Any other anime watchers in here? What are you watching? Attack on Titan? Jujutsu Kaisen? Re:Zero?

Bump desu

Attack on Titan !!!! Books and series. Excellent last season and yes depressing. But oh so good!

I have to be in an uncommon mood to feel like watching anime, but I like some varieties.

You should check out The Promised Neverland if you haven't seen it. Don't read any spoilers. It's a mystery thriller.

R3, the chibi looking characters kinda threw me off. But I’ve heard it’s quite a bit darker than the cover art reveals. Maybe I’ll try it out this weekend. I just started slime S1, but it’s becoming boring.

I forgot to mention Black Clover. Nice teasing of a backstory for the final episodes. I have high hopes for the movie(s).

I’m glad to hear AoT will be back for Part 2 of the final season. If they can nail the ending, it will be one of the best series of all time.

Honestly, i wouldn’t be surprised if a live action version became the next Game-of-Thrones-level show for HBO. It has the intrigue, character development, and plot twists needed for mass appeal.

Agreed R6. AoT, especially after the S2 “Warrior” reveal of Reiner and Berty, starts revealing the complex horrors of war, which is just as bad as the simple horror of man-eating Titans. Topics like child soldiers, concentration camps, killing your own kinsman, the misuse of total war/WMDs/Colossal Titan...yikes. It’s a rough ride, but very rewarding.

R4

Promised Neverland is very dark. It's a straight-up horror thriller mystery.

It's *much* darker than say, the netflix series Stranger Thing. I mean it's not like Saw-style torture porn horror, but it's definitely horror.

The child protagonists don't have like magical powers or cutesy talking cat sidekicks or anything, lol.

When you need to get eye-fucked by the best eyes.

The movie "Summer Wars" is my favorite. Subtitled, not dubbed. Not only is it a great anime, it's an excellent movie in general.

I love Black Butler, a 2000s anime classic. I also enjoyed Soul Eater, Ouran High School Host Club and Maid-Sama. Anime isn’t my most favorite thing ever, but sometimes lighting up with an anime is something incredible.

I read the manga of AoT but I ended up getting confused about 3/4th of the way through. Ill watch the whole anime once the final season finishes.

Yu Yu Hakusho remains my favorite. The demons actually look scary, and I love the music.

R11, Black Butler was great, although it’s been so many years. I loved the buildup to seeing him finally transform! I remember Season 2 being slightly less enjoyable.

Hellsing Unlimited is another that gives me those vibes of English society, even if it’s set a few decades after the late Victorian/Universal Movie Monster era of Black Butler.

R12, I’ve never seen YYH, even though I know it’s celebrated. I should check it out.

To be honest, I came of age slightly after it, during the Late DBZ/Samurai Champloo/Cowboy Bebop/FMA/Bleach era of Adult Swim in the 2000s. I was at least fortunate to be able to go back and watch the classics that I mentioned in the OP. But YYH is still on the list.

I'm not watching anything new at the moment. I'm re-watching Yu Yu Hakusho (caught it off and on years ago on Cartoon Network and I finally want to watch it all) and I'm watching Black Lagoon for the first time.

R14 Does that mean you also missed out on Inuyasha? That was my favorite then, along with Kenshin and Trigun, but then my family stopped paying for cable, so the animes you mentioned I never did get to see on Adult Swim.

But I was always more into manga anyway. I would go to Borders and read an entire series in a day or two.

I honestly haven’t been watching or reading any recently. I was reading and watching Terraformars which I thought was a wonderful concept and well done but too many characters kept dying. It was fresh as first to have “main” characters die, but it got annoying after a while when you have no one to root for.

R12, nope, I was definitely around for Inuyasha. I even started the recent sequel Yashahime about their daughters, but it doesn’t click for me like the chemistry of the original group, especially Sesshomaru kicking his little brother’s ass or showing him up every now and then 😂

I did miss out on Ruroni Kenshin, though I love Trigun with all my heart. It’s my favorite cowboy/western anime, even though I also love Bebop, Vampire Hunter and Casshern Sins.

That’s funny; my friend recommended the Terra Formars series to me a couple of years back, and it was good, but I haven’t thought about it since. I might check out the manga, although I’ve only ever faithfully read Bleach (due to the show ending) and Demon Slayer (same reason, though I just couldn’t wait for a next season/film).

I meant to tag R16 in R17.

R17 nah don’t read it, watch it. It has the same issue as AoT; it his high speed action which is really cool on the screen but the manga doesn’t pack the same punch.

Any fans of Deadman Wonderland here?

I had never heard of it, R20. It looks pretty good though! Seems it’s done by the same group of Eureka, and I caught a few of those episodes on [as] back in college.

Very excited about the new JoJo announcement! Any other JJBA fans here?

I’ve heard good thing all’s about it, R22, but the art looks so crazy, I never watched it. Is it serious or silly? Is it violent? I lean more toward, serious, violent stuff.

It's a little bit of everything, R23, but the main conflict is a centuries long grudge between the Joestar family and its descendants and an immortal villain. There are many comical parts but the focus is fighting and the different styles the characters use. Each "part" focuses on a different generation and some are more light-hearted than others - Part 4 is the most comedy oriented while Part 1 and 3 seemed to be darkest to me, and Part 5 was a good mix of each. But they all could get quite gory at times, even Part 4 (they were going after a serial killer in that one). I don't know much about Part 6 (I only watch the shows, I don't read the manga) but it's the first female main character they'll animate and I'm interested in how she fights.

I know there are very few following this thread, but I wanted to recommend the homoerotic fantasy donghua (Chinese animation) Heaven Official’s Blessing/Tiān Guān Cì Fú/TGCF. It’s currently on Netflix.

All the male characters are tall and beautiful with long hair. And the protagonist is gentle and adorable. It’s basically a story about how a heavenly official/god falls in love with a very powerful ghost. There’s no explicit gay content yet, but it’s seen as a huge first step for Chinese animation. I’ve also never seen any Japanese anime with this combination of good fantasy action and clear M/M romance.

R11/R13 have either of you seen the stage musical productions of KUROSHITSUJI? If not I can highly recommend them; so well-cast, so entertaining, and so funny.

The Millennial actor and dancer Takuya Uehara is a fantastic Grell, and his co-star Yuuta Furukawa a brilliant Sebastian.

R13 -- I'll have to give Hellsing a shot, I remember it being all the rage years ago. Similar thing with Hetalia: Axis Powers. My friends were obsessed with that one for a long time.

R25 Are you Chinese?

[quote] the protagonist is gentle and adorable. It’s basically a story about how a heavenly official/god falls in love with a very powerful ghost.

Uh, Yami? Why is everyone staring at us...?

R28, nope. I’m American and mostly into anime, but this was my first Chinese animation and I thought it was just really cute.

LOL, R29! They had a very special relationship indeed.

Can anyone recommend a show that is a lot like WOLF’S RAIN in terms of themes, story, style and pacing? That was my favourite top-rated anime as a teen, and over the years of casually watching many other shows, I’ve never found one to beat it. I must have watch it a dozen times over.

YMMV, but for me WR has the perfect blend of beautiful animation, lovely soundtrack, lore and mystical happenings, great VA cast (dub and sub) developed characters with some mystery, violence (not too much and not senseless or gratuitous, but enough to be gritty), and well-time unfolding of an interesting unique story (well, except for the couple of filler recap episodes, but we don’t talk about that). My weaknesses are dualistic identities, stories about heaven/the afterlife/next world, folklore, and post-tech/post industrial dystopia, so of course I was all over it.

VAMPIRE HUNTER D came close. It had the gorgeous art, dystopian melancholy, and the slowburn plotting. The character intrigue caught me, too. I just couldn’t get into the vampire element, and thought it was too gory and had too many guns.

In that same vein, I also highly rate SERIAL EXPERIMENTS: LAIN, though I can’t watch it ever again because it’s too unbearably depressing and sad. Honestly, it’s not a gripping or enjoyable tale meant for rewatching—more an absorbing one-time experience, meant to change how you think. AKIRA and EVANGELION left me feeling the same way, not wanting to watch and struggling to stay emotionally involved, but still feeling I should because of the complex and important ideas they express.

Other anime I have really responded well to and enjoyed over the years include ROSE OF VERSAILLES (so pretty and graceful and groundbreaking), GETBACKERS! (lmao), COWBOY BEBOP (natch), GINGA DENSETSU WEED (you’ll never look at pet dogs in the same way again), SHAMAN KING, THE PRINCE OF TENNIS and YU-GI-OH! (the latter three are too childish for adults, I guess, but I adored them as as a kid and still watch them for the nostalgia occasionally—they hold up).

There are quite a few live doramas and movies that stand out for me, too (mostly from the 2000s when I was weeb-adjacent); in particular GOHATTO (homoerotic historical tragedy, must-see), TOPAZ (tw: don’t watch this when depressed), MOON CHILD (the best ‘popstars can act!’ movie you’ll ever see), HANA NO ASUKA-GUMI! (schoolgirl Worldstar), KAMIKAZE GIRLS (lesbian love conquers all), GO APE! (can’t even describe this one—best/only non-dialogue movie ever?), KIZAZARU CAT’S EYE (so clever and hysterical, suprised it hasn’t been adapted in the West), HEAVEN’S ROCK (so hilarious but such trashy stupidity—sadly I can’t find it online anymore and don’t have a DVD), ITSUKA NO KIMI E (the twist is more of n obvious anvil but it will have you crying), and SIGN (the sad realistic but hopeful tone of this one is *chef’s kiss*).

On the other side of the coin: someone well-intentioned once recommended HIGURASHI to me, not realising I deeply dislike serial killer/possession stories or extremely bloody senselessly violent stuff, as I find it too disturbing. The scene where that crazy twin girl stabs some kid like a hundred times (but he doesn’t die?) and then he brains and shoots her sent me into a depression spiral, and I had to punch out quick. So nothing like that please!

And I’m not one for censorship or that squeamish, but I think most anime these days is way too needlessly graphic and relentlessly despairing on the whole. DGMW, though; I don’t mind moodiness, or dark themes, or occasional gory fights when they make sense or have narrative power. I just want some light tender moments, tasteful and discreet conflict, and some elegant execution to balance the dark, you know?

Sorry, dont mean to take over the thread taking about live-action, but somehow I neglected to mention two of my favourite Japanese movies—BIG BANG LOVE: JUVENILE A, and BLUES HARP (both by the same director, who favours homoerotic themes).

BIG BANG LOVE is eerie Brechtian weirdness start to finish, but I love it. It’s based on the books of legendary gay delinquent author Jean Genet, so I think if you’re gay it’s a must-watch. An anime just like it would really be compelling.