The Shrine

Hunter X Hunter - Finally resumed after a long hiatus. It's hard to say HXH is not 'dragging on' because it takes Togashi about an year to write 10 parts. While everything he goes over is probably necessary, fans have right to be restless going over the relatively unimportant characters when you're not sure if HXH will end before the author dies from old age. It looks like the first of the 3 royal guard fights is finally coming to an end with a strategic withdraw by the good guys. The outcome reaffirms Togashi tends to stick to his principles. As stated before, it actually doesn't matter whether the royal guards win or lose since the goal is only to defeat Meryem. At any rate if one assume Togashi will only do another 10 parts, then either Meryem or Pitou's battle better be resolved. No offense to the rest of the characters, but all the fighting revolves around these two in the arc and rest are sort of just there for the ride. Given the battle against Youpi ended up as a draw, it seems like chance of Pitou dying has gone up significantly especially if the 3rd matchup goes in favor of the royal guards.

Eyeshield 21 - Reliable information says Eyeshield 21 ends next week, which is good since a discussion about ES21 sounds like something out of Star Wars right now (Yamato went into hyperspace to counter Sena's 4 dimensional dash!). Assuming the inside info is true, this means ES21 will fall well short from trying to dethrone Prince of Tennis as the worst sports manga ever. If given another 3-4 volumes of time, I think ES21 has a solid shot at beating Prince of Tennis, but unlike Prince of Tennis, no one seems to actually read ES21.

It's also rather amusing that it took 4 touchdowns before the Alexanders realized that with the ball and a 5 touchdown lead and 8 minutes left in the game, they should have just run on every play, especially since Yamato is your standard 'guy that can run through an entire team' guy that every team possesses in ES21. Frankly I think ES21 picked the wrong sports to be clueless about. In Tennis if you're behind 5-0, 40-0, it's still possible to go Super Saiyan and come back from behind (in fact the way people's tennis power jumps around it'd be like you play a friend with a 5-0, 40-0 lead, and then Roger Federer decided to take over for your friend. It'd be very surprising if you didn't end up getting totally whipped in a situation like that). Not so much when you're behind by 5 touchdowns with 8 minutes left in the game. I'm pretty sure even a high school team can beat a NFL team when spotted that kind of lead.

One Piece - The new character, the Pirate Empress, serves as a reminder how the author of One Piece utterly sucks with female characters. The most hilarous part is she's always talking about she's too beautiful and I'm guessing her power is like seduction based, except One Piece female characters are pretty much the bottom end of what anybody would consider as seductive. One Piece's female characters are basically a child's face juxtaposed on a woman's body, and even the weird fans aren't into this kind of stuff. You can verfy this by noticing that the female characters in One Piece have rock bottom popularity rating despite considerable exposure. You know there's a problem when the generic Vice Admiral dude is considered the best latest newcomer compared to someone who was one of the 7 Oceans.

It's rather mind boggling how such a worthless person become one of the 7 Oceans to start with. At home people assured the Empress that she's so powerful that 'she should be fine if she needed to run for her life when things go bad'. Hopefully she'll disappear in a part or two and just pretend she was never there.

The new direction of OP seems to go with the way of aura-enchanced ability to counter Devil Fruit power. Stealing from HXH after 50 volumes is a bad idea. At least Naruto was shameless enough to do it from the get-go so it didn't seem like a totally different combat system showed up suddenly. I'm guessing the author is having a hard time to rationalize how to hit Devil Fruit users without Devil Fruits so he's experimenting with different ways, but using a HXH combat system is way more than he can possibly handle because HXH's combat system is heavily founded upon responsible combat. If you make the slightest mistake in the combat system then you really do die. If you misjudge an aura technique and defend with the wrong one you flat out die, and it doesn't matter if you're the main character's best friend or super powerful villian. This is about as far away from OP where it's almost impossible to die from combat. Looking at the pace of OP, I'm guessing it's going to take at least an year before it even settled down on a system to combat Devil Fruits. Maybe the author really should take some time off to think about how to make everything make sense. I realized he's only taken one week off in 10 years or whatever, but this is something that's worth taking a week or a month off to get it right.

Don wrote:One Piece - The new character, the Pirate Empress, serves as a reminder how the author of One Piece utterly sucks with female characters. The most hilarous part is she's always talking about she's too beautiful and I'm guessing her power is like seduction based, except One Piece female characters are pretty much the bottom end of what anybody would consider as seductive. One Piece's female characters are basically a child's face juxtaposed on a woman's body, and even the weird fans aren't into this kind of stuff. You can verfy this by noticing that the female characters in One Piece have rock bottom popularity rating despite considerable exposure. You know there's a problem when the generic Vice Admiral dude is considered the best latest newcomer compared to someone who was one of the 7 Oceans.

You mean they don't look like Eric's sig? You would have thought that the Japanese were good at drawing big tittied females...

Eric's sig looks like it's redrawn with somewhat correct face/proportion matchup. It doesn't hurt that one of the character in there is Nico Robin, the only character of any importance who seems to have a matching face with a body. I checked the latest poll I'm aware of and Nico Robin is at 5th and Nami is at 7th, which is incredibly low for female characters that are part of the main group so far as manga goes. For example Rukia in Bleach hovers around 2nd and 3rd in terms of popularity, and she's generally not someone you'd consider good looking or important to the story.

OP's author is only good at drawing little girls, really. He can't draw woman but seems to be completely unaware of the fact that he cannot draw such characters. Or maybe he's not aware that a girl and a woman's face is not the same, even in manga. I mean even Nico Robin more or less looks to have the same face as a child compared to an adult. OP is probably the most chavunistic manga I can think of in recent memory. All the girls look better when they're helplessly crying asking for the guys for help. I wonder if it's intended, or if the author realizes that's what's happening.

I actually went back and checked some of the early One Piece and Nami originally have a matching child's body with a child's face.

The new 7 Ocean seems like she'll turn out to be one of the generic garbage characters that's used to show how good the good guys are. While not particularly an interesting strategy, at least the author gets my respect for acknowledging he created a totally garbage character. It's just pretty disappointing because so far every other member of the 7 Oceans turned out to be pretty interesting characters.

And looking at the recent development, someone needs to stop the author before he makes the whole aura concept you can just train in like HXH because that kind of invalidates the entire combat system. I can live with the fact only special guys get aura powers since a lot of OP is founded upon privilege. If you suck but you get a cool devil fruit (like say, Lightning) then you're suddenly pretty much invinicible and I don't think OP ever tried to justify how this is ever supposed to be fair. That's just the way the story goes, so I'm fine if only equally privileged guys can hit through devil fruit immunities for being special. Certainly Luffy does deserve to be special.