manga updates

[Don]

One Piece - I don't particularly like One Piece, but even if it's cheesy, it's always pretty solid. However I think the recent Amazon Lily arc is going to be the first time the series is on a decline if it doesn't going to turn around. It's a huge warning sign anytime you've to resort to the "I was abused in the past" excuse for what amounts to wholesale genocide in OP terms (since nobody ever dies in OP even from a nuclear explosion, almost killing someone is like crime against humanity in OP).

It is obvious OP is a very chauvnistic manga, where the girls are pretty much just damsel in distress waiting to be saved and serve no purpose whatsoever otherwise. But this arc, I think, is taking it too far. There are no female character that warrants the saying "I'm too beautiful to be wrong" that it seems the author actually believes is right. That's something reserved to like the top 5 winners in the Anime cute cute contest, and I don't think any of OP's female character could even get to top 1000. It's not a fault of OP that it provides practically no fan service in the girl department, but it's a huge mistake to continue writing the story and pretend as if it's something you can justify anything based on fan service. Unless the whole Amazon Lily arc turns out to be some kind of satire on the state of fan service, and the Pirate Empress gets chopped to bits to atone for her sins, I see nothing good that can possibly come out of this. At best we can hope this arc will end soon and we'll forget any of these characters ever existed.

Bleach - Bleach has taken the abilty to drag on to a new level. It probably wouldn't surprise anybody if it took an entire week for someone to draw his sword. The weird thing is that it's not like Bleach is horribly bad or ran out of ideas. It's just like everything went into super slow motion for the last year. For the past 20 weeks the story can be summed up as such:

A beats B
B gets mad and draws his sword
A dies

It's also pretty hilarious how they can be fighting for like 4 months now and you still don't know the order of #1, #2, and #3 on the bad guys.

Eyeshield 21 - So apparently winning the Japan Cup isn't going to end the series, giving ES21 more time to try to dethrone Prince of Tennis as the worst sports manga ever that's actually read by a large audience. I'm guessing they're going to play Team USA, and I'm predicting Sina will be able to do the 5th dimension dash when playing against team USA, since obviously everyone in team USA would be able to see through a paltry trick 4D-Dash. I'd expect dialogue like: "Hyperspace? That's child's play, kid! Everyone can run in (some higher dimensional) space in team USA!" Expect all the team USA guy to be able to fly, too.

Naruto - I don't have much to say about this right now other than that I'm considering the suggestion that Naruto part 1 and part 2 isn't written by the same guy to be quite valid given the way it's going.

Liar Game - I have to give props for any manga that mentions things I learned in Discrete Math during college, in a correct way. The scarier thing is that there's at least 2 fans in the discussion board that knows about the Perfect Shuffle too.

[SineSwiper]

In related news, I need to pick up the Southland Tales trade.

[Eric]

One Piece - I don't particularly like One Piece, but even if it's cheesy, it's always pretty solid. However I think the recent Amazon Lily arc is going to be the first time the series is on a decline if it doesn't going to turn around. It's a huge warning sign anytime you've to resort to the "I was abused in the past" excuse for what amounts to wholesale genocide in OP terms (since nobody ever dies in OP even from a nuclear explosion, almost killing someone is like crime against humanity in OP).

It is obvious OP is a very chauvnistic manga, where the girls are pretty much just damsel in distress waiting to be saved and serve no purpose whatsoever otherwise. But this arc, I think, is taking it too far. There are no female character that warrants the saying "I'm too beautiful to be wrong" that it seems the author actually believes is right. That's something reserved to like the top 5 winners in the Anime cute cute contest, and I don't think any of OP's female character could even get to top 1000. It's not a fault of OP that it provides practically no fan service in the girl department, but it's a huge mistake to continue writing the story and pretend as if it's something you can justify anything based on fan service. Unless the whole Amazon Lily arc turns out to be some kind of satire on the state of fan service, and the Pirate Empress gets chopped to bits to atone for her sins, I see nothing good that can possibly come out of this. At best we can hope this arc will end soon and we'll forget any of these characters ever existed.

Meh, most Shonen manga reserve the females to damsels in distress. Even Bleach had Rukia as a worthless female for most of the first part of the series, and even after she came back as strong, she's till largely worthless.

Bleach - Bleach has taken the abilty to drag on to a new level. It probably wouldn't surprise anybody if it took an entire week for someone to draw his sword. The weird thing is that it's not like Bleach is horribly bad or ran out of ideas. It's just like everything went into super slow motion for the last year. For the past 20 weeks the story can be summed up as such:

A beats B
B gets mad and draws his sword
A dies

It's also pretty hilarious how they can be fighting for like 4 months now and you still don't know the order of #1, #2, and #3 on the bad guys.

This is painfully accurate. It's been putting me to sleep for a while now. -_-

Eyeshield 21 - So apparently winning the Japan Cup isn't going to end the series, giving ES21 more time to try to dethrone Prince of Tennis as the worst sports manga ever that's actually read by a large audience. I'm guessing they're going to play Team USA, and I'm predicting Sina will be able to do the 5th dimension dash when playing against team USA, since obviously everyone in team USA would be able to see through a paltry trick 4D-Dash. I'd expect dialogue like: "Hyperspace? That's child's play, kid! Everyone can run in (some higher dimensional) space in team USA!" Expect all the team USA guy to be able to fly, too.

I always thought that ES21 would just take the opportunities to pay homage to some of the most amazing comebacks that have happened in actual football over the years. But it's rather stretched the imagination when it comes to belief that a team can come back from a 35 point deficit in the 4th quarter with less then 10 minutes to go in the game. That was my main complaint, as for Sena's running, any player can get the best of another player on any day. While they may have exaggerated it with that 4th dimension talk, it's not something impossible to do on any level, the problem is most people slow down when they do it, Sena didn't, which is the manga spin we're supposed to believe.

Naruto - I don't have much to say about this right now other than that I'm considering the suggestion that Naruto part 1 and part 2 isn't written by the same guy to be quite valid given the way it's going.

Wouldn't shock me. I am enjoying the bloody 2nd half of Shippūden. Lots of people dying, some more shocking then others. They don't appear to be as afraid to kill off characters.

Liar Game

Null is doing the English translations for this, so we get 1-2 releases every 1 - 2 months. -_-

[Don]

Well if female characters are nothing more than damsel in distress in One Piece then they should stay that way, not have one being one of the 7 Oceans. I mean right now it looks like the pirate empress girl just happened to won the Devil Fruit lottery and happen to get a useful ability (which is really questionable) even though she is downright worthless.

For ES21, I think if Alexanders just run down the middle every time, 5 touchdowns is more than enough of a lead to hold onto with 10 minutes left. Once again you've this stupid justification like 'we totally can't let them figure out our strategy, never mind they can't stop us running down the middle anywhere.' If you notice once they're down to 10 points it's like then the Alexanders finally realized they could waste 5 minutes running down the middle effortlessly instead of doing Hail Marys on every possession for no reason. I'm willing to bet if you just take a knee on every down, you'd outlast another team no matter how powerful they are with a 5 touchdown lead and 10 minutes left.

[Eric]

Well if female characters are nothing more than damsel in distress in One Piece then they should stay that way, not have one being one of the 7 Oceans. I mean right now it looks like the pirate empress girl just happened to won the Devil Fruit lottery and happen to get a useful ability (which is really questionable) even though she is downright worthless.

Most of them win the lotto when it comes to Devil Fruits. Outside of Hawkeyes most of the Devil Fruit users that are Shichibukai(Can't believe I spelled that correctly) would be fairly worthless/weak without their ability. Moria WAS a weakling for instance, but his ability was so absurd combined with Hogback's zombies he was able to bring the Straw Hats to the brink of destruction. Luffy's brother Ace is another example of a Devil Fruit user with an extremely powerful ability, but once stripped of it basically got his ass handed to him.

Obviously the author likes to attempt to make you feel sorry for the women by giving them over the top tragedies, but that doesn't mean after you get past that they can't fight or aren't still pirates.

For ES21, I think if Alexanders just run down the middle every time, 5 touchdowns is more than enough of a lead to hold onto with 10 minutes left. Once again you've this stupid justification like 'we totally can't let them figure out our strategy, never mind they can't stop us running down the middle anywhere.' If you notice once they're down to 10 points it's like then the Alexanders finally realized they could waste 5 minutes running down the middle effortlessly instead of doing Hail Marys on every possession for no reason. I'm willing to bet if you just take a knee on every down, you'd outlast another team no matter how powerful they are with a 5 touchdown lead and 10 minutes left.

Pretty much. Clearly the "Empire" forgot to get a coach to go with it's roster of ridiculously pro players.

[Don]

Ace is pretty strong even without Devil Fruit on his side. You've to remember that Blackbeard was like one of those uber powerful guys even before he got a Devil Fruit. It's pretty obvious he has one of the top physical fighting stats which is why he tried to get the Devil Fruit that forces everyone else to fight him physically.

I think Bear's ability is more of his training/power as opposed to just being at the right place at the right time. I mean what he can do with his ability doesn't seem to have much in common with 'meatball', at least not anymore than how rubber fruit gives you the ability to go Gear 2/3. In OP there's a distinction between the power of a Devil Fruit and abilities refined from it. For example I'm pretty sure the super voltage thing Enel does just comes with the fruit. It's not like if he trained harder he'd be able to do 2 billion voltage attacks instead of 200 million voltage attacks, but his ability to read people's mind might be an extension of his training + fruit power since there's no obvious connection to it. Of course it might not even be related to his fruit power since it's never explained why he can read people's mind, but it could be. Take the Light fruit, I'd say the ability to go light speed or reflect off mirrors probably comes from the fruit, but perhaps the ability to form a lightsaber requires some training.

So far most of the natural fruit guy all look like they got the lucky on the Devil Fruit lotto. Pretty much all but Enel's mind reading powers look like something anybody can have by just eating the right fruit. Luffy's Gear 2/3 is more of a trained ability that takes advantage of his fruit power, and I think Bear falls along this line too. So far as Moria goes, he's supposed to be pretty powerful on his own but like he said his goal is to become the pirate king while doing nothing on his own. I think the implication is that he was once pretty good (said he fought one of the Four Emperors) and then the trauma from the new world left him too scared so he became some kind of fat slob that just sits around all day.

Back to ES21, I think someone pointed out that there's no time aspect in tennis so it's okay to become back from 5-0 40-0 in Prince of Tennis. There's supposed to be a baseball manga where a team came back from 100-0 with 2 outs at the bottom of the 9th. Now obviously these test the edge of believabilty but they do not test the edge of doability. In the baseball case if you replaced your team with 9 Gokus you would probably get out of a 100-0 hole no problem. In the case of ES21, even if you had 11 Gokus on your team, there simply wasn't enough time left assuming you're not allowed to just kill the other team (which seems to be okay in ES21 given the way Gaoh plays) or just onside kick to yourself every time (which 11 Gokus can certainly do, but the universe of ES21 establishes this as impossible). The implication was clear that the Alexanders will at least get the ball per each touchdown the Devil Bats get, so they were going to get at least 5 possessions.