slow times for manga
PostPosted:Thu Dec 20, 2012 11:19 am
Right now the usual victims are so awfully bland it's not even fair to pick them on, so I had to expand from my usual list of manga to find anything even critique worthy.
Sakura Sakura - In the future, due to a lack of children, apparently there are only 1 guy and 2 girls teenagers left in Japan (there might be more as the story progresses). They're collectively known as the Last Generation and this is about how those 3 people are in a special high school tailored only to them. The main character's goal is to prevent the Last Generation from really being the Last Generation. One of the girls wants to kill all the old men in the country, and the other girl is your standard 'past wrapped in mystery'. While there's nothing particularly noteworthy about any of the character designs or plot, I think it's an interesting subject in the sense what if you're one of the few reproductively fertile people left in your country. Honestly you'd think these people can just get anything they want if they're really the last 3 teenagers left in Japan.
HXH Kurapika flashback arc - There was this guy in Yu Yu Hakusho (the series that came before HXH) that gives adult books to young boys or something like that, and that's kind of what this flashback is like. It touches upon how the Spiders massacred the Kurta which is the background story of Kurapika and it lets you know not only the Spiders are the bad guys they eat your babies too in graphic detail. A lot of violence in the Ant arc got censored in Shonen Jump and honestly someone needs to seriously sanction HXH for being morally disgusting. In WoW apparently no children ever died in the entire game and sure maybe it's a bit silly to go that far to 'protect the kids' but on the opposite extreme you got HXH where you have kids get their brain bashed out on a regular basis because it's 'hardcore' or whatever. I heard China banned Death Note and while I'm not certain if it's true, I do know that I can't even find a pirated version of DN on the Chinese sites right now. HXH should be banned for similar reason. Look, the story is good and you don't need everything to be rainbows and sunshine, but the story has devolved into blowing brains out of kids and stuff like that just because Togashi can get away with it. They're not even relevent to the story, nor does the story even need the gratitous violence. It should be the second manga I know of that gets the 18+ rating for violence instead of poronography. Oh yeah and the ending didn't even make any sense, because Spiders goes out of their way to not be affiliated Meteor City and then left a Meteor City trademarked slogan at the site of the massacre. The whole point is that the Spiders are supposed to be a people way out on the fringe that a terrorist-like entity like Meteor City still would rather the world not know of their affiliation, not unlike how Al Queda recently cut off its ties to some American who makes bad Youtube rap video about how America sucks.
Prism Ilya 1/2/3 - This whole series is like a macrocosm of where the Fate series went wrong. While Prism Ilya didn't draw Saber because Typemoon is busy prostituting their flagship character in every possible medium out there, it did get Rin (2nd), Ilya (5th), and Kuroi is like a cross between Archer-ko and Shirou-ko so it's not like this series has the misfortune of starring Sakura Tohsaka as the main character. While going into the magical girl genre gets rid of some of the silliness of fighting in the Typemoon universe (humans absolutely are not supposed to be able to fight Heroes, while it seems plausible magical girls COULD fight Heroes), it carries the same old baggage from the Fate main story. The first problem is the proliferation of the Miracle Engine girls. In Fate it was at least somewhat plausible that a girl who can reshape reality anytime she wanted to is actually someone you can possibly fight and defeat vaguely because dominate Hero type spells are supposed to use up all of her miracle powers, but when you got 3 of them (Ilya, Kuroi, Mayu) in one series it just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. There's also the standard obsession with using Heroes nobody ought to have ever heard of in a universe where the power of a hero is directly related to its popularity. So let's see, you can summon the power of Medea which most people have never heard of against someone who summoned Odin's Mjolnir and wow, Odin won! Nobody could possibly see that coming! There was a fan 4-box comic that basically says: "The only sword that can surpass Excalibur is a Lightsaber" and it's surprising true. I realize they'll probably get sued by Lucas if they did have a Lightsaber but otherwise, you're not beating a weapon like Excalibur especially if the Hero/Weapon's fame determines its power. To this date I don't understand what's the point of Typemoon's hero balance. Even if you have say, Gandalf the Grey as Caster, it seems extremely unlikely he'd win against the reigning champion, King Arthur as Saber, in a battle of fame. It really should be like Ilya described, if you summon Saber it's like hitting the Jackpot of Hero summoning and you just autowin all your fights from that point on while all your opponents should just commit mass suicide to save you the time of hunting them down.
The charm of the Typemoon universe is that all the characters are incredible powerful and the whole notion of fighting for 'more power' is really some kind of sick joke. In the Holy Grail Wars they're fighting over the equivalent of Dragonballs that do not actually exist, and if it existed then Ilya already has them. If magical girls are canon in the Typemoon universe, as in the case of Prism Ilya, then these magical girls would be able to defeat Goku-level entities quite easily. After all magical girl Ilya overpowered Enuma Elish in a frontal assault, and that's supposed to be an attack that originally carved Earth out of the void or something like that. This is supposed to be a world where in a fight of one against infinity, the advantage is on the side with the one (Saber versus the infinite army of hell in Hollow Ataraxia). If I want to read about a story of people who are allegedly normal that eventually become stronger there's Shonen Jump. Typemoon is where you're supposed to see what happens when 3 reality shapers ran into each other.
Sakura Sakura - In the future, due to a lack of children, apparently there are only 1 guy and 2 girls teenagers left in Japan (there might be more as the story progresses). They're collectively known as the Last Generation and this is about how those 3 people are in a special high school tailored only to them. The main character's goal is to prevent the Last Generation from really being the Last Generation. One of the girls wants to kill all the old men in the country, and the other girl is your standard 'past wrapped in mystery'. While there's nothing particularly noteworthy about any of the character designs or plot, I think it's an interesting subject in the sense what if you're one of the few reproductively fertile people left in your country. Honestly you'd think these people can just get anything they want if they're really the last 3 teenagers left in Japan.
HXH Kurapika flashback arc - There was this guy in Yu Yu Hakusho (the series that came before HXH) that gives adult books to young boys or something like that, and that's kind of what this flashback is like. It touches upon how the Spiders massacred the Kurta which is the background story of Kurapika and it lets you know not only the Spiders are the bad guys they eat your babies too in graphic detail. A lot of violence in the Ant arc got censored in Shonen Jump and honestly someone needs to seriously sanction HXH for being morally disgusting. In WoW apparently no children ever died in the entire game and sure maybe it's a bit silly to go that far to 'protect the kids' but on the opposite extreme you got HXH where you have kids get their brain bashed out on a regular basis because it's 'hardcore' or whatever. I heard China banned Death Note and while I'm not certain if it's true, I do know that I can't even find a pirated version of DN on the Chinese sites right now. HXH should be banned for similar reason. Look, the story is good and you don't need everything to be rainbows and sunshine, but the story has devolved into blowing brains out of kids and stuff like that just because Togashi can get away with it. They're not even relevent to the story, nor does the story even need the gratitous violence. It should be the second manga I know of that gets the 18+ rating for violence instead of poronography. Oh yeah and the ending didn't even make any sense, because Spiders goes out of their way to not be affiliated Meteor City and then left a Meteor City trademarked slogan at the site of the massacre. The whole point is that the Spiders are supposed to be a people way out on the fringe that a terrorist-like entity like Meteor City still would rather the world not know of their affiliation, not unlike how Al Queda recently cut off its ties to some American who makes bad Youtube rap video about how America sucks.
Prism Ilya 1/2/3 - This whole series is like a macrocosm of where the Fate series went wrong. While Prism Ilya didn't draw Saber because Typemoon is busy prostituting their flagship character in every possible medium out there, it did get Rin (2nd), Ilya (5th), and Kuroi is like a cross between Archer-ko and Shirou-ko so it's not like this series has the misfortune of starring Sakura Tohsaka as the main character. While going into the magical girl genre gets rid of some of the silliness of fighting in the Typemoon universe (humans absolutely are not supposed to be able to fight Heroes, while it seems plausible magical girls COULD fight Heroes), it carries the same old baggage from the Fate main story. The first problem is the proliferation of the Miracle Engine girls. In Fate it was at least somewhat plausible that a girl who can reshape reality anytime she wanted to is actually someone you can possibly fight and defeat vaguely because dominate Hero type spells are supposed to use up all of her miracle powers, but when you got 3 of them (Ilya, Kuroi, Mayu) in one series it just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. There's also the standard obsession with using Heroes nobody ought to have ever heard of in a universe where the power of a hero is directly related to its popularity. So let's see, you can summon the power of Medea which most people have never heard of against someone who summoned Odin's Mjolnir and wow, Odin won! Nobody could possibly see that coming! There was a fan 4-box comic that basically says: "The only sword that can surpass Excalibur is a Lightsaber" and it's surprising true. I realize they'll probably get sued by Lucas if they did have a Lightsaber but otherwise, you're not beating a weapon like Excalibur especially if the Hero/Weapon's fame determines its power. To this date I don't understand what's the point of Typemoon's hero balance. Even if you have say, Gandalf the Grey as Caster, it seems extremely unlikely he'd win against the reigning champion, King Arthur as Saber, in a battle of fame. It really should be like Ilya described, if you summon Saber it's like hitting the Jackpot of Hero summoning and you just autowin all your fights from that point on while all your opponents should just commit mass suicide to save you the time of hunting them down.
The charm of the Typemoon universe is that all the characters are incredible powerful and the whole notion of fighting for 'more power' is really some kind of sick joke. In the Holy Grail Wars they're fighting over the equivalent of Dragonballs that do not actually exist, and if it existed then Ilya already has them. If magical girls are canon in the Typemoon universe, as in the case of Prism Ilya, then these magical girls would be able to defeat Goku-level entities quite easily. After all magical girl Ilya overpowered Enuma Elish in a frontal assault, and that's supposed to be an attack that originally carved Earth out of the void or something like that. This is supposed to be a world where in a fight of one against infinity, the advantage is on the side with the one (Saber versus the infinite army of hell in Hollow Ataraxia). If I want to read about a story of people who are allegedly normal that eventually become stronger there's Shonen Jump. Typemoon is where you're supposed to see what happens when 3 reality shapers ran into each other.