Chainsaw Man is one of the best mangas ever. I know it's basically jap superhero bullshit but the characters make up for it 100%. The relationship between Makami and Denji alone is a phenomenal tale of puppy love. Though the story becomes a little like wet paper near the end of the first arc. Lots of cool characters just stop mattering to the story and basically nobody stops to remember them like a real person would. And at some point the fights just stop making sense and feel like those imaginary games you'd play as a kid where one kid says "im stronger. i win" while the other kid goes "no im stronger. i win." Still, its a fun story all the way through. Anyways my point is if you like weird animes then go read it.
Chainsaw Man 1 was great. 2 honestly has been a slog for months, very disappointment in it. Feels like it's meandering and everything feels like it takes so much longer than it should.
As for the whole Isekai sperging. I agree with whoever said that it's more of a trope than a genre as such and it's more the fantasy genre being a bit too formulaic for it's own good. Though most of this stuff comes from LN which my understanding is that it's the sloppiest of the slop. Doesn't mean I can't have fun with them mind you. Though not always Isekai, I do like the "start in a shit position and go up breaking the system", but they always become incredibly boring once the MC gets too overpowered or the "deep lore" starts going too up it's own ass.
Solo Levelling lost me when suddenly there is a dad and it's important and he's a lvl bajillion necromancer who has a giga ant and other absolute monsters as his puppets. The one about the spider girl? Similarish deal, when she can subdivide her consciousness into 4 and use multiple layers of obscene magic at the same time. Great popcorn but lose the appeal after a while.
Slime is one I do like to keep up with every few months or so simply because it shifted from being obscenely powerful to kingdom building. Also means he can have proper stakes, Slime may be OP as fuck, but most of his subjects don't have that luxury and though the whole arc to revive his secretary was a bit bullshit, it also means there is at least that vulnerability always on the table.
Rezero just doesn't fucking get anywhere. It does the usual sin of Isekai of having an exponentially increasing "deep lore" and character count. At some point you want a solution to the mystery rather than literally hours of cocktease ending in more questions. Having everyone but Subaru forget the loops means even character development is not kept between arc, so it's a literal cocktease. Killing off Rem for the crime of gaining character development showed that the author is hellbent on getting his way and will not change the story even if it does not make sense anymore.
In comparison, a Visual Novel has an ending, and it would usually let you have more fun with extended "Doomed" dead ends (sometimes combining it with heroine endings). Rezero is just not fun.
Sounds like I dodged a bullet never getting into the Rezero train. Reminds me of a funky one about a skeleton that becomes sentient beyond his necromancer and starts doing cycles. That one had a great run going, but like in what you mention in Rezero, the author seems to get cold feet and try to stretch everything into oblivion. Sounds like a LN problem in general. Anyway, seemed like it was in it's final arc, but then instead of going for the finish, it did another HARD reset and well, it's just become tedious and added a ton of "deepest lore" that just muddles shit all over the place.
Also, saw
@Space Police had another one of his spergouts calling anything beyond the 70s pedophiles and porn. But I do agree on a couple of points of his. Drawings have become so soft , I really missed the more jagged lines and designs from old. One of the reasons I think Jojo hit so hard is that it was basically a manga from the 80s that finally got a proper adaptation and was stylistically at the start very inspired by stuff like Fist of the North Star. I miss that more "realistic" line work. like with City Hunter, Ninja Scroll, Legend of Galactic Heroes and so on, for the most part it only gets used for parodies now. Others have touched that a lot of shit is just LN that get adapted and since those barely have any art outside of the cover, they are easy to sloppify into the current style of very soft lines with UwU characters.
Also, going beyond the softness of the drawing, I also get the impression that there is some sort of restriction on depictions of violence in anime. I remember in early Dragon Ball Goku looking incredibly beat up at some points. One of the ones that I have in mind is kid Goku vs Picollo senior
You see dirt on Goku, you see an active attempt to show bruises and remember other instances of swollen wounds. Today everything is very clean and pristine for the most part (some dirt and stylistic trail of blood), even when somebody is getting actively wailed on. There is a sensation of "lack of weight" to battle damage in a lot of shows. Even edgy ones with mutilation focus more on the shock factor of clean cuts fort he most part.
And last thing I wanted to mention is that I also get what he means with the waifufication of the media. It did exist in the past (you are fucking deluded if you don't think Lin Min Mei wasn't the waifu of thousands) and calling that "porn", when it's only porn in the doujin circles says more about you than anything (I imagine you would be screaming how much One Piece is porn for example). But there is a definite a move design wise to try and have as many waifus as possible in a series. In the west we have "make it gay and stick a chick in it", in grorious Nipon it's "mate it kawai and stick a waifu in it". I'm a sucker for waifus myself (
@WelperHelper99 yes, Saber is indeed best girl) but I like 1 Saber, not 27 versions of Saber which we all know why they got created and it's very hard to not notice how a lot of that is present in anime. Doesn't mean I want it gone, but wouldn't mind if that fad died down for a bit. I can only file it as a consequence of how poorly your standard Japanese boy/man deals with the fairer sex, in the past, the times Space Police wants to come back to, they were more enthralled by the ideas of adventure and discovery (and I agree there is a beauty and romance in that which is exceedingly rare) yet today it's a lot more about being cool or simply not being alone, yet are terrified of being proactive. The whole "Gyaru pays attention to meek" guy trope has exploded in the last decade or so and it's happening for a reason.
