3/6/2024 0 Comments Every anime in a nutshellThe show’s fourth season was split down the middle between an incredibly high-stakes battle with the villain Overhaul and his creepy yakuza henchmen, and the whimsy and respite of a school festival. The continuing adventures of Izuku Midoriya, a boy born without powers in a world where everyone has them, have become reliably entertaining in its mixture of memorable characters with expansive world-building with attention to every mundane detail. Though the series’ sudden release threatened to bury it, its high energy helped it stand out amidst a packed winter season. It’s artful in its goofiness as well, with strange and subjective use of split-screen interpolated amongst soft, painterly backgrounds, courtesy of art director Kazuhiro Obata and background artist Yasutada Katou. That nostalgia is extremely deliberate-those with a keen eye will spot visual references to his past works and series. That wall-to-wall silliness won’t work for everyone, but its bizarre digressions are constantly amusing, and Vlad Love makes for a kinetic return to the kind of playfully raunchy rom-com Oshii cut his teeth making. The show is quirky and off-the-wall in a way that Oshii’s work hasn’t been since that time, with hyperactive scenes full of strange meta-gags and nonsequiturs (look out for a scene interrupted for nearly a half-minute with Wikipedia descriptions of a bomber jet). After contemplations on everything from our bodily relationship to technology to man’s impulse to destroy, the show plays like a low stakes and often extremely stupid return to his roots, recalling his years of work on Urusei Yatsura in the '80s. Still, Horimiya is more than worth watching simply for its visuals and character art, perfectly emphasizing moments of quiet intimacy, loneliness, and self-doubt.Īfter decades of heady philosophical science-fiction and fantasy, Vlad Love represents something of a palette cleanser for the veteran director Mamoru Oshii. It’s a shame that the last few episodes become somewhat lost after rushing through the romantic arc of Hori and Miyamura, and lean too far into quirks that become worrisome rather than cute. As a result, it feels like a more naturalistic, but no less touching approach to romance. But it’s salvaged by its elliptical approach to storytelling, viewing Miyamura and Hori's burgeoning relationship as a collection of different moments rather than a will they/won't they courtship. It's a double-edged sword, as its breakneck pacing (the director has only a single season to work with) can feel disorientating. Though the manga on which the anime is based has been running for years, Horimiya wastes no time in building the romantic overtures between the two, focusing on the emotional consequences of their relationship rather than merely the step-by-step buildup. This all changes in a chance encounter with his popular classmate Kyoko Hori outside of school, where both discover that their first impressions of each other couldn’t have been more wrong. But by that logic, any action show - where most of the characters are usually male - is a reverse harem.An isolated and intense young man, Izumi Miyamura doesn’t grab much positive attention from his high school classmates, nor does he try to. So I don't see why it's a harem, unless your definition of a harem be that there are simply significantly more females than males in the show. I'm not here going "lol they getting so mad", I'm not feeding off negative energy I wanted to know what the reaction of people on this site would be to something like that, so I posted it and sat back to see.Īnd you can dismiss what I said all you want, the fact that 6 of the 8 main characters are female and the character-specific subplots with some of the later episodes are the only remnants of the harem that remain, the main plotline has taken over. Oh right, the "it's not really harem becuz." defense, same as the RahXephon fans.It's not really trolling, I'm making observations based on given stimuli. Plus, the anime basically strips almost all of the haremy stuff out from the visual novel - it wasn't until a few episodes in I even realized most of the cast was female cuz the characters don't act like it's a harem so I wasn't even paying attention. Noted, but the narrative strengths override it.
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