Awesome clarification - thanks.

Looks to be pretty standard cute girls doing cute things. Between the art style and the setting, it most made me think of GochiUsa with a bit of Kin-iro Mosaic thrown in.

Though that word “lily” leaps right out, since that’s almost certainly a ham-handed localization of “yuri.”

I guess we’ll find out eventually…

You’re conflating two entirely different debates.

Yes - there has been some debate around western publishers overly aggressively “localizing” manga and/or changing details to not just make things more understandable to western readers, but deliberately altering social /political content to accord with their own views. The two broad positions in that debate are to continue to depend on western publishers and their translations, or to keep translation in-house - under the supervision of the Japanese publishers.

This debate starts from the position that translation will be kept in-house, and concerns how it will be done - whether by human translators or AI. The publishers want to use AI for one and only one reason - because it would be cheaper. The JAT’s position is that machine translation is so vastly inferior that it will not work, and that human translators must be used.

As is always the case, all publishers need to do is look at the scanlation community to see how things will or will not work, since the scanlators are already doing, for free, what the publishers hope to do for profit. Whatever problems exist and whatever solutions there are to those problems, the scanlators have already discovered.

And if they would only do that, they would discover, for instance, that MTL, presented as a finished product on its own, is so blatantly crappy that it’s essentislly universally derided, with the only split being between the people who might grudgingly tolerate it in a specific case and the people who reject it outright.

There’s no need for the JAT to argue that case when vivid proof that they’re right already exists in virtually every comment section of every machine translated manga.

But instead, the publishers consistently make choices that any halfway decent scanlator could tell them are going to fail to appeal to the fans, which choices then - surprise surprise - fail to appeal to the fans.

Huh.

I would’ve expected, if I saw news about this series, that it would be to announce that it was being axed. It seems a bit late in the game for an adaptation.

Granted - I dropped it a couple of years ago and it might’ve improved since then, but it just doesn’t seem likely that it actually has.

It was decent enough when it started - if nothing else, the art is charming and the girls are all cute, and all in different (if tropish) ways.

But Medaka and his whole situation always came off a bit vague and contrived, and as it went on, it just got more and more obviously and awkwardly contrived. He didn’t get any sort of character development really - he was just assigned a handful of traits and reactions, given a handwaved backstory that sort of vaguely gave them something that sometimes resembled context, and inserted into the story.

And beyond being cute, the female leads really didn’t bring anything interesting to the mix either. Mona is the class idol, but she’s actually self-conscious and insecure. Asahi is the cute sporty girl, but she’s actually self-conscious and and insecure. And Namba is the cool beauty, but she’s actually - surprise surprise - self-conscious and insecure.

And… that’s about it really - a selection of cute but insecure girls and a guy who cycles back and forth between stoic and awkward because something something monastery.

Again though - maybe it unexpectedly improved after I dropped it. I dunno - it just seems odd to me that it’s getting an adaptation this late in the game.

Spent part of the day checking this out.

It’s a light novel original. There’s a manga adaptation, and that’s where I started. It wasn’t very good though, and I was pretty sure, as is often the case when a lot of the text in the original is the thoughts inside the protagonist’s head, that the manga was just skipping over big chunks of it. I kept plugging away through four chapters (mostly because they were done by Skythewood, and I trust their judgement - our tastes strongly overlap), but then found that 5 and 6 are missing from mangadex, some sort of sniping war has broken out starting with chapter 7, and Skythewood has apparently dropped it.

In sorting all of that out, I discovered that Skythewood has been translating the light novel, so I just read that instead. And discovered that the manga has indeed left out huge chunks of the original.

It’s pretty good all in all. It’s very definitely of the “oddly proud and determined loner finds himself surrounded by pretty girls” subgenre that seemed to really take off with the success of Oregairu. The twist with this one, and to its credit, is that all of the girls are romantic losers who initially turn to the protagonist for a shoulder to cry on (either figuratively or literally), then it expands from there, as they come to appreciate him more broadly and he starts coming out of his self-imposed exile.

And thankfully the anime art appears to be based on the LN illustrations rather than the manga.

So - IMO, the LN is pretty good, the anime is promising, and the manga can be ignored.

I contributed to TVTropes in the early days, and quit after they banned Lotte no Omocha, At the time, it wasn’t so much because of any concern for that or any other specific thing, but just because the way it all went down empowered a regime of prigs and assholes.

I read through the first two volumes of the manga yesterday - through chapter 13 - then went back and reread the first volume, since I unsurprisingly could make no sense of it at all the first time through. That was all my brain could take.

I should get through quite a bit more today, since I have a feel for what’s happening now. And I’m absolutely enjoying it - thanks for the heads-up.

Wow…

Sort of peripheral to your point, but…

Heavenly Delusion was new to me, so I looked it up and discovered the original manga is by Ishiguro Masakazu, the author of one of my all time favorites, SoreMachi. I don’t know how I didn’t know that this existed, but I’m all over it now.

SoreMachi is a sort of breezy SOL with bits of weirdness tucked around the edges and an absolutely stellar cast of characters. I’m looking forward to seeing what he does with the weirdness front and center.

Anyway - Kemurikusa is indeed broadly similar to Usuzumi no Hate, but with the significant difference that the characters themselves know next to nothing about the world - aside from what they’ve gleaned in the time they’ve lived there, it’s as alien and inexplicable to them as it is to us. Actually, in some ways, it’s even more alien to them. We can recognize that they live in a derelict railroad car and travel through city ruins, but to them, it’s just a box with round things that they found and the world is just a place of open spaces and enclosed spaces.

But now I’m off to binge the Heavenly Delusion (Tengoku Daimakyo) manga.

So last week I yet again rewatched an unusual favorite - one that I rewatch fairly often, but have never seen discussed anywhere - Kemurikusa.

It was obviously made on a limited budget, and Wakaba is sort of tedious and annoying with his non-stop chatter about how interesting everything is, but still, there’s just something about that series that really speaks to me.

A lot of it’s the world. It’s so bleak and such an odd combination of familiar and alien. And it’s so well presented.

Mysterious settings are tough to do well. If they’re too alien or too inconsistent, then they just end up weird and inexplicable, but if they’re too familiar and logical, then it’s too easy to figure out what they’re all about and they lose that sense of alienness. The world of Kemurikusa is neatly balanced - it’s thoroughly bizarre underneath the familiar trappings, but it always feels as if there is some underlying logic and order to it, even though we don’t know what it is. Obviously at this point, I know its secrets, but I can still feel that sense of slowly unfolding mystery - that there is a logical explanation for all of it, just out of my grasp.

And a lot of it’s the characters (except for the most part Wakaba). They’re all anime archetypes, but… well, let’s just say that even that is part of the underlying logic of that world. There are in-universe reasons why they’re each who and what they are. And they are all appealing in their own ways.

And the story ultimately is very compelling. It retains most of its mystery right up until the final secrets are revealed, and then all the pieces fall into place.

I’d really like to see this get a remake some day. I like it already, but I can just imagine what it could be with a bigger budget and another episode or two (the last bit before the climax in particular was obviously rushed).

Anyway… I enjoyed it as much as I always do, and just wanted to say something about it…

I’ve watched Spirited Away more times than I can count.

It’s a great movie overall, but I really watch it just to see specific scenes - Chihiro going headlong down the stairs and crashing into the wall, Sen’s face underwater, Lynn calling her a dope, the soot balls bringing out her shoes and especially the train seeming to float on the water. That last is a visual treat to rival 5 Centimeters per Second.

I’ve never seen it on the big screen. That would be nice.

Ah… I had forgotten that - and then his roof finally works.

I’ve been thinking it’s about time to rewatch this. It’s easily my favorite anime film of the last few years, but for whatever reason, I haven’t felt an overpowering urge to rewatch it. More just a stray inclination that wanders through my head from time to time.

Like right now…

The first one to come to mind for me is Emiru from Nozoki Ana. I get that the underlying idea is that she’s broken, but even with that, I just didn’t find her the least bit sympathetic. At all. Ever.

Another that comes to mind would be Hina from Domestic na Kanojo. It’s as if the theme for her character is “someone who consistently makes nothing but the wrong choice.” At every turn, there’s a fairly obvious path she should follow, either for her own good or for the good of others, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that that’s not what she’s going to do. And there’s nothing consistent about her character - for instance, it’s not that she’s capricious and assertive. She just suddenly becomes capricious and assertive when she should be thoughtful and cautious, and then when she actually should be capricious and assertive, she just as suddenly turns thoughtful and cautious.

I’m sure there are more, but that’s all that comes to me at the moment…

The protagonist I’ve most hated was Ishitaka from I’'s. The whole problem with him is that he’s an angry coward - he’s a pathetic, insecure piece of shit, and he compensates for that with seething rage and righteous indignation, which just made me want to punch him in the face every time I saw him. And Iori deserved so much better.

I had that exact same experience. There was a while there when it was fun to make fun of the series, but it’s not even that any more. It’s just awful.

I think the central problem is that the setup was supposed to be that the characters were other than they appeared to be - that she was going to turn out to not be a shallow, self-absorbed slut and he was going to turn out to not be a pathetic creep, but then they both turned out to actually be exactly and only what they initially appeared to be.

And not only that, but the boring cardboard elf chick he claims to love explicitly asked him to do exactly and only one thing - to stay at home and not butt into things in the city - so what does he do? He rushes off to butt into things in the city, and fucks up literally everything for literally everyone.

I too “discriminate against” Chinese animation, and the illustration at the top of this article is a fine example of why - because it all looks the same. It’s like there’s exactly and only one Chinese animation art style, and it’s just regurgitated over and over and over again.

When I go to an anime site without something specific in mind and just browse for something to watch, I narrow my search by, among other things, specifying Japan as the country of origin, and toggling off all Chinese productions, just because I have zero interest in them.

Now granted - this article seems to be focused more on Chinese animators being subcontracted to Japanese productions, as opposed to Chinese productions, but I wouldn’t be the least surprised if the heart of the problem is that Japanese studios believe, and with considerable evidence to support it, that Chinese animators are unable to do anything other than that one endlessly repeated art style - that if they want their art style to be anything other than that one distinctive and endlessly repeated style that the Chinese use, they have to use Japanese staff.

Certainly I have no idea if that’s actually the case, but that was my immediate reaction - if I ran a Japanese animation studio, I would think that I would be generally unwilling to hire Chinese animators, specifically because I’d expect that they’d be unable to do anything other than that one and only, endlessly repeated art style.

Sorry - that whole thing just ended up roo rant-y for my tastes, so I deleted it.

Broadly, for those coming into the thread, it was about the asshole translators and their asshole employers who insist on “localizing” literally everything, including culture-specific things like honorifics that cannot ever actually be “localized.”

And yes - eliminating lgbt issues is another problem. That one particularly irritates me because it’s an issue regarding which the Japanese, traditionalists though they might be, are very open and tolerant - there have been lgbt characters in anime and manga, entirely non-contoversially, for as long as the mediums have existed. Then along come the Americans, who get all twisted out of shape over it.

My approach to the matter has been very simple and straightforward - I have nothing at all to do with any of the .ml communities. I never even set foot in any of them. And I heartily recommend that others do the same - just pretend that the .ml communities don’t exist and focus entirely on this instance and its vastly superior communities.

Time is on our side. These communities are simply better, in all possible ways, so all we really have to do is keep doing what we do here, completely ignore .ml, and be patient.