Manga recommendations that doesn't have lolicon, excessive fanservice and other retarded tropes

Colress said:
There was a specific series about people who deal in the recently deceased and basically do mortuary services. I would recommend it if I could find the name. Kind of horror-ish, one dude had a pendulum that would find bodies.
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Found it.
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Kari Kamiya said:
JoJo is required reading, no exceptions.
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Meh. I read all the way to halfway thru Stardust Crusaders and didn't see what made it so special. And again, it does have lolicon fanservice.

..................................

So, does anyone in this thread know a program for downloading manga from sites like mangafox? Said site has a pretty good collection of the Golgo 13 manga in English (not the same chapters Viz translated, it seems) and I'd like to be able to read them offline.

I used to know one, called like HDownloader or something like that, but I'm not sure if its still around.
 
CasketBase said:
Junji Ito. It's a man, not a manga. Did weird Japanese horror with a lot of gross shit. No retardation, just good horror, decently drawn, his style is slightly less realistic than King of the Hill, I'd say.
Uzumaki is my personal favorite, very Lovecraftian. But his other work is good, too, pretty much all of it. People also like Tomie, but I dunno. Never trust a girl with a Tomie pfp btw
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Seconding. He's the lovechild of Kafka and Lovecraft that was born and raised in Japan. Good entry point for Ito is probably his Frankenstein adaption. Lets you get a good taste for his work with a familiar story. Aside from that and the usual recs like Uzumaki and Tomie, would recommend Lovesickness, Mimi's Tales of Terror and his Cat Diary. He also has a lot of one-shot stories in multiple compilations of varying quality if you want something shorter.
 
Sci-Fi is a pretty broad genre, and it depends on what exactly you think counts as trope-y shit, but:
  • Seconding Monster. A crime thriller set in postwar Germany about a surgeon who must try to stop a psychopath he created.
  • No Guns Life is about a crime noir detective who has a giant gun for a head. It touches on a lot of dystopian topics; I've not finished the manga but I like it a lot so far.
  • Psycho Pass follows the preventative crime unit of distant future Tokyo; a police division that uses the setting's hyper-advanced monitoring in order to predict crime before it happens.
  • Attack on Titan and Promised Neverland have a lot in common in that they're both really good, as long as you read exactly the first arc and pretend nothing exists afterwards.
  • Akira is a classic and the originator for a lot of modern anime and manga tropes. It's a horror manga about a criminal with psychic powers evading the government of a corrupt cyberpunk-esque city.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist is peak normie-tier, but it's still good. Follows a pair of brothers who are seeking the philosopher's stone to return what they had lost after an attempt at resurrecting their mother using alchemy as children left one without an arm, and the other nothing more than a soul bound to a suit of armor.
  • Ghost in The Shell takes place in distant-future Tokyo, where technology has advanced to a point that entire consciousnesses can be transferred between synthetic bodies. Major Kusanagi leads a division of highly trained operatives who work to stop terrorists and criminals who are enhanced by these technologies.
Here's some others, though these definitely toe the lie on some things:
  • Dr. Stone is about a genius who wakes up after the apocalypse, and has to reverse-engineer modern science to propel the world far enough to cure the event that caused it. It's definitely got a fair bit of fanservice and is a little campy, but the interjection of real world science and history makes it pretty fun.
  • Tengen Toppa Guren Lagann is a deconstruction (genuine) of the mecha genre. It's about a boy named Simone and his best friend Kamina who have spent their whole lives underground under threat of monsters, escaping to the surface in a drill-based mech. I'll be honest, it feels pretty shonen-y, but goddamn is it so fucking good anyways. This shit makes you want to turn your life around.
  • Assassination Classroom can be fairly comedic and does center around a bunch of middle school kids, so ymmv. An alien capable of destroying the world comes to earth and gives humanity one year to kill him before following through. He ends up the teacher of an academy's "dead last" class of failures who are tasked with assassinating him.
 
Got reminded of Appleseed by Shirow Masamume by the above post. Has fanservice but you can rest assured that all the women in it are legal. Deunan, my beloved.
 
Sci fi is hard, most of it is dogshit...
there is nothing that comes close to incal and its spin offs or Valerian from Japan.

Golgo 13 is for adults and great.
old school action without 14 year old protagonists...

skykiii said:
I used to know one, called like HDownloader or something like that, but I'm not sure if its still around.
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have you tried Jdownloader 2? it downloads everything you can from a website.
needs some fine tuning to only get the stuff you want and not the ads and some random art assets on the website.
 
Gonna quote myself from the Anime/Manga thread since I've now caught up with this manga (and have to now patiently wait for updates *sad face*) and can still wholly recommend it.
Kari Kamiya said:
Found a manga at the library, Fool Night, and it's hooked me in.
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In the far future, thick dark clouds have enveloped the earth into perpetual night, so natural plants died out. To keep oxygen levels high, humanity came up with a solution: transfloration. Due to ethical issues, only people with terminal illnesses get implanted with seeds that will turn them into plants called spiriflor within two years where they effectively live forever as such. They get paid ten million yen for their efforts, though, so it's a-okay.

Main character Toshiro Kamiya lives with his psychotic mother and his job barely allows them to live, and when she stabs him in one of her fits, he tricks his childhood friend, who works for the company, into letting him take on transfloration so he could have the money, though the reality of how short two years is hits him quick. Oh, and he can "hear" the spiriflora now, so he's a temp hire for the company. Being able to eat something every day now is a great motivator to keep on living.

Lovely art and composition, it has a cinematic flow at times. And the body horror, while not unique, is unsettling in the right ways. It's the mangaka's debut manga, really hitting it off strong here.

Though I do find it completely hilarious how a manga can just be given a rating for "existential themes". Literally "2deep4u".
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Fucking hell, Viz, you're so embarrassing.
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Webtoons have a lot less of that. Though they tend to recycle tropes. Overpowered Isekai, litRPG, secret martial art societies etc. Manhua are similar but they just recycle the bloodline power system and like their freaky shit, alot. Both styles have awesome art though.
 
skykiii said:
So, does anyone in this thread know a program for downloading manga from sites like mangafox? Said site has a pretty good collection of the Golgo 13 manga in English (not the same chapters Viz translated, it seems) and I'd like to be able to read them offline.
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I mainly use Tachiyomi
 
I like it when a manga series is short. Not 50+ volumes like Bleach or One Piece. Anyway, a series that may meet the criteria of OP is AQUA and ARIA: a series about aspiring gondola rowers on terraformed 4th planet, centuries from now. There is also Yotsuba&!, which is sorta like the Japanese equivalent of Calvin and Hobbes, but sans any tigers.

BTW, I don't mind "fanservice" in animu and mango, at least as long as it's not too much for me. Dunno if the latest anime and manga series still do that sorta thing though.
 
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Tism the Return II said:
Wrong. By that logic Dragon Ball GT has shotacon fanservice every opening.
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Dude, Jojo has a little girl who isn't even given a name and her only role in the plot is to take a shower on an abandoned boat (and the artist lovingly renders her body and even kinda has her make a pornstar face) and almost get molested by a monkey.

And incidentally this same character was soon after yeeted from the plot because she was unpopular with fans.

If Goku was some nameless little boy whose sole role in the story was to strip naked for the camera and almost get molested and then immediately get taken out of the story and never mentioned again, maybe your comparison wouldn't be stupid.

ToroidalBoat said:
There is also Yotsuba&!, which is sorta like the Japanese equivalent of Calvin and Hobbes, but sans any tigers.
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Yotsuba is also more of a sweet and gentle story whereas Calvin and Hobbes (to my memory) tended to be more on the cynical side.
 
Kari Kamiya said:
Just what kind of childhood did you not have to think that Calvin & Hobbes was cynical in any way?
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I'm going off of decades-old memories, but weren't most of the punchlines about Calvin and/or Hobbes making some sort of cynical observation? Or am I getting it confused with Garfield?
 
skykiii said:
Dude, Jojo has a little girl who isn't even given a name and her only role in the plot is to take a shower on an abandoned boat (and the artist lovingly renders her body and even kinda has her make a pornstar face) and almost get molested by a monkey.

And incidentally this same character was soon after yeeted from the plot because she was unpopular with fans.

If Goku was some nameless little boy whose sole role in the story was to strip naked for the camera and almost get molested and then immediately get taken out of the story and never mentioned again, maybe your comparison wouldn't be stupid.
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Pretending that JoJo is a lolicon manga or that one scene framed like the Psycho shot is lolicon fanservice is retarded.
 
Tism the Return II said:
Pretending that JoJo is a lolicon manga or that one scene framed like the Psycho shot is lolicon fanservice is retarded.
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I never said it was a lolicon manga, but denying that scene (and frankly, that entire character) exists for any reason other than fanservice is retarded.

Like, explain to me what narrative purpose that character--who, I repeat, didn't even have a NAME in the original manga--serves in the story? If you took out her nudey pages--or indeed, removed the character entirely--what would be lost?

ToroidalBoat said:
BTW, I don't mind "fanservice" in animu and mango, at least as long as it's not too much for me. Dunno if the latest anime and manga series still do that sorta thing though.
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I'll admit I don't read manga or watch anime as much as I used to, but my memory is that this kind of stuff was mostly a thing only up until the late 1990s but then started to die down. Barely any 2000s anime has this kind of stuff (not counting blatant pornos).
 
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skykiii said:
Barely any 2000s anime has this kind of stuff (not counting blatant pornos).
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Sounds like you didn't watch much 2000s anime outside of the mainstream. There were still bouncy big boobies and skirt flips and lingerie shots galore in the 2000s even in non-ecchi titles. Ecchi exploded/grew more bold once 2010 rolled around.
 
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