Main studio outsources to China -> Chinese studio outsources to North Korea. No surprises there. China doesn’t care about sanctions imposed by other countries unless they’re against China.

Finally, I love all the cat puns by Uliminas

Chalk up one for the translator, because I’m pretty sure that she was originally just ending all her sentences with nyan, although I admit I wasn’t paying close attention.

(Yes, I’ve been calling myself “meow” in Japanese. Both my cats approve.)

Well, he did leave a trail of bodies of people that were theoretically supposed to be on his side (but actually weren’t, because humans), as opposed to just a trail of monster corpses.

In my opinion, having a romcom (a genre I find either dead boring or wince-worthy depending on the show) in the top ten at all is an error. 😜

This is a series that has reminded me, at various times, of Wolf’s Rain, Ergo Proxy, and the David Lynch version of Dune—not always in a good way.

In the end, I think this needed to be two cours to give them enough space, or else they should have slashed the Original Nine down to the Original Five-or-so to make more space for other aspects of the story.

The number of josei series running this season is actually unusually high—the manga for Dog Signal, 7th Time Loop, and Mofumofu(!) are apparently all classed as josei. Normally, you don’t see more than one a season, and the only other multi-cours ones I can think of are Chihayafuru and Saiyuki.

Long shounen action series tend to live or die on character arcs and the quality of the fight scenes. I don’t recall Fairy Tail’s fight scenes as being exceptional for the genre, so if the characters didn’t grab you fairly early, then it wasn’t the show for you. 🤷

Why does any studio ever reboot anything? Guaranteed audience. Less risk than putting out something new. At the same time, the original aired so long ago that they can’t really continue on from it without potentially confusing new viewers (or at least, I think that’s their logic).

I don’t think I’ve ever seen it happen at all with a professional translation, and only very rarely with amateur ones. I’ve seen pro translators screw up, self-censor, or get censored by management that are fearful of lawsuits, but none of those represent an agenda beyond making money. Messing up the translation deliberately is a good way for the translator to not get paid and/or not get more gigs. I won’t say that it never happens, but I doubt it’s more than once in ten years.

Some fans are too sensitive to perceived “agendas” and too quick to allocate blame, methinks.

(As for MTL, it isn’t there yet. Maybe in another decade or two. And as you say, the management layer that’s terrified of lawsuits isn’t going anywhere.)

Not sure if I’d call her “the worst”, necessarily, but Miaka from Fushigi Yūgi always annoyed the heck out of me. She’s pretty much a canon Mary Sue.

The skew is something they’re supposed to take into account, if they realize a given factor is important. Models are seldom perfect, and people can be incompetent or self-centered even when they’re not being actively malicious. I think you’re overestimating both the quality of the statistical models and the purity of the motives behind this survey.

You’re assuming that the set of people surveyed was truly random, but it never is—people who don’t like answering surveys are always underrepresented (obviously), and the article isn’t specific about how people were recruited for this one. There isn’t enough information to tell how much skew might have been introduced as a result. Surveys are always kind of iffy as information sources: not meaningless, but with a lot of subtle noise in the signal.

For what it’s worth, Ray isn’t really worth going back for, or at least it didn’t make enough of an impression for me to remember much except the title.

Some of the Black Jack material is worth watching, but you can dip into it at almost any point from the 1990s OAVs on and make some sense of it, since it’s fairly episodic. The characters’ backstories are interesting, but rarely necessary for understanding the plot. (There’s also Young Black Jack, a more recent series—Wiki gives a 2015 airdate—that I forgot about initially which traces part of the title character’s origin story.)

Monster is worth watching on its own merits, if you haven’t seen it already (it was early 2000s, if I recall correctly, so outside your timeframe), but only the first few episodes could be considered medical drama. After that, it proceeds in quite a different direction.

The classic anime medical drama is Tezuka’s Black Jack (there have been multiple anime adaptations of the manga over the years, the last one being the TV series Black Jack 21, from 2006). Other than that, there’s Ray (also airing in 2006), some individual episodes of Monster, and maybe the currently airing Surgeon Elise, depending on the direction it goes in? There was a period where you didn’t see medical dramas much on Western TV either, and maybe Japan is going through a similar time. (Now I feel old. 😭 )

I think Sasaki is only reminiscent of the guy from My Home Hero because they’re both middle-aged salarymen who are smarter than they appear. In my mind, that doesn’t seem like enough for there to be a relationship between the series.

I admit, I was starting to wonder how one sends flowers to a sick lemmy bot. 😅

I don’t know if I want to know why a girl is doing Lamaze breathing while looking at an enormous frog in front of her face. It is just one of those weird mysteries of life.

In this case, the context just makes things weirder. Yes, really. 😅

(I mean, we’re talking about a show that involves three invisible penguins, two brothers who aren’t really, their terminally ill sister, a posessed novelty hat, a terrorist’s ghost, the most inept stalker ever, and a mysterious object that may or may not be able to change the world.)

Ikuhara has two more recent single-cours anime series—Yurikuma Arashi and Sarazanmae—to his credit as well as Utena and Penguindrum. His work is always full of symbolism, magical realism, and miscellaneous lunatic-arthouse-film stuff that can take years to comb through, depending on how far down the rabbithole you want to go. (He also worked on the fourth season of the original Sailor Moon, AKA SuperS. Make the mistake of looking too closely, and you can see nascent bits of Utena in it.)

I read the first volume of the manga, so I had some idea what to expect going in. It’s been a while, but I don’t think the animators are deviating significantly from the source material, although I’m not curious enough to do a page-by-page check.

The problem is that one of the lemmy.ml admins has misconceptions about the instance that the admins of this community want to redirect traffic to, and said lemmy.ml admin has been deleting posts that so much as mention that server. That increases the difficulty of leaving a pinned pointer message.