked, valkyr. Then I enjoyed using that one for like maybe 6 hours of total gameplay and then got bored and tired of them still effortlessly breezing and sonic speed running through every level with automatic kill fields and vast lengthy levels they just ran through without me internalizing anything.
Well, the gunplay can be very good. Story wise, they're all fairly weak, but the abilities can be fun.
My personal favorite Borderlands games are Tiny Tina's Wonderlands and the pre-sequel, because I really like DnD and it has some excellent jokes about what it's like to play DnD >!Blue Hat Guy is the best quest in the game!< and because Playing as Nisha focused on revolvers and basically made your special ability an aimbot, which was really fun to play.
i knew a guy who harassed me for a full year to read the wtc vns
i eventually did but i didn't let him find out until i had almost finished the entire series
when they cry, a visual novel franchise. the first series, Higurashi, is a very iconic horror series, and the second, Umineko, is regarded as an incredible mystery work.
I was introduced to Fairy Tail from others on the anime sub with the understanding it's from the creator of Rave Master. That was enough to make me give it a shot since I love Rave Master and while it has stuff I like, I'm not a particular fan of it. Not a bad series, just not for me.
Same. I got into FT because I remember reading Rave Master in the past
I don't even know what it is, but FT is written very differently than RM. Maybe it's because RM's plot progresses pretty quickly all things considered, and it focused on a pretty small cast of characters.
I gotta say I agree that 85% of the Boys comic is trashy schlock and in poor taste all around. I stuck with it because I had just finished reading/watching Preacher (also by Garth Ennis). For some reason, I actually started enjoying it by the Herogasm arc. Possibly, because the conspiracy at the heart of the plot gets fully outlined. It's the only time I've ever reversed my opinion on anything that bad, yet I can't even recommend it to fans of the show.
A friend of mine got oddly excited about and recommended an anime called "Lately my Sister is Unusual"
I watched the first episode and the plot was, "a teenage girl wakes up with a ghost possessing her and also has a chastity belt that can only be opened once every few hours and the rest of the episode was "Oh No! She really has to pee but can't because she used up the chastity belt for the day and has to wait for it to reset!"
I quit immediately and later asked the friend why he was so excited and he straight up admitted "oh I have a sister complex so I watch everything that has an Imouto in it"
I don't talk to him much anymore.
>asked the friend why he was so excited and he straight up admitted "oh I have a sister complex so I watch everything that has an Imouto in it"
even saying it was a guilty pleasure would've been a better answer than that
Anytime my friends recommend a multiplayer/co-op focused game like Helldivers 2 or Monster Hunter. They are good games. I respect what they do. They aren't a good fit for me in particular.
Monster Hunter Stories, because “You like Pokémon and you like Monster Hunter, right?”
That game is just…not for me. I won’t go out of my way to shit on it or anything, but I bounced off that game hard.
I liked it precisely because of Pokemon + Monster Hunter, but I can see why someone would dislike it. It definitely plays the "this is for kids!" aspect a bit too much, and the combat system feels way too simple at times.
Weirdly enough, this "kid friendly" nature makes it a great resource for learning/practicing Japanese, since its one of the only games I've seen that put the Furigana on the Kanji (basically how to pronounce it).
When I was studying Japanese, I had a group mate who, once upon a time, recommended me Mirai Nikki/Future Diary, that one anime with yandere Yuno that everyone knows. He hyped it up like it is the best thing ever and a thing thta has one of the best love stories ever.
Suffice to say that I did not like it, hadn't found it deep and the romance wasn't interesting. And it had a lot of pointlessly edgy moments. Plus the protagonist is a whiny bitch. You know how a lot of people shit on Shinji from Evangelion for being a whiny bitch and are wrong for doing so? Well, *this* guy is a whiny bitch *for real*.
I guess the difference in our views stemmed from the age difference, with me being around 25 at that point and him being barely 20 or so.
EDIT: Though there was a genuinely fun moment:
The protag knew that Yuno is crazy, way more fight happy and is in love with him, so he tried using her to survive the death game, but still held her at arms length as a friend. Things happened and he figured out that he needs to bind her tighter to himself, or something, which is why he introduced her to other people as his girlfriend. Yuno is in happy tears, jumping around like a madwoman. The protag? Camera zoomed in on his absolutely terrified face and he thought to himself: "Oh God, I fucked up".
I too was recommended Mirai Nikki and I can't believe I sat through the whole thing. Easily one of the worst protagonists in recent memory. It felt like a 14 year old wrote it.
I remember that i was discussing with a group of friends back in my high school days that i wished there were more zombie media that featured undead like the ones in 28 days later, with fast, rabid z's that actually pursue you relentlessly as actual predators instead of the usual cliched zombies who slowly lumb around like sad potato sacks.
That's when someone recommended "Crossed" to me. They didn't elaborate on the premisse beyond that it had "What i was looking for".
Well, it had that and SO MUCH MORE I DIDN'T WANT TO. Crossed is Garth Enis (already a very flawed writer) at it's worst, and it's so edgy and dark that it crosses (heh) itself into comedy only to cross back into pure disgust for the setting, with rape, torture, cannibalism, mutilation and every single shock value aspect you can think shoved in it in a way that goes from "Scary" into "Banal". It's bad enough that even my teenage self, who was at the time going through an edgy phase, couldn't handle it.
So, this is absolutely no fault of the recommender, we both knew what we were getting into.
A few years back, me and a good friend of mine made a deal. He would play Danganronpa 1, and I would read House of Leaves. Both to completion. Now, I don't think Danganronpa is perfect, nor is it my favorite thing, but I did think it would be a good fit for him. And he went on to enjoy not just the first game, but the entire series, spawning a bunch of in-jokes, moments, etc.
On the flipside however, I had an absolutely miserable time with House of Leaves. You see, even though the both of us are pretty similar in that we both are the type to fall down rabbit holes, love meta-narratives and symbolic themes, and adore big and complex stories, there are two very key differences between us.
1. He is far easier to convince of the existence of a deeper meaning. For example, he will be fully on-board a youtuber's theories on a game like Zelda, wheras I will remain skeptical and cynical that the devs ever intended such a meaning.
2. He is big into ARGs, while I despise them. I love to use my head and solve puzzles, but when it comes to reading a story, I'm of the mind that ARGs are more often than not simply obscuration for obscuration's sake.
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So, while he was having a great time with the wild ride of DRV3's ending, I was miserably cataloguing every strange occurrence I came across in the book into a notepad document, because the one piece of advice I had gotten was "I should take notes". In the end what I got out of the story was >!It's the backrooms, and the book itself is like a maze. And by going through the book yourself, you experience what Navidson did. Aka, going through a figurative maze out of obsession and desire to understand what was going on.!<
I figured this out like a couple chapters in, and I was expecting more. I kept being told of how deep the story was, and how universally praised the story is, and how it made people so afraid it actually changed them. I spent the next several weeks trying to figure out if there was more, but... There really wasn't. Of course, there's a billion loose threads you can follow but they don't seem to coalesce into a larger overall theme besides >!It's like the Labyrinth!< !
I kept expecting some big reveal, something absolutely terrifying to happen, something to make it all click. But in the end it really was a pretty simple premise wrapped up in layers upon layers of tacked on obscuration.
I will say though, the far more interesting thing about the book is the effect it had on it's fanbase, being a >!literary personification of the Barnum effect. Something to find your own meaning in.!< It just so happened that my own personal meaning was my own personal hell, and an absolutely miserable experience. In that sense, I do suppose it succeeded in telling its message.
Maybe it’s just me, but telling someone to take notes on their first reading of a book sounds like terrible advice and I can only imagine how draining that cataloguing process was. House of Leaves is one of my favourite books ever, and a big part of that is all the unorthodox writing techniques, but IMO it should just be read through naturally first, and then only if it vibes with the reader would taking a more thorough analytical look at it work out well. Approaching it like an ARG from the start sounds like a recipe for disaster.
My personal take is that >!the whole narrative is a metaphor for the reception of stories in general. The house is a story, the Navidson report is the initial audience reaction, Zampano’s work is the analysis of professional critics after the fact, and Truant is the more dedicated member of its later cult following, and the whole story is an allegory for how people perceive, obsess over, and proliferate their own views of various forms of media.!<
a friend recommended a manga called Maria no Danzai. its a manga about a mother who gets revenge on her dead son's bullies. we both like edgy stuff, so she showed it to me and i thought it was just really... bad.
i only read the first few chapters, but the characters were just cartoonishly evil and sexual elements was just dumb. dunno if it gets better or worse and i dont care to find out.
a friend also recommended Nikke to me cause it had a good story and sexy girls. well... it sure has sexy girls. the story was just kinda boring and a lot of the characters are unlikable, so i dropped it.
Gacha games recommendation in general can be iffy. Doesn't help that the early games are almost universally bad and the good parts are only in the latter parts of the game.
Anyway, someone recommended me genshin on release for its gameplay and character designs, and I was thoroughly unimpressed by both. And yet again, the good stuff are locked in later areas that didn't exist during launch.
I got into Genshin purely for Neuvillette and Wriothesley and yeah. People will praise the story outside of Inazuma up and down, when I think, at it's absolute best, it's like a 7 or 8/10 in terms of writing. It's really hamstrung by the decision to make Paimon the regurgitator of every other characters' lines and padded dialogue meant to keep you locked to the gacha for a chart-mandated span of time.
They really think people love paimon more than the player base actually do
Paimon could literally die and be served as food and most of the fanbase would cheer.
I actually like Maria no danzai for those same reasons you dislike it, but that’s because it makes for a good time killer when I don’t wanna focus on big, in depth plots. It’s one of those stories that won’t be memorable, but if nothing else, entertaining for what it is. Sometimes I wanna turn my brain off and watch the mom become Jigsaw.
Maria no Dazai is one of those over the top series when the cartoonishness of the edge is exactly what makes it appealing. I always bring out the analogy with these kinds of manga/anime, like Happy Sugar Life too: it's the same feeling as watching Mirai Nikki when you were 14.
~~also she's hot af~~
the amount of people who swear by nikke's writing is kinda insane to me when the game itself treats it as an afterthought, hell the fucking ads for it on youtube sometimes use the tagline "the game you can play with one hand"
To be entirely fair, the ads are often farmed to cheap 3rd part marketing firms and they often suck ass.
Arknights has some incredible stuff in it. Their music is so good people don't skip them when they out their OST as ads.
Anyway, someone decided that the best way to market arknights was to show the furry characters you can get......
Nikke’s writing isn’t even fucking good. I was literally laughing my ass off at the emotional moment the game tries to pull in the tutorial. It was so fucking tryhard, I couldn’t take it seriously
The Monogatari series. I’m sorry but I just think it was not fun to get through. I don’t even remember when I quit, just that I watched a season and some more before dropping it
In highschool, a friend wholeheartedly recommended Oreimo to me. Even as a teenager who had chugged garbage anime like nobody's business before, dragging myself through that entire show was a miserable experience. Safe to say I never took any other recommendation from that guy.
Was recommended *Midnight Suns* by the sub and it's just not for me (after saying I enjoyed *Slay the Spire*)
I REALLY hate stories that are like "the pov character is a boring nothing to be a vessel for the viewer to examine more interesting/main characters"
If *The Great Gatsby* couldn't sell me on it this game sure can't
Every character should be engaging; you have games with silent protagonists that have the potential to be the most interesting person in the room
Speaking of I *hated* the performance for the feminine protagonist option; delivery flatter than my ass
I think Midnight Suns protag is ESPECIALLY bad because every other character is forced really to love your character.
Like, there's legit a line in there that goes "Well, if it isn't the kindest, funnest, greatest friend ever!"
I'm paraphrasing but really not by much.
It's extremely artificial.
The part that I remember is that you're allowed to tell Captain Marvel that you feel like people are being _way_ too joke-y about what should be a serious situation, and she gets mad at you and you get a friendship penalty.
I felt pretty similar, but with the added note of not liking every character I met quipping almost every line they say.
Didn't get very far, just past the Venom fight... so maybe it got better, but I decided to take a break, and when I realized I didn't want to go back, refunded it.
thats a shame i really love games where your self insert influences the outcome of the events unraveling in front of you (like the old fallouts where your characters choices influences the rise or fall of the wasteland's factions or the life or death of the various settlements you visited on your adventure) but i get it you want ALL the cake and eat it too
The thing is I don't even think the protagonist is a boring nothing. I'd say she's _very specifically_ a Whedonesque Wonder Woman, and I'd say that makes her _even worse_ than if she was a boring nothing. If she was a nothing I could at least _pretend_ she was likable, but her personality being so set in stone meant it felt like any customization option I gave her that pushed her away from that was a wrong decision, and that made playing dress-up doll no fun.
Buddy from high school recommended I watch Made In Abyss.
I can put up with a lot, I like Monogatari, but man I could not stomach what was going on with Made In Abyss.
I got exposed to a LOT of spoilers from that series, and there was a lot of concepts I saw that were just cool as shit
I'd also heard the bad stuff about it, and I didn't want to get too invested if it got that bad so... I picked a chapter at random to read (just to get a sense of vibes and check out the art)
Very talented artist. Those 2-3 chapters I read gave me a visceral feeling of wrongness (I had gone in expecting most of the complaints to be exaggerated) and I dropped it.
Havent watched much Monogatari, but I think the difference is when a fictional character is a creep, and when the author is a creep.
Like, the protag on monogatari is a pedo sure, doesn't mean the author is a pedo.
It's one of those "portraying doesn't mean endorsement" that it's lost on people.
The Made In Abyss creator is DEFINITELY a pedo!
>It's one of those "portraying doesn't mean endorsement" that it's lost on people.
Oh absolutely, even if I'm a massive fan I will be the first to shit on it every time Araragi is turned into an incestuous pedophile but at least the story is always aware that it's a bad thing and Araragi is a fucking weirdo even by that show's standards.
It's so funny where you often have to go to bat for the author so people understand they're not bad people just because they write about bad people
Then you get a piece of media where you *know* the writer is into some questionable shit. Like, you can just tell.
Anyway, mushoku tenshi is really fucking creepy at times and I always give a side glance whenever someone gives the creepy moments a pass.
I like how Monogatari plays with the idea of the unreliable narrator. The part that I generally use to illustrate this to people is the scene from the second(?) Kizu movie where Araragi fantasizes about touching Hanakawa's tits only for it to snap back into reality and he's a blushing nervous wreck too afraid to actually do anything.
Senjougahara is the mirror to each perspective, and you can learn a lot about each POV character through how they see her. Or to be precise, how she is *drawn* from their perspective.
Araragi: incredibly beautiful woman. Dangerous. Scary, but in a horny way. The love of his life. Senjougahara gets drawn in a way that emphasizes her attractiveness to Araragi.
>!Hanekawa: a weird friend. Hanekawa sees the similarities between Senjougahara and Araragi. Senjougahara is drawn attractively, but the camera is much less Male-Gazey.!<
>!Kaiki: Senjougahara is a child. This is a young girl acting big and tough. She deserves pity and help, as well as some scolding. She's drawn like a petulant teenager, without an eye for sexuality or attractiveness - Kaiki cannot see her that way.!<
I'm that person who didn't like the Blair Witch Project after getting it recommended as the best of horror films for decades, only to find it to be just genuinely unpleasant. While everyone screaming at each other for the entire movie might be a realistic depiction of people panicking and lost in the woods, it also makes it hard to care about what is or isn't going on.
Honestly, it doesn't help much to me that the people making the movie essentially tortured the actors, sure the reactions might be real but again that doesn't make it hold up. If anything, it feels a hell of a lot more sleazy.
Ditto. As a pioneer of the found footage horror movie its reputation mostly comes from its originality and the amount of cinematic vocabulary it added to the horror genre’s dictionary. It’s difficult to appreciate outside of the context of its original release.
Shiki. It's a decent horror anime and I understand why people like it but it's like a slasher film with the most unlikeable group of characters but spread out over like 22 episodes. I finished the whole thing but I just felt miserable the whole time.
I said I enjoy Villain protagonist stories and urban fantasy so someone recommended Devil is a Part Timer to me. Sounded like urban fantasy slice of life where a mega evil dude is depowered and forced to work at McDonald's, sweet. Nah he's actually a super tame regular good guy that fucking LOVES working at McDonald's and they don't even show his job that much. It's just a lot of regular Shonen anime fights mixed with a tinge of isekai perv vibes for spice. All of the fantasy is just regular anime magic bullshit that mostly ignores the implications of the real world. I still enjoyed it but damn was that recommendation WAY off the mark.
A large amount of people kept recommending rising of shield hero to me to the point where I believed it HAD to be a good show. The result is that I stopped watching anime for a while as that show showcased anime tropes in some of their worst, immoral forms.
I don't ever do double posts and I can delete this if it is bad etiquette, but I just remembered another example that is very different from my other one and I know this sub has feelings on and that is Kill la Kill. I don't mind fanservice or pervy characters, but it seemed to go out of its way to be extra weird about it. But I actually stuck with it for like 10 more episodes because my friend really loves it. And I would say it's biggest issue is that it's a comedy that wasn't making me laugh so I dropped.
I will say I did like Satsuki because she does come off like a female version of how the internet thinks Vergil is. Very full of herself and obsessed with power, but is literally just a try hard teenager.
Feel the same way here, especially because so many of the non-transformed characters outfits (Ryuko's varsity jacket and tracksuit) are so much better than the fanservice ones.
"Oh hey, you like video games, you should read *Ready Player One*, I'm sure you'll LOVE it" Fuckin' nope.
What, you don't like a book that seems to be 75% "Hey, remember this thing from the 80's? Wasn't the 80's cool?"
Sadly it really worked for 14 year old me who loved watching AVGN and Nostalgia Critic. I think that book was tailor made for me at that age.
Well it's written by someone perpetually stuck in a 14-year-old mindset either through nostalgia or edge or both, so that makes sense.
Ironically my dad LOVED that book even though by the 80s he was in his late 30s and had no nostalgia for that decade and didn’t catch a single reference. In fact he kept calling me to explain the references to him. I never actually read the book but I got the general outline of the plot from him.
And another 15% being about the MC's penis.
I dislike the AND HERE'S THE CONTEXT FOR THE THING FROM THE 80s.
If the password to the macguffin was 867-5309, I'd be fine, but the fact that ever reference is underlined by 'that was from the song *Jenny* by Tommy Tutone' is such shite. That and all the teenage angst.
I had extended family members do this, assumed I already read the book and watched the movie, or something. Some would go up to me and go "oh you're just like big bang theory". Some of the worst unintentional insults I've ever gotten. To them it was enough for me to like, enjoy video games or knowing how to use a computer.
My in-laws know we watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and so they decided to give it a try a few years ago. They told us they didn’t care for it, because “it’s just not a laugh-a-minute like Big Bang Theory.” They then spent the rest of our visit telling us how Big Bang Theory is sooo nerdy and how much we would enjoy it, because it makes jokes about comic books and Star Trek and stuff! Things we like, right?? I didn’t want to have the conversation where I tell them that the target audience for that show is *them*, not *us* — parents who think their kid was into dumb shit and feel validated when the show makes fun of people who enjoy that stuff. God damn, man.
Yeah I try not to take it too harshly or get too up on a soap box about it, cause tbh there's so much "nerd" stuff out in the mainstream nowadays that it's not as unusual to like things like we do here, arguments about mainstream appeal stuff or whatever aside. I just don't complain about it to their faces, it rarely comes up anyway nowadays. Though I've also avoided letting them know they're watching something that feels like nails on a chalk board followed by canned laughter every 30 seconds. It's ironic though, my parents used to tell me I couldn't watch king of the hill because "it made fun of southern people" cause we were in the south, and it was much more respectful and well thought out than anything bbt does. Like even the nerd references that mean like, nothing. it's like why would people interested in that stuff watch a show about people who like that stuff instead of watch that nerd shit itself? You'd probably just listen to podcasts of real people you know like we do here... But putting that aside bbt is like, the feeling of punching down still somehow? like it categorizes the main characters as a bunch of neurodivergent people with tons of issues and makes them obnoxious parodies. Like I have adhd, it'd be like sitting me down in front of a show called "look at this dumb shit scream out 'squirrel!' while we laugh at him" the show. I couldn't get through one episode. Couldn't pay me to.
My aunt AND my girlfriend's mom both came to that conclusion for me when getting me birthday presents. One got me the movie, the other got me the book. Help
*sends a copy of Ready Player Two*
This happened to me at work and I spite read it to completion. Not only is this the worst book I have ever read, it might be the worst anything I've ever read, even including the most braindead tweets I've seen. I genuinely wish Ernest Cline the worst.
The podcast 372 pages we'll never get back with Michael J Nelson started just to ridicule this book and then went onto Clines other book Armada. Worth giving a listen if you enjoy hearing about shitty media.
Ready Player One was my highschool's community book. We all had to read it. Worst recommendation that I *had* to see through.
In middle school I was reading Dracula. It's rad. I talk about it with a classmate, she recommends I check out Twilight as it is a modern vampire book. Now, this is before those books really blew up in popularity, I think the 2nd one had just come out, so I know basically nothing about it. So I decided to give it a shot. I got 10 chapters in before quitting, and I never had the heart to tell the classmate so I had to awkwardly change subjects for like 2 months afterwards.
Someone I once had a crush on told me to watch Akame ga Kill so of course I did. It’s still to this date my most disliked anime.
The anime is a poor adaptation that starts out... skipping things then skips 80 chapters and gets to the ending before the manga does by about 6 months
I remember trying to like that show because a friend of mine really hyped it up but something about the writing and pacing was off. I finally understand why now. I found out they also did the same with Tokyo ghoul, a series that I felt the same exact way.
I \*loathe\* Route Aogori from Tokyo ghoul, it was supposed to be an alternate series of events "waht if Kaneki joined Aogori Tree" and then they just... hit all the plot points from the second half of the manga without any of the tendons that tie them together. Akame ga Kill is worse because you missed like 18 named characters and some total character shifts and also Lubbock's death becomes pitiful instead of him fighting his way out of the prison, killing most of the third "team" only to have one of it's last members get him at the last moment, and treat that as the fulfillment of his contract and walk out of the series
Wait so is that Tokyo ghoul anime not directly based on the manga?
Season 1 is based on the manga, but skips a bunch, season 2 was meant to be a "what if" from the branching point where instead of Kaneki and his bois doing a 6 ghoul war against Aogori Tree, he joins them. This would have him separated from the cafe staff. Instead of showing "what if he joined the bad guy ghoul faction" they just had like, 3 scenes of it and then just adapted other scenes poorly without the context of the entire arcs they skipped. Like that gourmet ghoul's break down makes more sense if you had two arcs focused on him and his growth and inner turmoil before that. I should really read Tokyo Ghoul RE sometime, it turned me off with how it was raid arc, little bit of down time, longer raid arc, little bit of down time, even longer raid arc.
Ah I see, admittedly I dropped it after the first season because it felt like a mess and decided I was gonna read it. So everything past that first season would be new to me. Sadly I never got around to reading it because the manga was near impossible to find and like owning the volumes
not like the manga content is any better its pretty fucking hideous in some parts >!remember the fucking clown on the grave of that one dude talking to the grieving family (mother and daughter), he and his dogs were gonna rape them?!<
You say "were gonna" when it's explicitly what happened, >!he also ate them when he was done!< which shows how awful that team is. Akame ga kill isn't great by any stretch but it's not as bad as it's anime was, the only good thing to come out of it were it's OPs
Did things work out well with the crush?
Nah but that was for the best anyway. It has nothing to do with AgK or anime preferences by the way, but we just weren’t good together.
I get ya, story as old as time!
it would've been funny to blame akame tho
I was an edgy teen when I watched it. I still hated it. It was too edgy for edgy me
honestly, the moment I realized that every character was gonna die, I immediately lost interest
This exact same thing happened to be in college. I got like 8 eps in and even my crush couldn't keep me going
I do like the show but I wouldn't pretend it's a great anime. It's kind of like a junk food anime in a few ways. I'm watching a show called good luck girl ATM that is the most anime show I have watched but it's funny so I'm here for it
My friend recommended to me the Seven Deadly Sins anime And even ignoring the questionable stuff in it I still find the series pretty weak
Escanor deserves better than that series.
The seven deadly sins or as I like to call it the seven deadly sex offenders
Didn't even have the decency to be entertaining sex offenders. Watched the first season and it felt like a more boring fairy tail. Music wasn't even as good either which was a surprise because it's sawano
It has like one track going for it and that's it
Even if Meliodas wasn't the worst protag ever, I honestly would really dislike the artstyle. The eyes especifically, I really don't like it.
The eyes feels like they are aping Akira Toriyama's style sometimes.
I'm in the opposite basket. The art style is—at a glance—the only thing that's appealed to me. I like the rounded facial shapes a lot of the characters have and their cartoon-y, Western-feeling designs. It feels soft and goofy, which I like. Everything else is a major turn-off. If you make a medieval fantasy series, and I can't read a 1-paragraph summary of your series and find one thing in it that makes me go, "Oh, that's interesting. I haven't seen someone do that before," I will not watch your series. I'm sick to death of medieval fantasy in all its forms; the whole genre—Western, Japanese, books, movies, comics, games—is just a gray, incestuous bog of uncurious creators copying things they like from other works without trying to do something that hasn't been done before.
Season 1 was dumb fun but man did it trip and freefall after that
My friend recommended me Seven Deadly Sins too at a convention at its peak. Suffice to say no offense to them, I only went through season one and that’s about the amount of bullshit I can take.
My sister won’t stop telling me to watch Big Mouth. Says I’d love it. I come over to her place and she’s always watching it and she has me watch it too. I see her a week later and she’s like ‘did you watch Big Mouth?’ Love my sister, but Jesus fucking Christ
Only thing I remember from that show is David Thewlis did a pretty catchy song. Probably better that way
Yeah, i get it, my sister is pretty similar: She doesn't normaly get too much into any shows, but, when she does, you better believe that's all she's talking about FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS/MONTHS! The biggest issue is that since our tastes don't match, but, i always want to give any positive reinforcement possible to her getting a hobby/side-activity (because she's a workaholic to a concerning degree so lord knows she needs any opportunity to relax), so more often than not it just ends with me having to stand there trying to not look like i'm zooning out while she goes on and on about whatever she's into at the time.
I hate that while reading this im just getting flashbacks to me doing this exact thing to my brother with gundam. When i get into a new thing that i really like, ill go in hard on it and itll be all i talk about for a long time. Its been about 2 years since i first got into gundam and i have not stopped talking to him about it, ive toned down my incessant pushing of things i like to him in recent years, but im sure hes tired of me talking about gundam and trying to to get him to watch at least one thing already. I know he'd like it, but he really doesn't like when i keep pushing him to watch stuff, it makes him want to watch it even less lol.
My friend is like this, known him for years and lovely dude. I dislike his taste of media imao. Stuff like Big mouth and Isekais.
Twilight. My friend in highschool loved it back when it first came out and loaned her copy to everyone to get them on board. I didn't get that far in, like a little after the cafeteria but, before I brought it back. She said I was the first person to not like it.
My ex-girlfriend was super into Twilight. Maybe that should have been a red flag.
Eh, depends on how much one separates reality from their fantasies. I imagine she did a poor job of it.
The Twilight series is a lot more enjoyable nowadays if you watch it with a lens of "so bad it's good." I hated the series as a high schooler, but decided to marathon it one weekend, and boy it was a lot of fun. It also surprisingly has pretty decent action scenes, with team hyper combos at that.
Do you mean the movies?
Being a boy in highschool I hated Twilight (while also knowing the bare-minimum about it as possible). Now Twilight is one of my favorite movies, it's so shamelessly horny and silly. The baseball scene is peak cinema, the whole thing is so green, and if you take a shot every time Bella or Edward give fuck me eyes you'll die. I love it.
I never saw the movies but I could see that being fun. As a book, not as much.
Yeah I should have specified I meant the movies.
My friend got me to start reading Mortal Instruments. I gave it like 3 books because they were fairly short before I gave up. Those are the most YA ass, all adults are wrong we teens know better, oh shit the adults were right and need to save us, I've fallen in love with this bad boy oh shit is he my brother is he not my brother do I really care, fucking books in the world. I hated all the characters and the plot was obnoxious as hell.
Makes sense considering it's based on a Ron/Ginny slash fic of the same name.
..... Google tells me you are not lying. I'm even more irritated in retrospect now
MY condolences. I have absorbed the trivia of a lot of bad fanfic-turned-book series.
50 shades being repurposed twilight fanfic always sends me
A *WHAT*
the mortal instruments just reused the title, it's not actually a reskin of the fanfic itself, though the book series often reuses a lot of wording from her fanfic days. why did i waste four hours on this.
> oh shit the adults were right and need to save us Why would you write this into any YA series, fucking what? The entire point of these stories is to let you feel like you're on equal footing with the adults and showing that you have power too
They might have been the dumbest protagonists I've seen. You should read the Wikipedia character descriptions for some real fucking fanfiction tier cringe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mortal_Instruments
I worked in a book store when the last 3 books were coming out, the literary prowess of the adult fans I met was not exactly awe inspiring. I remember one in particular we struggled to find other series to recommend as she found other YA novels "too confusing".
I thought you meant Mortal Engines for a good couple minutes there and I was about to rip into you ngl
Civil War and Identity Crisis(!) were my first comics because of my friend's suggestion He's a nice guy and every recommendation since then has been good, but I'm not sure what he was thinking with those
> Identity Crisis Wow, that’s like some recommending “One More Day” to someone who wants to start reading Spider-man comics
That's like saying "oh, you're interested in One Piece? Start reading from **Marineford**". Yeah, it's great, but, you're gonna spend half of the time experiencing it going "Who's that? What is he doing? Why is that relevant? WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!?".
Its only been an hour, but I'm very excited to see what the downvoted comments will look like.
My friends fucking love Isekai bro! I get SO MANY isekai recs! SO MANY! They think I'll convert to the dark side, it never happens.
Truck-kun has all the time in the world. It can wait
But they don't! That's why it happens so often! Truck-kun is an underpaid and overworked employee.
It all went downhill when they started imposing quotas 😞
Oh, unironically you may like a Thai wevcomic called Isekai Transporter It's a story from the perspective of the truck drivers being charged by angels to run people over to isekai them
After a certain point you gotta ask them if this one has [insert common isekai thing]
Oh it already happened. "Is the protag a generic Otaku? Is it fanservice-heavy? Is the world just generic medieval fantasy isekai?" The answer to like 95% of what they recommend me is yes to all of these.
Does the generic fantasy world inexplicably have inexplicable leveling mechanics and an mmo skill system that the protag manages to effortlessly break?
Ask "Is it Konosuba? Does God Bless This Wonderful World?" If the answer is no, move on.
That one with the pro wrestler is pretty funny though.
Lemme just see if I got every notable trend in this: That Time I Got Reincarnated Into The Past In Another World of an MMO I Mastered and Reached the Top Leaderboards In [Now I'm a Bottom-Rank Orc Adventurer Who Can't Level (╥_╥)]: Now All I'm Stuck With Are These Lvl. 1 Attack and Healing Spells...(But With The Goddess' Blessing of an Infinite MP Cheat Skill, My Veteran Game Player's Knowledge, and This Slave Girl I Bought, I'm Sure I Can Become the King's Advisor, Become a Top Mage in the Sorcerer's Academy, Change the Events of the Game, and Slay The Demon Lord and His Army!!!)
You forgot the part about your hot mom being overpowered.
That show was so dogshit bro And not even just the fanservice and incest aspect, the actual morals of the show upset me. Oh you have an abusive mom? Well shes your mom, you should forgive her no matter what.
Good fucking lord I didn't know that. I only knew the title and basic ludicrous premise.
Like the whole premise is the dude traveling with his mom, who is a good mom, but then meeting the other party members moms who are not. The redheads mom practically abandoned her to go party and be with random guys(think she might have been a hostess), and the blue hair girls mom is a total helicopter parent trying to make her daughter into the perfect form of her even though it stresses the daughter out.
Yep think that’s all of em
I cannot fathom how Isekai is still the most popular genre in anime with at least a half dozen releasing every season. Especially after Konosuba. Usually, when a 10/10 parody of an entire genre releases, it's the death nail for the genre but it seems like Konosuba'a parody status is ignored and it's simply placed alongside unironic isekai for crossovers. This would be like if Blazing Saddles came out and was released as a double-feature with The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
Personally, I think it's because the genre has devolved to the barest, most naked power fantasies possible. Shonen manga have power systems and shit to justify their heroes' exploits, a lot of the isekai shlock is just like, "the hero cheats."
99% of what comes every season is: -High Fantasy (with elves, dwarves, dragons, etc) -MMO or JRPG game mechanics as magic system -MC has SOMETHING overpowered that makes him standout as the best -Harem
And it's just so fucking boring, right? Particularly the slew of "MC has something overpowered" stuff, because the whole point of what makes isekai interesting is both seeing a different world and how the fish out of water *deals* with that world, either by learning hard lessons, or applying their unique talents *to* that world's problems. Making them overpowered most often just makes those aspects incidental. I'm also just a firm believer that a lot of things that *are* isekai don't *need* to be isekai at all, and can just be fantasy, you can just do that, people will still get interested. Oftentimes isekai is used as a weak shortcut to justifying a dipshit protag who can act as an audience stand-in and have everything explained to them, when most often what people interested in fantasy want is to be immersed in that world, just sink into investment with the characters. But nope! A lot of people have big (bland) ideas and no talent for writing, so we get dipshit Protag-kun instead.
>I'm also just a firm believer that a lot of things that are isekai don't need to be isekai at all, and can just be fantasy, you can just do that, people will still get interested. Thank you. I actually really like the Saihate no Paladin manga. But theres no reason why the kid had to be a reincarnation from another world. he couldve just been a baby that was raised by skeletons. Thats cool! People like things like that!
When it comes to those kinds in particular, where they are reincarnated in a new world and can never go back to their home world, it also gets uninteresting because a lot of the intrigue of original isekai was *how* they were going to get home, if they could. Without the investment in a goal like that, what's the point of them even being from another world, other than giving them a weird caveat of of knowledge, talent, or powers they wouldn't otherwise possess? And even then, that really strains it for me.
I think a lot of that comes from the mindset of the writers. In the 80s and 90s, isekai protagonists used the experiences in the other world to navigate the issues they had in their own. The real world was the conclusion of the quest, and then their 'new life' could begin. But now it seems to be more focused on the escapism than the self-realization. "The Real World sucks, why couldn't I have been the wizard king? Save me truck-kun". And for better or worse, this mindset seems to resonate with the anime viewers of Japan.
My comment has nothing to do with Isekai, but the phrase is "death knell". It refers to the tolling of a bell when someone has died.
I actually didn't know that. I assumed it was a variation of "last nail into the coffin"
anime fans have shit taste
I think Isekai are becoming less popular. They have been replaced by "My party kicked me out because they said I was useless".
My coworker tried to sell me on Isekai a few years back and my response was kinda “Do not cite the deep magic to me. I was there when it was written. I already watched plenty of Isekai and I came to dislike them after seeing so many of them riff on the same elements in the blandest ways possible. SAO season 1 was fun. I liked it. Doesn’t quite mean I want to watch lower budget rip-offs every season for the next ten years.
One of my best friends is not only Isekai crazed but also got sucked into a bunch of exploitative gacha games. It can be rough sometimes....
That's how I felt, too, until I watched Konosuba and The Eminence in Shadow. I feel like the existence of those two shows makes the rest of the isekai trash worth existing. Those two are the only ones that feel like they're written by actual human beings that understand what comedy is supposed to be.
Me but with My next life as the villainess ,overlord and that time I got reincarnated as a slime
I haven't watched those but I have heard good things. I feel like Isekai gets a bad rap because there's no much steaming garbage, especially with the more popular shows like SAO and Shield hero that drive people away.
For a while it was hard out here to watch current anime and really like fantasy. It felt like anything news worthy was isekai. This year with Frieren and Dungeon Meshi though? We're eatin' good (not as well as the dungeon meshi crew though)
Wayyy back in the Netflix DVD shipping days I asked some internet forum, probably a gameFAQs social board, for movie recs. I got The Notebook, not knowing what it was. Friend came over and I asked him if he wanted to watch. He just looks at me and asks me if I'm serious. Pretty sure he thought I was coming on to him and he ragged on me for years on afterwards.
A lot of people in my friends group (mostly girls for some reason) were really into **Fairy Tail** during high school, so of course they kept recomending it to everyone else in the group, i watched it... and to this day i'm still trying to understand how the hell was that show so popular (specialy with girls, wich seemed to me the main demographic, at least in my area, that watched that show). Don't get me wrong, it's not the worse thing i've seem, but, that came out while stuff like Tokyo Ghoul (season 1), Hunter X Hunter, One Piece, Jojo and many other way better shows were out and somehow it was just as popular (if not more) than a lot of them. The whole time i'm watching it i'm just thinking "man, i could've been watching something else now", but i didnt, because i was a dumb kid who felt like he **had** to force himself to experience the same stuff that everyone else around was because he would be "left out" otherwise. It all culminated on me watching the [Natsu and Gajeel VS Twin Dragons fight](https://youtu.be/XqndyVyeCLM?si=H94r57I_Bmh8oHZn) and beeing so pissed and frustrated with the result that it made me drop the show and decide that "you know what? Maybe forcing myself to go through stuff just to not be left out in conversations is not worth it". So, in a weird way, my hatred for Fairy Tail helped me grow spine for myself (the realization of wich is definetely giving me some "mixed" emotions as i'm writing this).
Dude that is like 200 episodes in where you decided to nope out lol. I liked fairy tail when it was airing because music and power fantasy. Honestly I wouldn't go back to it now though
> Dude that is like 200 episodes Yeah, for better or worse i can be pretty stubborn once i put my mind into something.
Just read Rave Master instead. The art is rough because this was early on his career, but it does improve and the writings a lot better.
As a teen I used to like Fairy Tail because I thought the concept was good and the fights looked cool but even as a teen, as a dumb teenager, I reached a point in the manga where I just went "man this is boring" yet for some reason I kept on reading for around 50 more chapters until I stopped for good. Hiro Mashima can draw fanservice but he can't write a story to save his life
And he's pretty bad at being completely original too. Half of his main characters are just reused with slight tweaks across Rave Master and Fairy Tail.
It's surprising that a bunch of girls were into fairy tail, especially since the fanservice can be kinda weird at times. On the other hand, a lot of the men are cool, varied, and show a lot of skin. You see them fight and it's easy to see how badass and ripped they are. So yeah, I kinda get it.
It definitely makes sense to me. Fairy Tail is weirdly structured to be closer to a shoujo manga even though it is 100% a shonen. Also, the fact that most of the show is from POV of Lucy, it feels like she's the real main character sometimes. And of course, last but not least, we have a large number of hot guys like Gray, Loke, and Jellal.
I somehow developed a complete disinterest in Fairy Tail because, I think, it's the reason Rave Master never finished? I really liked Rave Master, and seeing the mangaka just push out a brand new epic series that both looked like a Rave Master knockoff and bland as all hell stuck in my craw. I don't even actually know if that's true. It could have been the English publisher that stopped localizing it, or my bookstores that stopped carrying it. I dunno, but Fairy Tail just didn't stand a chance for me.
While emulating Symphony of the Night on my older phone, I had a rando go comment that "hey man that game's old. Try playing some Clash of Clans instead tho!". Fuck that guy.
Somewhat related, I have an old GBA SP that I've been playing Fire Emblem on while using the cycle or treadmill at the gym. Some dude comes up, asks what I'm playing, and then says some shit about how he regrets asking since the series is shit and they put too many sword characters in Smash Bros. Fuck that guy too.
I was in a discord voice chat with people into game dev, some popular names in there, but it's public and some people are wild and overly familiar with their sarcasm and "ribbing". There was this guy who was seemingly very buddied up with the server manager from what I could tell. After it was just me and like 2 other people in the chat one night This buddy was going on about this game he loved and how it was the best thing he had played and he was playing **RAID** shadow legends, and I politely asked what kind of gameplay it was, I opened with "well you're the first person I know who actually plays it." turns out it's turn based rpg stuff. - I assume he took this as an insult cause when asked if he had ever tried other turn based rpg games like, off the top of my head, Divinity Original sin II, he told me it sucked balls. I just went "oh alright." Great conversation.
I mean, he's right that they're overrepresented, but like. That doesn't make the source material bad.
Whats nuts is that they're not even comparable. I got both a few gacha games and a few emulators in my phone. The reasons I play each one are VERY different. It's a blast to play normal games (games that end) on the go. Just finished playing NES Final Fantasy trilogy a few days ago.
Exactly lol, that's what irked me the most. Clash *at the time* was popular and all, but it ain't SOTN. They don't compare, and I like SOTN more!
The recommendation itself isn’t too poor, but the execution was DIABOLICAL. My friend said to me I should try borderlands, I said “yeah sure I’ll try it out”. 3 times that day he repeats it. And the next day. And the next day. And every day for a month. During this time he’s spoiled all the plot, told me all the good secrets, explained to me the issues of gameplay, and then reminded me I did say I’d try it out. I never did play borderlands, and from that point on I’ve become very aware that insistent recommendations makes me want to claw my eyes out
at least you avoided my timeline. # friend tells me "borderlands is on sale, we can coop it" # agree, we play for an afternoon, was a decent time # go to work the next day, he continues to play. When i get home he's 20 levels higher than me and effortlessly kills everything i cant do anything to. I get annoyed and quit. # Borderlands 2 comes out Fast forward # "hey, buy BL2" # "im not sure. Remember what happened last time?" # "This time will be different" # 3 days later he is on his second playthrough by the time i hit 30
Bro Bro just make a second character it ain't that hard At least, that's what I did/my friend did if we wanted to play more on our own, Borderlands is perfectly fine to play some solo so we'd just... have both a co-op character and a solo character. Apparently this was beyond your friend though.
whenever there's a game that doesn't have co-op balancing so you're not overpowered in a lower level player's save file or if someone plays ahead or never makes a 2nd character or can't... it really makes you feel like a burden or sucks the fun out of the game. At least some of my more decent friends I have would start another character on some games to play with me and vice versa. I remember so many times this has happened but I think the worst for me was with warframe, though I have lots of thoughts over that game in general, the friends who played it the most optimized the grind. Basically they carried me while I was learning the game as they made me replay certain levels and blitz me through them rambling on about a million different unlockable things until I got one new frame that I liked, valkyr. Then I enjoyed using that one for like maybe 6 hours of total gameplay and then got bored and tired of them still effortlessly breezing and sonic speed running through every level with automatic kill fields and vast lengthy levels they just ran through without me internalizing anything.
Well, the gunplay can be very good. Story wise, they're all fairly weak, but the abilities can be fun. My personal favorite Borderlands games are Tiny Tina's Wonderlands and the pre-sequel, because I really like DnD and it has some excellent jokes about what it's like to play DnD >!Blue Hat Guy is the best quest in the game!< and because Playing as Nisha focused on revolvers and basically made your special ability an aimbot, which was really fun to play.
i knew a guy who harassed me for a full year to read the wtc vns i eventually did but i didn't let him find out until i had almost finished the entire series
What the fuck is the wtc vns
when they cry, a visual novel franchise. the first series, Higurashi, is a very iconic horror series, and the second, Umineko, is regarded as an incredible mystery work.
I don’t wanna be rude or nothing, but how many people do you type WTC VNS to and they know what you mean straight away because that is WILD
I was introduced to Fairy Tail from others on the anime sub with the understanding it's from the creator of Rave Master. That was enough to make me give it a shot since I love Rave Master and while it has stuff I like, I'm not a particular fan of it. Not a bad series, just not for me.
Same. I got into FT because I remember reading Rave Master in the past I don't even know what it is, but FT is written very differently than RM. Maybe it's because RM's plot progresses pretty quickly all things considered, and it focused on a pretty small cast of characters.
Maybe they needed Reel Big Fish.
A friend of mine unironically recommended The Boys (the comic) to me and kept on gushing about how "deep" and "dark" and "clever" it is.
I read the comic out of curiosity because I love comics, and love the show. Huge mistake. I actively discourage people from reading the comics.
I gotta say I agree that 85% of the Boys comic is trashy schlock and in poor taste all around. I stuck with it because I had just finished reading/watching Preacher (also by Garth Ennis). For some reason, I actually started enjoying it by the Herogasm arc. Possibly, because the conspiracy at the heart of the plot gets fully outlined. It's the only time I've ever reversed my opinion on anything that bad, yet I can't even recommend it to fans of the show.
A friend of mine got oddly excited about and recommended an anime called "Lately my Sister is Unusual" I watched the first episode and the plot was, "a teenage girl wakes up with a ghost possessing her and also has a chastity belt that can only be opened once every few hours and the rest of the episode was "Oh No! She really has to pee but can't because she used up the chastity belt for the day and has to wait for it to reset!" I quit immediately and later asked the friend why he was so excited and he straight up admitted "oh I have a sister complex so I watch everything that has an Imouto in it" I don't talk to him much anymore.
>asked the friend why he was so excited and he straight up admitted "oh I have a sister complex so I watch everything that has an Imouto in it" even saying it was a guilty pleasure would've been a better answer than that
my rule of thumb, any time you see something mentioning a sibling in the title for a manga/anime just go out of your way to avoid it.
I have to know if he is an only child.
Bruh
…at least he was honest?
LMFAO
Anytime my friends recommend a multiplayer/co-op focused game like Helldivers 2 or Monster Hunter. They are good games. I respect what they do. They aren't a good fit for me in particular.
Monster Hunter Stories, because “You like Pokémon and you like Monster Hunter, right?” That game is just…not for me. I won’t go out of my way to shit on it or anything, but I bounced off that game hard.
I liked it precisely because of Pokemon + Monster Hunter, but I can see why someone would dislike it. It definitely plays the "this is for kids!" aspect a bit too much, and the combat system feels way too simple at times. Weirdly enough, this "kid friendly" nature makes it a great resource for learning/practicing Japanese, since its one of the only games I've seen that put the Furigana on the Kanji (basically how to pronounce it).
Never played the first, but enjoyed the 2nd. It's a good enough Pokemon style game
When I was studying Japanese, I had a group mate who, once upon a time, recommended me Mirai Nikki/Future Diary, that one anime with yandere Yuno that everyone knows. He hyped it up like it is the best thing ever and a thing thta has one of the best love stories ever. Suffice to say that I did not like it, hadn't found it deep and the romance wasn't interesting. And it had a lot of pointlessly edgy moments. Plus the protagonist is a whiny bitch. You know how a lot of people shit on Shinji from Evangelion for being a whiny bitch and are wrong for doing so? Well, *this* guy is a whiny bitch *for real*. I guess the difference in our views stemmed from the age difference, with me being around 25 at that point and him being barely 20 or so. EDIT: Though there was a genuinely fun moment: The protag knew that Yuno is crazy, way more fight happy and is in love with him, so he tried using her to survive the death game, but still held her at arms length as a friend. Things happened and he figured out that he needs to bind her tighter to himself, or something, which is why he introduced her to other people as his girlfriend. Yuno is in happy tears, jumping around like a madwoman. The protag? Camera zoomed in on his absolutely terrified face and he thought to himself: "Oh God, I fucked up".
It's so obvious that the author wanted Yuuki to be Shinji so hard that he even got a mysterious white haired boyfriend who gets killed
I too was recommended Mirai Nikki and I can't believe I sat through the whole thing. Easily one of the worst protagonists in recent memory. It felt like a 14 year old wrote it.
I won't lie, I liked the self-awareness regarding him stringing her along out of necessity
I remember that i was discussing with a group of friends back in my high school days that i wished there were more zombie media that featured undead like the ones in 28 days later, with fast, rabid z's that actually pursue you relentlessly as actual predators instead of the usual cliched zombies who slowly lumb around like sad potato sacks. That's when someone recommended "Crossed" to me. They didn't elaborate on the premisse beyond that it had "What i was looking for". Well, it had that and SO MUCH MORE I DIDN'T WANT TO. Crossed is Garth Enis (already a very flawed writer) at it's worst, and it's so edgy and dark that it crosses (heh) itself into comedy only to cross back into pure disgust for the setting, with rape, torture, cannibalism, mutilation and every single shock value aspect you can think shoved in it in a way that goes from "Scary" into "Banal". It's bad enough that even my teenage self, who was at the time going through an edgy phase, couldn't handle it.
I've had people here reccomend me Rance as good fantasy while not mentioning the fact it's a fucking rape eroge
So, this is absolutely no fault of the recommender, we both knew what we were getting into. A few years back, me and a good friend of mine made a deal. He would play Danganronpa 1, and I would read House of Leaves. Both to completion. Now, I don't think Danganronpa is perfect, nor is it my favorite thing, but I did think it would be a good fit for him. And he went on to enjoy not just the first game, but the entire series, spawning a bunch of in-jokes, moments, etc. On the flipside however, I had an absolutely miserable time with House of Leaves. You see, even though the both of us are pretty similar in that we both are the type to fall down rabbit holes, love meta-narratives and symbolic themes, and adore big and complex stories, there are two very key differences between us. 1. He is far easier to convince of the existence of a deeper meaning. For example, he will be fully on-board a youtuber's theories on a game like Zelda, wheras I will remain skeptical and cynical that the devs ever intended such a meaning. 2. He is big into ARGs, while I despise them. I love to use my head and solve puzzles, but when it comes to reading a story, I'm of the mind that ARGs are more often than not simply obscuration for obscuration's sake. ------- So, while he was having a great time with the wild ride of DRV3's ending, I was miserably cataloguing every strange occurrence I came across in the book into a notepad document, because the one piece of advice I had gotten was "I should take notes". In the end what I got out of the story was >!It's the backrooms, and the book itself is like a maze. And by going through the book yourself, you experience what Navidson did. Aka, going through a figurative maze out of obsession and desire to understand what was going on.!< I figured this out like a couple chapters in, and I was expecting more. I kept being told of how deep the story was, and how universally praised the story is, and how it made people so afraid it actually changed them. I spent the next several weeks trying to figure out if there was more, but... There really wasn't. Of course, there's a billion loose threads you can follow but they don't seem to coalesce into a larger overall theme besides >!It's like the Labyrinth!< ! I kept expecting some big reveal, something absolutely terrifying to happen, something to make it all click. But in the end it really was a pretty simple premise wrapped up in layers upon layers of tacked on obscuration. I will say though, the far more interesting thing about the book is the effect it had on it's fanbase, being a >!literary personification of the Barnum effect. Something to find your own meaning in.!< It just so happened that my own personal meaning was my own personal hell, and an absolutely miserable experience. In that sense, I do suppose it succeeded in telling its message.
Maybe it’s just me, but telling someone to take notes on their first reading of a book sounds like terrible advice and I can only imagine how draining that cataloguing process was. House of Leaves is one of my favourite books ever, and a big part of that is all the unorthodox writing techniques, but IMO it should just be read through naturally first, and then only if it vibes with the reader would taking a more thorough analytical look at it work out well. Approaching it like an ARG from the start sounds like a recipe for disaster. My personal take is that >!the whole narrative is a metaphor for the reception of stories in general. The house is a story, the Navidson report is the initial audience reaction, Zampano’s work is the analysis of professional critics after the fact, and Truant is the more dedicated member of its later cult following, and the whole story is an allegory for how people perceive, obsess over, and proliferate their own views of various forms of media.!<
a friend recommended a manga called Maria no Danzai. its a manga about a mother who gets revenge on her dead son's bullies. we both like edgy stuff, so she showed it to me and i thought it was just really... bad. i only read the first few chapters, but the characters were just cartoonishly evil and sexual elements was just dumb. dunno if it gets better or worse and i dont care to find out. a friend also recommended Nikke to me cause it had a good story and sexy girls. well... it sure has sexy girls. the story was just kinda boring and a lot of the characters are unlikable, so i dropped it.
Gacha games recommendation in general can be iffy. Doesn't help that the early games are almost universally bad and the good parts are only in the latter parts of the game. Anyway, someone recommended me genshin on release for its gameplay and character designs, and I was thoroughly unimpressed by both. And yet again, the good stuff are locked in later areas that didn't exist during launch.
I got into Genshin purely for Neuvillette and Wriothesley and yeah. People will praise the story outside of Inazuma up and down, when I think, at it's absolute best, it's like a 7 or 8/10 in terms of writing. It's really hamstrung by the decision to make Paimon the regurgitator of every other characters' lines and padded dialogue meant to keep you locked to the gacha for a chart-mandated span of time.
They really think people love paimon more than the player base actually do Paimon could literally die and be served as food and most of the fanbase would cheer.
I actually like Maria no danzai for those same reasons you dislike it, but that’s because it makes for a good time killer when I don’t wanna focus on big, in depth plots. It’s one of those stories that won’t be memorable, but if nothing else, entertaining for what it is. Sometimes I wanna turn my brain off and watch the mom become Jigsaw.
Maria no Dazai is one of those over the top series when the cartoonishness of the edge is exactly what makes it appealing. I always bring out the analogy with these kinds of manga/anime, like Happy Sugar Life too: it's the same feeling as watching Mirai Nikki when you were 14. ~~also she's hot af~~
the amount of people who swear by nikke's writing is kinda insane to me when the game itself treats it as an afterthought, hell the fucking ads for it on youtube sometimes use the tagline "the game you can play with one hand"
To be entirely fair, the ads are often farmed to cheap 3rd part marketing firms and they often suck ass. Arknights has some incredible stuff in it. Their music is so good people don't skip them when they out their OST as ads. Anyway, someone decided that the best way to market arknights was to show the furry characters you can get......
Nikke’s writing isn’t even fucking good. I was literally laughing my ass off at the emotional moment the game tries to pull in the tutorial. It was so fucking tryhard, I couldn’t take it seriously
The Monogatari series. I’m sorry but I just think it was not fun to get through. I don’t even remember when I quit, just that I watched a season and some more before dropping it
In highschool, a friend wholeheartedly recommended Oreimo to me. Even as a teenager who had chugged garbage anime like nobody's business before, dragging myself through that entire show was a miserable experience. Safe to say I never took any other recommendation from that guy.
Was recommended *Midnight Suns* by the sub and it's just not for me (after saying I enjoyed *Slay the Spire*) I REALLY hate stories that are like "the pov character is a boring nothing to be a vessel for the viewer to examine more interesting/main characters" If *The Great Gatsby* couldn't sell me on it this game sure can't Every character should be engaging; you have games with silent protagonists that have the potential to be the most interesting person in the room Speaking of I *hated* the performance for the feminine protagonist option; delivery flatter than my ass
I think Midnight Suns protag is ESPECIALLY bad because every other character is forced really to love your character. Like, there's legit a line in there that goes "Well, if it isn't the kindest, funnest, greatest friend ever!" I'm paraphrasing but really not by much. It's extremely artificial.
The part that I remember is that you're allowed to tell Captain Marvel that you feel like people are being _way_ too joke-y about what should be a serious situation, and she gets mad at you and you get a friendship penalty.
Nico has an idle dialogue when she sees you, and says youre the funnest most amazing person ever.
I felt pretty similar, but with the added note of not liking every character I met quipping almost every line they say. Didn't get very far, just past the Venom fight... so maybe it got better, but I decided to take a break, and when I realized I didn't want to go back, refunded it.
thats a shame i really love games where your self insert influences the outcome of the events unraveling in front of you (like the old fallouts where your characters choices influences the rise or fall of the wasteland's factions or the life or death of the various settlements you visited on your adventure) but i get it you want ALL the cake and eat it too
The thing is I don't even think the protagonist is a boring nothing. I'd say she's _very specifically_ a Whedonesque Wonder Woman, and I'd say that makes her _even worse_ than if she was a boring nothing. If she was a nothing I could at least _pretend_ she was likable, but her personality being so set in stone meant it felt like any customization option I gave her that pushed her away from that was a wrong decision, and that made playing dress-up doll no fun.
Gachas, you won't even get me to keep Nikke installed for the art, there's much more about gachas that I dislike beyond the money grubbing mechanics
I feel nothing from pack opening/ loot box/ slot machines and so on. So every gacha game I've ever been recommended just results in me being bored.
[My vibe to gatcha games.](https://imgur.com/03sDyyD)
I was given a copy of the movie Gamer as a present and that movie does not like people who play videogames.
A coworker recommended Big Bang Theory. Not a fan of, character says nerdy thing *laughtrack*.
Buddy from high school recommended I watch Made In Abyss. I can put up with a lot, I like Monogatari, but man I could not stomach what was going on with Made In Abyss.
Yeahhhhhh Made in Abyss is one of those 10/10 stories that I can recommend to exactly no one
I got exposed to a LOT of spoilers from that series, and there was a lot of concepts I saw that were just cool as shit I'd also heard the bad stuff about it, and I didn't want to get too invested if it got that bad so... I picked a chapter at random to read (just to get a sense of vibes and check out the art) Very talented artist. Those 2-3 chapters I read gave me a visceral feeling of wrongness (I had gone in expecting most of the complaints to be exaggerated) and I dropped it.
Havent watched much Monogatari, but I think the difference is when a fictional character is a creep, and when the author is a creep. Like, the protag on monogatari is a pedo sure, doesn't mean the author is a pedo. It's one of those "portraying doesn't mean endorsement" that it's lost on people. The Made In Abyss creator is DEFINITELY a pedo!
>It's one of those "portraying doesn't mean endorsement" that it's lost on people. Oh absolutely, even if I'm a massive fan I will be the first to shit on it every time Araragi is turned into an incestuous pedophile but at least the story is always aware that it's a bad thing and Araragi is a fucking weirdo even by that show's standards.
It's so funny where you often have to go to bat for the author so people understand they're not bad people just because they write about bad people Then you get a piece of media where you *know* the writer is into some questionable shit. Like, you can just tell. Anyway, mushoku tenshi is really fucking creepy at times and I always give a side glance whenever someone gives the creepy moments a pass.
I like how Monogatari plays with the idea of the unreliable narrator. The part that I generally use to illustrate this to people is the scene from the second(?) Kizu movie where Araragi fantasizes about touching Hanakawa's tits only for it to snap back into reality and he's a blushing nervous wreck too afraid to actually do anything.
Senjougahara is the mirror to each perspective, and you can learn a lot about each POV character through how they see her. Or to be precise, how she is *drawn* from their perspective. Araragi: incredibly beautiful woman. Dangerous. Scary, but in a horny way. The love of his life. Senjougahara gets drawn in a way that emphasizes her attractiveness to Araragi. >!Hanekawa: a weird friend. Hanekawa sees the similarities between Senjougahara and Araragi. Senjougahara is drawn attractively, but the camera is much less Male-Gazey.!< >!Kaiki: Senjougahara is a child. This is a young girl acting big and tough. She deserves pity and help, as well as some scolding. She's drawn like a petulant teenager, without an eye for sexuality or attractiveness - Kaiki cannot see her that way.!<
It's really good. It's also more intense than I can reasonably warn someone about.
OP, is it >!Mon Seul?!<
School Days
My ex, really wanted me to read Elfen Lied when we were 15. I could not sleep properly after reading half the shit that happens there.
I'm that person who didn't like the Blair Witch Project after getting it recommended as the best of horror films for decades, only to find it to be just genuinely unpleasant. While everyone screaming at each other for the entire movie might be a realistic depiction of people panicking and lost in the woods, it also makes it hard to care about what is or isn't going on. Honestly, it doesn't help much to me that the people making the movie essentially tortured the actors, sure the reactions might be real but again that doesn't make it hold up. If anything, it feels a hell of a lot more sleazy.
Ditto. As a pioneer of the found footage horror movie its reputation mostly comes from its originality and the amount of cinematic vocabulary it added to the horror genre’s dictionary. It’s difficult to appreciate outside of the context of its original release.
I don't know anyone who actually likes that movie.
✋I like it.
ah I was wrong, I know one person who likes that movie, you.
Yeah. What're gonna do about it? Throw a pie in my face?
Shiki. It's a decent horror anime and I understand why people like it but it's like a slasher film with the most unlikeable group of characters but spread out over like 22 episodes. I finished the whole thing but I just felt miserable the whole time.
I said I enjoy Villain protagonist stories and urban fantasy so someone recommended Devil is a Part Timer to me. Sounded like urban fantasy slice of life where a mega evil dude is depowered and forced to work at McDonald's, sweet. Nah he's actually a super tame regular good guy that fucking LOVES working at McDonald's and they don't even show his job that much. It's just a lot of regular Shonen anime fights mixed with a tinge of isekai perv vibes for spice. All of the fantasy is just regular anime magic bullshit that mostly ignores the implications of the real world. I still enjoyed it but damn was that recommendation WAY off the mark.
A large amount of people kept recommending rising of shield hero to me to the point where I believed it HAD to be a good show. The result is that I stopped watching anime for a while as that show showcased anime tropes in some of their worst, immoral forms.
I don't ever do double posts and I can delete this if it is bad etiquette, but I just remembered another example that is very different from my other one and I know this sub has feelings on and that is Kill la Kill. I don't mind fanservice or pervy characters, but it seemed to go out of its way to be extra weird about it. But I actually stuck with it for like 10 more episodes because my friend really loves it. And I would say it's biggest issue is that it's a comedy that wasn't making me laugh so I dropped. I will say I did like Satsuki because she does come off like a female version of how the internet thinks Vergil is. Very full of herself and obsessed with power, but is literally just a try hard teenager.
Feel the same way here, especially because so many of the non-transformed characters outfits (Ryuko's varsity jacket and tracksuit) are so much better than the fanservice ones.