One Punch Man

This anime is so refreshing and just downright smart. It's so simple and just makes sense. With shounen anime and manga being in a weird place with... stuff... like Boruto existing I guess One Punch Man feels so right and relevant to both the current standing of shounen and just relatability in general. One Punch Man is able to carve a new narrative into shounen while still being smart and keeping shounen at the forefront. It has the action and everything that makes a shounen a great shounen while it also heavily comments on shounen satirically. It's just fun and relatable to a point where I just want to go and do one hundred of everything every day like Saitama and be at his level of not giving a crap. One Punch Man feels so genuine and the character interactions are what make this show great, most importantly Saitama and his development.

Silver Spoon Response

Through reading Silver Spoon, my initial response was relating to the direct similarities between Japanese coming of age and US coming of age. This experience is so relatable between the two cultures and share so many similar values. One such value is camaraderie and its growth. Another aspect of Silver Spoon was the theme of wide social class interaction and relationship and putting aside judgement in relation to this. One great example of how this is portrayed in this manga is the relationship between horses and new people and the emotions and reactions that are involved. The excerpt image below is a great summary that describes societal tension and the relations between people and the unknown. The relatability of Silver Spoon is great because of the diverse cast between an outsider looking for a path and to fit in, and the group of people that think they know what they want to be and do in life. In all, the elements of relatability center on coming of age, camaraderie, and facing the insecurities and fears that come along with these. In terms of adapting Silver Spoon into an anime, I would slow the progression of the narrative and spread out new character interactions more so that the viewer can get a better feel of the characters to create a better bond between the main characters. In terms of episodes, I would probably have the show be broken down into episodes based on core events that happen in the school days i.e. assignments / tasks.

Shield Hero

Let me start out by saying Shield Hero is damn amazing. This show made me feel an anger at characters I havn't felt since Re:Zero. But instead of hating one character with all of my might, HOLY SHIT let me tell you every damn character in this show made my blood boil at every turn. Hell, most situations I knew some blood boiling stuff was going to go down, but my god this show was able to push that to the next level. Malty and the Lance hero can seriously screw off as well as the king. I honestly have not much more to say than dang this show knows how to make me feel. The start of the show was really refreshing seeing it go back to a classical isekai. This show is amazing and it has no business being this good nor does it have business being this frustrating.

Banana Fish!

Banana Fish is so cool! I havn't had a chance to get into the new anime of Banana Fish until now, but have listened to the soundtrack a few times in the past because it is just so good and I've had a big backlog so I'm glad I had a change to get into it for real now and experience the soundtrack with the actual show. This anime was super different for me to watch as I havn't watched much anime that isn't fantasy etc. or set in a city for that matter (apart from seasonal slice of life etc. stuff that just isn't the same thematically and stylistically) apart from maybe Kekkai Sensen which... is absolutely no where near what Banana Fish is at all but still set in NY.  Taking place in New York was a bit jarring for me and I think the only anime I can think of with this realistic style was BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad but even that is no where near what Banana Fish is even about. It's just different. Different actually to a degree where it was hard for me to keep with it for some reason. For some reason I liked it, but couldn't really get into it. I think maybe if I come back to it a few years later I'll be able to love it a lot, but it just didn't click with me for some reason and I want to give it another chance later on in life. Maybe listening to the OST beforehand a lot made me tired of it instead of hyping me up for it? I honestly have never felt this before with media and I'm stumped as to why. I usually like shōjo manga but man this was different.  I might just need another pass at Banana Fish because I really wanted to like it. Maybe it was the setting? Not sure. Definitely hit me in the feels though.

Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli

Starting out, I have honestly skipped over Nausicaa and never really came back to it until now. I really loved diving into it as one of my favorite things is deep visual world-building and just displaying absolute environment porn such as is displayed in Nausicaa. One work that I've read recently was Blame! as it has little to no dialogue, words, or speech bubbles and displays pages after pages of lone environment exploration. Seeing the amount of pure environment shots while reading Nausicaa felt really refreshing as I've been watching mostly seasonal anime of late.

Above are two pages from different parts of Blame!. As they aren't the same thematically, Nausicaa and Blame! have both given me great feels of exploration of environment that is not normally seen in most manga. There is a level of world building that is on a grander scale in these works in line with scales of Akira and the Metropolis Anime visdev work.

Makoto Shinkai

I have watched most of Shinkai's works and I honestly do not like the comparison to the works and Ghibli's as him becoming the next Ghibli. The works just completely evoke different feelings and emotions in me and feel drastically different visually. To me the first different would have to be Ghibli works always seem to have something to say first and foremost. Miyazaki's works to me just feel like they have a pointed message and commentary on society. With Shinkai's works i feel a greater sense of trying to convey relatability and almost just creating pretty stories of society rather than sending a pointed message. The works are just flat out different. One key criticism I have for Shinkai's works is the narratives are all pretty much the same. Two lovers separated by space and time. It's a formula he dosn't seem to be breaking any time soon especially seeing the success of Your Name. His style is nice, but my god I might just turn subtitles off and mute my tv and look at the art for the next Shinkai work unless he can break out of rehashing the same narrative formula.

Presentation description

I will be doing my presentation on a cyberpunk show called Serial Experiments Lain and its manga Serial Experiments Lain: The Nightmare of Fabrication. I will be delving into its influences and worldbuilding.