Which Anime series you are watching ?

[Manimal]

Finally a seasonal show has got my interest, it's taken so long but this is one to keep up with. Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai is awesome 3 episodes in.

This is the perfect light novel romance series that I love. You have a guy with balls for once, finally, who is cheeky and gruff but still has these strong emotions & goes for what he wants and a quirky loner girl with a bit of an only in anime supernatural element to figure out. I love the dynamic between Mai and Sakuta and given all the nice moments in episode 2, instantly cared about them and found the drama in episode 3 to payoff. It moved quickly, I do wonder how the rest of the series will play out. I really like the romance building here and that element of boy meets girl with a strange trouble is always something that connects with me, ever since I watched Shakugan No Shana it's been my favorite dynamic. 

The Peggies do a neat opening theme, cool to hear them in an anime. Voice acting is good and animation is standard but looks alright. I'm happy that there is finally a good sort of romance quirky scenario type of show which for me has been lacking the last few years in seasonal anime. I've tried to keep up with a few series and failed this year, there was A Place Further Than The Universe an absolute near 10/10 masterpiece that I watched after it aired and man that show means so much to me and it just was the right show for my life at the point that gave me an extra push I need! It made it into my top 10 for sure. Other than that there have been some other good shows but nothing I wanted to keep up with.

So this Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai show is good so far, let's see where it goes. 

[Suuper-san]

Just finished www.working, the alternate version of Working!!, the family reseaurant anime. I thought I wouldn't like it because it was like an alternate version with diferent characters, but I managed to get into it pretty quickly. If you can get past the "everyone has something distinctly wrong with them" cliche, it's an OK watch. Not as bizarre and interesting as the original series, but the cute romances and slapstick humour got a few laughs and tears out of me :)

Also just finished Abenobashi Mahou Shoutengai, which is basically a very-strange-parallel-universe jumping plot. All with kansai dialect characters which did no help to my Japanese learning. A lot of blatant parodying of other animes and films, including Knight Rider, Indiana Jones, and Back to the Future.

Finished the original(?) Lupin Sansei (Lupin the third) anime series. Very old and nostalgic feel to it. Nothing amazing in graphics or storyline but a good watch.

Currently watching Dog Days S2, which I have no words to describe, Wizard Barristers Benmashi Cecil and Utawarerumono Itsuwari no Kamen.

[MahluaandMilk]

Watched the first season of Highschool DxD. I heard rumor that Prison School was getting a season two this winter???

[Suuper-san]

started Asura Cryin, the dangan ronpa prequel ,and sequal, and rewatching hayate no gotoku

[Suuper-san]

watching Aho Girl. First time I've properly laughed out loud in ages. Nice to see something I've read as manga first, it's got a different feel to it.

also just finished Hundred. not really worth watching but not entirely worthless. It's got a nice OP so everything's alright :P

[legomaestro]

Aho Girl manga was a fun read. Glad to hear the adaptation for 4koma can turn out well. I really need to watch anime again, but I'm on a legendary catch-up binge for live action tv series at the moment... Plus gaming. so that'll be on the backburner a bit.

[Suuper-san]

I've been watching anime and drawing at the same time. since neither require full attention to perform (or rather I can't give 100% attention to anything anyway) I can multitask between them with minimal loss of performance (sometimes even an increase in performance if you can believe that), to my incredible surprise. It takes about 20% longer to draw pages and do work, but I gain in that I no longer need to set time aside for anime so my productivity actually increases as I'm always doing something while watching lol.

fortunately I don't watch anything live action or English, for that matter. Or games lol. You could probably manage anime/show and game at the same time as long as it wasnt a super hard game methinks haha

I'd love to try 2 shows at the same time but that would be quite hard on my brain I think. would probably need to split the audio to left and right speakers.....dang now I want to try it XD

[legomaestro]

I have a weaboo vocabulary of japanese, so it's not good enough to leave anime running half screen for me. I have to read the subtitles (And please, no. Dubs are just bad. Except for Hellsing, Cowboy Bebop and a few exceptions)

Lol 2 shows at the same time.  That's anime level stuff right there.

[Suuper-san]

yeah dubs are out :P ghost in the shell dub was alright as well i think.
If I ever try 2 shows simultaneously I'll be sure to report back haha

[MahluaandMilk]

Y'all wanna fight me? Sure, dubs used to be pretty horrible in through to the early 00s, but these days, they're pretty good, especially since voice acting for dubbing has become recognized as a more legitimate profession. You can hate a dub for being particularly subpar, but to say they're all bad is quite a terrible overgeneralization. Might I suggest the dubs of:
Rin: Daughters of Mnemosyne
Soul Eater
Panty and Stocking
Claymore
Fullmetal Alchemist (original and Brotherhood)
as well as the two Lego mentioned.

And that's just off the top of my head.

I watch most anime in dub, literally unless there is no dub (e.g. my yuris.)

[legomaestro]

You win. Fine. I accept. My 'off-the-top-of-my-head' game is weaker than all of yours. Gawd I even forgot GTIS (YOU CAN ONLY WATCH THAT IN ENGLISH DUB. I have the german manga and it's just not the same. Ditto for japanese voices in the anime. The germanic translation for the series is so much better than the original imo.) 

Mnemosyne I won't risk because that show traumatized me.

Panty and Stocking I loved it in japanese because of how horrible the mixed in english sounded. So Studio Trigger.

FMA was brilliantly dubbed.

I watch most anime in dub, literally unless there is no dub

but this statement...  this statement... troubles me.

Mahlua y

[Suuper-san]

I agree with you Mahlua that its improved but I also disagree with the quality. Maybe Im biased against the loss of cultural references and other subtle dub issues as well, or i dont want to have the feel that im watching a "childrens cartoon". But there are indeed good dubs that i wouldnt mind watching, but i would never chose them over the japanese original.
Maybe lets not disrail this thread and make a new one. Actually since you like necromancy Mahlua you can dig up my old dub v sub topic and we can discuss more in depth haha

[MahluaandMilk]

@Lego: Because then you get gems like Queen's Blade where the voice acting is so bad it's funny in some points, but startlingly well-delivered in others. The same goes for a lot of things done by ADV films back in the day. The range of skill in some of the older stuff is...it adds its own layer of something. Then again, I find the whole dubbing process fascinating, so maybe that's me exploring that area of interest while also watching an anime.

@Suuper: the cultural context thing is always a poor excuse for sub>dub. You'll lose cultural context because things down to body language and tonality cannot be conveyed in a simple translator's note. You lose cultural references in subs all the time, pretty much just as much. Unless you are fluent within the culture to almost a native-speaker degree, you have no way of knowing. So the subtitles are really just the same as a dub script. The subtitle translator had to pick and choose which words to use in what lines, just the same way as a dub translator, and which things to explain in little notes. The difference is negligible. I also know just a little Japanese, and it always irks me when people choose a different translation than what I'd go with for a certain line delivery. Because Japanese is such a context-based language, there is no 1:1 translation into English. Ever.
A good example of this are some lines that can be translated as "Let's go"
Pardon if my transliterations are slightly incorrect here. You can have "Ikimashou ka?", "Ikmashou.", "Iku iku", and say, "Ikou ze". They all basically mean "Let's go". But do you know the cultural implications between them? Probably not. And the subtitler is probably not going to put in a translator note on it because it would take forever to explain.
I've had to ask my friend who does speak Japanese to tell me if characters switch between polite and impolite forms, and usually that's a thing that's not noted in translator notes, but it is VERY important to understand what's actually said.

That wraps up all I have to say on the matter, really.

[Suuper-san]

@Mahlua so sorry! At some point id forgotten I mostly dont read the subs anymore because i actually do understand japanese. So my reasoning is actually based on japanese vs english dub (It just so happens that the sub version has the japanese audio hence my confusion). Your reasoning is totally correct in the amount of culture lost in subs, my mistake. And since i do understand japanese enough to pick up on the nuances (i had in mind oniisan, oniichan, aniki etc for "brother"), when listening to dub i constantly wonder "hmmmm what was the original japanese?", hence my preference to the japanese. Hope that clears that up. I admittedly havent seriously tried watching any recently dubbed shows (just a tiny listen and then jumped ship) so ill have to try again and update my opinion. It is often a case by case as lego says. Even in the japanese there can be that one character whose voice you hate XD

Because then you get gems like Queen's Blade where the voice acting is so bad it's funny in some points

Yuu yuu hakusho is one of these, although the voices were alright it was the script that was different. The dub completely changed the mood of the show it was hilarious and enjoyable. Trouble was, it completely changed the mood of the show, so it technically wasnt a proper dub, it was more like an alternate funny version/parody.

Ontopic I also started watching tonari no kaibutsu which completely went a different way to expected within 1 episode

[50 Words for Paipis]

It is, of course, a matter of preference, but, in my experience, dubs are almost always awkward in ways I can't ignore, 10s dubs notwithstanding. The biggest issue is timing. You have lines which are obviously padded with unnecessary words because it takes longer to say in Japanese than English and the opposite, as well as lines which are rearranged in strange ways. Of course this is the case with text too, but to hear that discrepancy spoken elicits a far more visceral reaction from me. This affects even the best dubs, Cowboy Bebop and Fullmetal Alchemist included, perhaps excluding The Cat Returns. But beyond that inherent challenge dubs have to face, many of them just seem poorly executed. I often find myself thinking "there are 10 more natural ways to say that line." I don't doubt that most of them a produced as fast as possible to save studio time ---> money. And then there's the issue of everything before the 10s, which is most of all dubs ever. The dub of Grave of the Fireflies, for instance, almost makes what's known as the saddest anime film of all time a comedy. It's that bad. Not to mention the fact that, in every dub, somebody has to have a "New Yoik" accent, whether they're in feudal Japan or medieval Europe.


There is the drawback of having to read the screen. Sometimes I choose to watch the dub, particularly if I watch with my youngest sister, who struggles with reading. Too, there are a few dubs I prefer to some degree, maybe because there's something special about them, or maybe because they're what I watched when I formed an emotional connection with the series or movies. But, on the other hand, sometimes the original cast is really good. After all, if we stepped outside the world of anime for a moment, it would seem strange and sacrilegious to me to dub Bergman's Winter's Light and Persona, which have some of my favorite performances in any movie. Where the movie or series can be said to be the sum of the director's artistic choices, the original cast can be very important if you want to experience the work as close as possible to what the director intended. After all, dubs are not just "English audio" but completely different casts with rewritten lines. Of course, there are things lost because I don't know much Japanese, which is why the emphasis is on "as possible."